A visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum

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In the infield of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, you’ll find one of the finest auto museums in the world. Here’s the cook’s tour with a big photo gallery. 

 

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum is one of MCG’s all-time favorite car destinations. (Note: Since this story was written, the name of the facility has been changed to simply the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum.) We’re such hopeless Speedway geeks. Even in the dead of winter, we get goosebumps driving up 16th Street and seeing those big silver grandstands glinting in the sun. We lost count long ago of the number of visits we’ve made to the Museum. Many of the cars in display here are almost like old friends:

+  The Boyle/Shaw Maserati 8CTF, winner of two straight Indy 500s in 1939 and 1940, and featured previously at Mac’s Motor City Garage here.

+   The fearsome and wondrous 1903 Premier racer built by Carl Fisher, who co-founded the Speedway a few years later.

+   The Reynard-Cosworth 94I, tuned and polished like a Stradivarius by the brilliant Dr. Who, engineer Tim Wardrop, and driven in 1996 by Arie Luyendyk to the fastest lap ever turned at the Speedway, 239.260 mph.

+   The 1911 Marmon Wasp, an amazing machine now over a century old and surely one of the most historically significant race cars in the world.

 

 

The Museum owns far more cars than it has room to display, so they’re rotated through the exhibit floors on a regular basis to keep things fresh. For our most recent visit this May the emphasis seemed to be on former Indy 500 winners, so you’ll find plenty of those in the accompanying slide show.

The Museum is also home to a number of significant non-Indy related cars, including a Mercedes-Benz W196 and the original Corvette SS factory racer.  During our (2013) visit, there was also an entire exhibit devoted to the cars and career of 1963 Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones, featuring his own fabulous collection. Actually, everything was perfectly awesome, just as it always is. Gallery below.

 

7 thoughts on “A visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum”

  1. Man, look at them. That’s what race cars are supposed to look like! The worst thing that happened to racing was the science of aerodynamics. Curses to Jim Hall and all of his followers.

  2. The cars and photography are beautiful. The Mercedes W196 should be illegal!

  3. There’s a section of land in Bucks County Pa. in a town by the name of Warminster that is or was called the speedway tract. I heard many years ago this land was the original proposed spot for building what we all know as the Indynapolis Motor Speedway. Has or does anyone know of this?

  4. I checked on the proposed speedway in Warminster and it is fact. The track was begun in 1914 and the depression ended it. I got my original information fron an old friend who lived in the Warminster Pa. area and he told me the deed to his property read Speedway tract. Interesting subject known by very few even race fans.

    • It’s unfortunate for me that it never came to fruition. I would have attended many more 500s if that had been the case.

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