INDIANAPOLIS — With rain in the forecast for the 108th Indy 500 on Sunday, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, President Doug Boles said Wednesday that the track is monitoring the potential impact on the race but will make no decisions until within hours of the green flag.
According to the hourly forecast Sunday morning on the Weather Underground website, there is a 85 percent chance of rain near the green flag (12:45 p.m. ET).
Noting that Indiana is notorious for its infamously fickle weather, Boles has remained hopeful for improvement on race day. In 2019, forecasts had a 100 percent chance of rain, but there was only a passing shower at midmorning Sunday.
“It is Indiana, so even though things may look a little dodgy at the moment, we’ll see how it goes,” Boles said in a news conference Wednesday. “We will continue to monitor that. We’ll have more formal meetings (Thursday). We’ll have another formal meeting on Friday to really start looking at what we think the weather will do as it gets closer and that will allow us to really make decisions on what we’re going to do.
“I’m just going to hope that that weather, that the Tony Hulman bubble that comes from Terre Haute, comes to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sunday, and we don’t have to deal with it.”
Boles said he was “99.9 percent sure” there would be no schedule updates before Sunday morning.
“Unlike a lot of our other events, I think we will wait,” Boles said. “I mean even if the weather looks terrible that midnight on Saturday night or it looks rough at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, we will wait. We will do everything we can to get the race in on Sunday. So if that means we have to wait around till 3 or 4 o ‘clock to really figure that out, we will do everything we can to get it in on Sunday.”
Sunset will be around 9 p.m. ET Sunday.
Boles said IMS also has rented the NASCAR Air Titan system that is used to help push water off the asphalt.
Multiple Indy 500 practices were impacted by rain last week. In one instance, Boles said the track set an unofficial record by drying its 2.5-mile surface in 77 minutes.
“A lot of that has to do with the aging of the track just the way that it can kind of repel water if it’s a small amount of water,” Boles said. “Things that impact that drying time are humidity, sunshine, wind, how much rain we’ve had before. The more rain we have ahead of time, the longer it takes maybe to get some of that water out of the asphalt.
“But we will do everything we can to get it in on Sunday, which means we’re not going to probably make a decision to change anything until if it’s raining at 11 o ‘clock in the morning when we’re going to start pre-race ceremonies, but we’ll do everything we can at that moment to make sure we have the race.”
Sunday’s broadcast of the 108th Indy 500 will begin at 11 a.m. ET on NBC and Peacock.
Boles said a crowd of 345,000 is expected Sunday, up about 15,000 from last year. As of Wednesday, there were fewer than 5,000 grandstand seats remaining (all in the North Vista between Turns 3 and 4).