Ten months ago, Roger Penske stood at the top component of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and marveled at his enormity. The sight lines take their eyes from the Penthouse seats near Turn 1, past the IMS Museum and toward Turn 2. His eyes can over the looming pagoda and pylon that casts a shadow almost as long as its new owner.
Alley Gasoline, the mountainous mounds of the golf course, the quarter mile dirt court and the FIA Level 1 route course that once housed Formula One. In total, it has more than 900 acres.
And it all belongs to Penske.
And no other year is more vital, and incredibly complicated, than 2020. First, it was planned to welcome a multitude of the length of the Icelandic population. Then it had to be similar to the length of South Bend, Indiana. Then consider wasting tens of millions of dollars on price ticket earnings when banning all enthusiasts on the field. The word “We’re so lucky to have discovered Roger” could well be the new motto of IMS and IndyCar.
Every time you mention Penske’s call to drivers, team owners or other track principles of the series, that’s the concept. It’s not so much that Hulman George’s famous circle of relatives couldn’t have organized a 75th consecutive edition of the Indianapolis 500 amid the coronavirus pandemic, but the concept creates enough uncertainty to shake the team owner.
Some have admitted that not owning this year’s edition of the Great Racing Show may also have led to the demise of their team. An enthusiastic-free Indy 500 would possibly seem a little lifeless when NBC cameras travel through the box on Sunday afternoon’s broadcast, but for many other people on the show, it’s a matter of life and death in the business world.
That’s what makes watching cars fly around their track at bird’s eye view last Sunday to be so incredibly satisfying for Penske. Scott Dixon’s pirouette, followed by the quick correction of the lighting of his Chip Ganassi Racing team. A two-time F1 champion demolishing the front straight. A driving force from the veteran Penske team and a three-time Indy 500 winner on the most sensible speed chart at the end of the day. All this gives the 83-year-old the kind of smile he can see through his mask.
“When I left on Sunday, I could see everything we’ve accomplished, how many laps have been run since Wednesday,” Penske told IndyStar in an exclusive interview this week. “I think we’re going to have a very attractive career.”
There was never a time when he thought about not performing this race, even when Penske boldly stated that an Indy 500 2020 would not take place without enthusiasts entering through the gates after the 6 a.m. gun explosion. Even then, in June, through the changing weeks of July and the revolutionary and disappointing announcement of August 4, which absolutely replaced the reach and had an effect on this year’s edition of this year’s biggest racing show.
And indeed, not on March 8, a week after his first run as the show’s owner, when the United States had reported 550 cases of the new corondavirus. Even the world billionaire with commercial interests in Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States says that once it passed into the first week of the race, he had no idea what the next seven days would take: cancellation. or the postponement of their first four races and the understanding that celebrating indyCar’s edition of the Super Bowl, its classic weekend, was no longer sustainable.
Suddenly, the self-taught motorsport icon found itself in an unprecedented scenario with a well-defined end line (33 cars for a 500-mile race) without a road map or any concept of the obstacles it would encounter.
“I think everything took everyone by surprise, then it was a long journey to the garage,” he says. “All the hours we spent, all this was done so that we can look each other in the eye and accept as true that we were doing what was most productive for the health and protection of our customers. I don’t think it’s been a while without getting married that we’ve tried to sell anything, whether it’s a sponsor or some other ticket.
“It’s about taking care of the commitment we already had.”
Mark Miles, like Penske, had the idea earlier this week that he was about to embark on some kind of coronation to St. Pete. The race would have been his boss’s first national public appearance since the November 4 announcement of the Hulman and Co. sale, adding IMS and the IndyCar series, to the sport’s largest name. Miles has become president and chief executive officer of Penske Entertainment Corp.
Instead, upon his arrival in Florida, Miles was taken straight to St. Pete’s workplace, Rick Kriseman, in something resembling a scene that leads to the time of face-to-face in an action movie.
“Just before flying this Thursday, March 12 from Indianapolis, the Big Ten (men’s basketball) tournament suffered a brutal cancellation and NBA the day before. No one I know expected those things,” Miles told IndyStar. “As soon as I landed, I went to the mayor’s house at his request. He said he didn’t think he could just celebrate (the opening of the IndyCar season) with fans.
This lasted 20 hours.
While Miles was cooking in his hotel room in St. Pete that night, he learned that Disney World, 90 miles northeast, was planning to close its doors on Sunday, race day. The PGA Tour players’ championship, where NBC Sports programming president Jon Miller observed the worldwide sporting crash around him, also announced its cancellation on Thursday night.
The next day, IndyCar announced that he had cancelled or postponed the first four races on his calendar, necessarily taking a red score for his track events until May 1.
But it’s an arbitrary date to save enough time to know what to do with this year’s biggest racing show, which is expected to end on May 24, with two weeks of testing, qualifying and the GMR Grand Prix before.
“And it was transparent to us the day after we left St. Pete (March 14) that would be detrimental to our top priority, which was to participate in the occasions leading up to the 500s, which would be very difficult to assume we can stay on the general May dates,” Miles said. “Not even an express moment. It was just obvious to us. I mean, we’d cancel everything so far in one day.”
The $15 million, well, is a $7.5 million question, and then it comes: when and, most importantly, how would you invent such a giant event?
“It was like an amazing puzzle, with ebbs and flows coming down each and every day, if not every one of the hours, as things changed,” Miller told IndyStar.
And Miller had to please the 75-100 households of rights holders who had their most productive quotes in their brains for their occasions that were to be postponed, or who did not need their unaffected contests to be the victims of major reform.
“For them, their occasion is their ultimate life property. It’s his livelihood, his career,” Miller said. “This is what feeds their families, what they extract all their energy from.”
Miles spoke to Miller two or three times a day over the next two weeks, and was filming for Labor Day Sunday for 500. On paper, it made sense: on a sunday of a holiday weekend, the beginning of some of the most productive weather conditions each year in Indiana and more than a hundred days on the road since the original date. But it would have been a logistical nightmare for NBC, who owns the show’s exclusive rights.
“We put pressure on Labor Day on Sunday for a number of reasons,” Miller said.
Reason 1: The Kentucky Derby is interested in the same weekend by which, in a vacuum, either of you may have had a valid claim, until you thought of an Array..
Reason 2: The Indy 500 is not just a one-day event, but a two-week extravagance, even in its fan-free version, with nearly 40 hours of broadcast policy through NBC, NBC Sports and the subscription service NBC Sports Gold. Not only the NBC scheduled to broadcast for five hours on race day, but also two separate two-hour windows on Saturday and Sunday of qualifying weekend, which would have resulted in the fact that …
Reason 3: NBC is the owner of the PGA Tour FedEx Cup playoffs, which were scheduled to begin From August 13-17 with the Northern Trust Open, the broadcast policy of NBC’s WEEKEND BMW Championship (August 22-23) and the Tour Championship (August 29-30).
Labor Day is the most logical place for the Derby, which slid through Saturday, September 5, with the best window for the last day’s Kentucky Oaks race. With that in mind, Miller and NBC persuaded the PGA Tour to host the year’s biggest motorsport races and horse racing, rolling back the playoffs of 3 week-long events, starting with this weekend’s Northern Trust Open airing on Golf Channel and CBS. . He moved the BMW Championship next weekend to pave the way for the 500, and the Tour also agreed to a four-round schedule from Friday to Monday for the circuit championship to make way for the Derby on Labor Day weekend.
Despite everything, Miles was able to avoid what he sees as the biggest impediment to the sport’s fall: competing to get television’s attention to school football and regular-season NFL football that, at that time, would have rivaled everything else in September.
Miller says IndyCar enthusiasts have an organization of other people to thank.
“This date of August 23 may have happened without the cooperation of the PGA Tour,” he said.
“The only smart thing about the Indy 500 when it takes position in May is that it’s the biggest sporting opportunity that’s positioning itself,” Miller said. “And now the Derthrough understands that he’s going to get a wonderful promotion in the 500s. The 500 realizes that it will get a wonderful promotion because it is the first big occasion out of the box, and the PGA has discovered that moving a week later means they are promoted through either and achieving a Labor Day finale.
“You want to communicate with people, and more than just communicate, you have to pay attention to them, find out what’s vital to them, and do everything you can to help them weather this storm.”
For Miles, Penske and IMS President Doug Boles, while MotoAmerica agreed to move their original IMS event from August 21 to 23 to October weekend, the table set.
“We felt like we had five months and a lot of clues to check to get that,” Boles said. “While we were disappointed to take it out of May, we hoped that with almost six months to get it right, it would be the most productive opportunity to start the race with the fans.”
Miller added: “At the time, we didn’t have a concept of the scope of all this and only the scope of what we were facing. We thought we were for anything where everything would ever be general again on June 1. We didn’t have the concept that this would have a lasting effect.”
IMS, however, had a much greater sense of urgency. August 23 may have seemed very distant on March 26, when the series schedule was announced, but the IMS date of July 4-5 for the historic weekend will host for the first time a dual IndyCar-NASCAR program as cushioning.
In the coming weeks, IndyCar and NASCAR officials would begin to see the return of enthusiasts in any of the series. The 88-page IndyCar plan presented at the end of July to have nearly 90,000 Indy 500 enthusiasts almost the same as the edition evolved in April and May for the double header.
And that’s when serious and normal communications with the municipal and state government and fitness officials began.
Penske began spending a day or two from 12 to thirteen hours into IMS week. Traditionally, they started with a walking tour of the facility to give the skipper an update on the latest innovations in their $15 million renovation. These included expanding the track footprint on the west edge, tearing and replacing miles of fences, installing a 100-foot video car on the back of the pagoda, adding more than two dozen viewer data screens along the front section, and installing a new Victory. Lane car elevator.
Penske’s visits also referred to IndyCar’s global strategy meetings for mapping contingencies for the other seven versions of the calendar announced this year.
Often, in those 48-hour windows, Penske had at least one meeting with his organization of key decisors, which included a Miles crossover with NBC and government officials; Interface with local entities; John Lewis, facilities manager; Bud Denker and Jonathan Gibson, who led communications and marketing efforts; Cindy Lucchese, financial director of the company; Allison Melangton, Senior Vice President of Events at IMS; and Kellie Lehman, senior director of ticket sales at IMS.
“We tried to involve other people in operational meetings from the beginning and not make decisions until we had other people in meetings,” Penske said. “It was very helpful and everyone brought anything to the table.
“The challenge is that we were making a decision, we thought it was the right one, and then, when it comes to fitness indicators, which we’ve never addressed on that scale, everything would change.”
In addition to its Zoom, phone call and face-to-face meetings in the IMS boardroom and the center’s government offices, IMS welcomed officials on site in mid-May to see how they planned to welcome hordes of viewers in the middle. more than two months before the track publishes its detailed plan.
There, and in future meetings, the track will detail how Gate 1 was installed for the front and will leave spectators; Temperature projections would work; Masks and hand sanitizer will be distributed; and what would be the flow of lines in bathrooms, concessions and advertising spaces. In these meetings, the imaginable arrangement of the seats in the grandstand was perfected, without anyone sitting directly in front of or behind another person. IMS has invested in more than 100,000 red adhesives for closed seats. Fans will probably notice them on Sunday’s show.
“We know we checked people’s refrigerators, and we were going to ask our personal safety contractors to wear gloves, and they were going to move their sticks to make sure they were safe,” Miles said. “And one of the state fitness officials said, ‘Well, that’s not such a smart idea,’ because there was something we had no idea of a COVID attitude, rather than a general security attitude with a cooler attitude that, if the virus was there, would simply spread from one to the other. And they said, “Why don’t you ask the individual to do that and be safe?”
But as the days went by, thanks to NBC’s May 24 special focused on last year’s Indy 500 duel between Simon Pagenaud and Alexander Rossi, and IndyCar’s attempt at a season-opening race, it began to clear up. that welcoming GMR Grand Prix enthusiasts and the Brickyard 400 was a doutful proposition.
Marion County was seated for up to a week from the rest of the state in terms of Gov. Eric Holcomb’s “Back on Track” reopening plan. To accommodate fans, Indianapolis is expected to succeed in Phase Five through July 4.
In addition, given the duration of the 500 and the magnitude of the revenue to house the number of enthusiasts this would bring, Penske and his entourage began to wonder whether hosting enthusiasts on IMS before the 500 would jeopardize the much larger event.
To date, no large-scale sporting occasion has been linked to a primary outbreak of COVID-19, however, at that time, enthusiasts had not yet been mass-welcomed in American sports.
The same concern led USAC Karting to include a preventive letter to participants from July 30 to August. 1 Battle the Brickyard race weekend on IMS, establishing strict and uncommon rules on and offsite, adding an incitement to silence on social media
“The way we provide ourselves as a total for karting this weekend will contribute to the price of karting on a larger scale,” the letter reads. “The Indianapolis 500 is 3 weeks away from our event, and our eyes will be on our game as IMS prepares for the biggest show of the race.
In addition to a new dress code for the occasion that required “a shirt with sleeves, shorts or closed pants and shoes, as well as a mask when possible,” visitors were asked to label the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in pictures and “a percentage also many images online.”
“If you think it can only cause a problem,” the guidelines say, “it will be. We need a no-fault bachelor symbol that is used to damage motorsport or other events.”
The letter then contained what was thought to be “bad” (groups of other people without face masks, other socially distant people or grid images) and “good” (other socially distant people dressed in masks, as well as track go-karts).
It came out at about the same time as IU Health for IndyStar opposite the concept of running the 500 with enthusiasts. Just a week earlier, IMS had submitted its 88-page fitness and protection plan, which had been approved through Marion County Director of Public Health Dr. Virginia Caine. In this plan, IMS revealed that it planned a fan capacity of 25%, or about 87,500 enthusiasts in its stands, infield and suites, below its maximum capacity of 50% announced on June 26, when IMS had sold about 170,000 tickets to this plan. race of the year.
In addition to temperature controls, IMS is helping to wear a mask at all times when enthusiasts are dining or drinking.
On July 29, the state’s largest fitness formula said it “strongly encourages IMS to opt in to run the Indy 500 with enthusiasts in August.”
IMS responded, saying the public position of the official fitness service provider on the track for more than a hundred years “inaccurate and premature”.
“Despite our organization’s attempts to interact with UI Health executives, we have not received any advice from UI Health on how our technique can be improved.”
The public relations exchange has been the highest and most powerful sign to date of the precariousness of the concept of hosting the largest organization of others in the world since the beginning of the pandemic.
Two days after the IU Health statement, Miles and Penske met in one-on-one meetings with Holcomb and Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett,” “to look at and give us some optimism for next week, if not next week. would change, ” said Miles.
In early July, Hogsett announced a mandatory order for the use of masks for Marion County, and Holcomb followed on July 22 for all internal and external jurisdictions where social estrangement is not possible. Ideally, these ordinances would flatten the curve of the growing number of instances in the state and verify the positivity rate.
When IMS officials announced their fitness and protection plan on the same day as Holcomb’s announcement, they were well aware that state and local signs of fitness were heading in that direction, but there was hope that the winds would change.
“At the time, I felt confident enough of myself to accommodate the enthusiasts that I felt comfortable saying, ‘We’re going to have enthusiasts or not the race,'” Penske said of his opening statement. over time, several weeks later, the settings changed.
“We never guessed. We expected smart things to happen.
It’s the only way they can move forward and be able to welcome tens of thousands of people to the IMS on August 23 if the situation permits.
The time it took to put more than 100,000 stickers on the seats in the stands. The irrecoverable prices of ordering food in concession. Signs dressed in mask and social distance and traffic decals around 900 acres of the track. It was a bet Penske had to make, in addition to his $15 million investment in infrastructure.
“We have been very careful in controlling spending and it is a bit countercultural to continue investing in the printing of the program and in countless things related to the organization of the race,” Miles said. “We knew that all this would probably have been in vain, and it is not in our culture to put so many resources at risk or devote them to doing so knowing that they might not be necessary.
“But Roger, he’s focused on the total and the end of the game, and we’re looking to be in position at the last opportunity to take the resolution to meet the fans. If you cost cash in the short term, then be it. »
This time, the space is lost. It was estimated that, thanks to the profits of price tickets only, with between 200,000 and 300,000 enthusiasts and an average of $100 consistent with the ticket price, Penske Entertainment Corp. lost between $20 million and $30 million when it didn’t host enthusiasts this year.
Penske says this figure is incorrect. “It’s top or bottom, but it’s not right. You can do your own calculations,” he said with a shy laugh, the guy you’d expect from a billionaire who needs to downplay how much they’ve touched him. short-term.
But the figures that define Marion County’s prestige with coronavirus transmissions are undeniable. From June 26 to early August, the average number of instances consistent with the day in the county tripled and the positivity rate doubled. These are the two parameters that IMS Maximum alluded to when asked exactly what led them to announce on August 4 that, for the first time, the 500 would be played without fans.
“That Friday, we looked (for Holcomb and Hogsett) to know that we were thinking a lot about all the scenarios, adding the concept of maybe doing it without fans,” Miles said. “We knew what the KnowledgeArray had right in levels, and we had a hard time locating optimism. And since then, it’s confirmed, isn’t it? That hasn’t improved.
“We looked for them to know that it was a resolution that we had to take soon, but no one said, “Don’t do it with the hobby.”
With a weekend to think about it, Miles returned to officials Monday with the resolution, a resolution that said IMS is still more than two weeks behind. By that time, the average number of instances consistent with the day in Marion County had tripled and the positivity rate had doubled since June 26.
“It’s not a resolution that surprised them,” Penske said. “They understood that we had to go in that direction, and I think in the case of any of the races, we did the right thing.”
But it’s vital to consider who’s in the driver’s seat, Miles said, “Ultimately, it’s the resolution of Roger Penske and Penske Entertainment Corp.” It was a country they had come to, a government and fitness officials were confident they would come alone, although that doesn’t mean IMS had carte blanche.
“(The government and fitness agencies) only looked for what we best devised, whenever we consider it reasonable,” Miles said. “For those who think there was a time when someone said, “You can’t do it”or “You shouldn’t do it,” it just didn’t happen.”
Requests for Comments from IndyStar have been returned for this story.
Penske returns to the track this week, still zooming in on his golf cart like an employed bee. Even with fewer than 2,000 people on race day, there is still a long way to go.
Meetings with Miles and Boles, NBC officials and IndyCar give drivers and team owners a brief greeting as they pass.
“I didn’t take the time to take a step back and think about what it all looks like, like when I bought it,” he said. “And the concentrated effort resumes on Wednesday when I return. Are we missing something? We need to make sure that the race goes as productively as possible.”
“The conscience will probably all come next Sunday when the winner is there, and we can say that we own the track at that time.”
The story of the Indy 500 2020 without a fan will almost be told for generations to come. Yes, who won the race, of course, but as much as Penske juggled his own losses just to organize a race. In a way, it puts it in the look of losers and winners.
And that’s how you need it. More general questions about inheritance and management. It’s race week.
“I’m above the bomb and the boxes and the rite of buying the track. It’s time to focus on how it works,” he said. “I may not be able to hug anyone, but I’m going to hit myself with my arms and tell other people the wonderful task they’ve done to make this happen.”
Email IndyStar motorsport reporter Nathan Brown to [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.