The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum’s $60M Renovation Puts It Among The Best Car Museums In The Country

Prior to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum shutting down in 2023 for a 17-month extensive renovation, it was kind of just an okay museum. The inside of the building looked like it was straight out of the 1980s because it was, with monochromatic walls and somewhat staid graphics and displays. I visited the museum when I came to Indy for the 500 in 2023, the museum was closed for all of 2024, so when I came back to the track last weekend for the 109th running, I was excited to check out the changes the design team had affected. It took little more than a step through the front door to see just how far they’d taken it. I had a little over an hour to poke around the museum, and I probably could have spent four more without examining every artifact and placard. This is now maybe the best racing museum in the country, and among the best car museums anywhere. 

Bradley Brownell

The only thing the IMS Museum doesn’t have in its corner is size, lacking the grandiosity and gravitas of The Petersen in Los Angeles, The LeMay in Seattle, or The Gilmore in my Hickory Corners, Mich. home town. That aside, every inch of the IMS Museum is now elevated to the level of these greats.

The museum, in recent years, has sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of collection cars that aren’t related to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to focus exclusively on the cars that have raced at The Brickyard. The Museum’s Mercedes-Benz W196 R recently sold for around $58 million, while the former collection Le Mans-winning Ferrari 250 LM brought in around $34.5 million. In addition to working with RM Sothebys, the museum sold 83 lots on Bring A Trailer. 

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s group of garages is famously known as “Gasoline Alley,” and the museum set up hallway gallery which visits multiple eras of the Indy 500 with vignette displays of what those garages might have looked like in-period. It’s fun to see how the track, the tools, the equipment, and the people developed in lockstep as the speed of the cars increased exponentially through the years. 

Bradley Brownell

While admiring the 1964 polesitting Lotus 34 I overheard a particularly ignorant “I can’t believe Lotus came over here and won, at least Jim Clark was an American!” It was beyond my skills to leave the comment alone and my love for the history of the sport forced me to intervene, launching into a several minutes dialogue about the impact that Clark had showing up with Lotus in 1963 (and finishing second on debt) had on the Indy 500, and the incredible season Clark had in 1965 to win the Indy 500 and the F1 world title, as well as the Tasman Series, British F2, and French F2 championships. 

Bradley Brownell

The Gasoline Alley display extended through the late 1990s and showed the extent to which humans have grasped the concept of speed and bent it to their will over decades of going real fast and real left. Across from the garages were giant hallway-length display cases of racing paraphernalia well worth taking the time to check out. This area was my favorite of the displays. 

With a giant curved screen above and a yard of bricks below, the IMS Museum’s startline experience room feels grandiose and emotional. Every so often the lights dim and visitors are treated to an audiovisual experience of emotional manipulation. Showing a protracted display of the pomp and circumstance that comprises the lead up to the start of the Indianapolis 500, I felt a tear well in my eye as the show blasted through the flyover, the Memorial day tributes, and Jim Nabors belting out Back Home Again In Indiana. This track, this race, this place, it just gets into your blood and becomes a magnetic draw year after year. 

Bradley Brownell

The startline experience also features a trio of display cars that guests can touch and feel all up close and personal. Making this the second attraction when you walk in is a great idea. Every museum has to reckon with visitors constantly wanting to reach out and touch the artifacts. By telling everyone to get their touchy feelies out of the way with these cars and that nothing else in the building can be touched will hopefully cut down on fingerprints elsewhere. It’s also cool to see the scale of the current Dallara DW12 race car. When I visited on Saturday the trio of cars in this room were decked out in the liveries of polesitter Robert Schwartzman, and his front-row starting competitors Takuma Sato and Pato O’Ward. 

The main gallery is where you’ll find the biggest discrepancy between the old museum and the new. What was once a jam-packed parking lot of former Indy 500 entrants has been transformed into a real actual museum display with proper lighting and each of the cars has been afforded a beautiful platform to separate them and provide a place to tell each story. Decades of winners line the walls and adorn the floors, while mountains of historically significant artifacts are housed alongside. 

Bradley Brownell

The 1911-winning Marmon Wasp of Ray Harroun takes center stage in the gallery, but my personal favorite is Mark Donohue’s 1972-winning Penske McLaren-Offenhauser M16B. The number of times I’ve read about the development of this car in Donohue’s incredible “The Unfair Advantage” is impossible to count, and every time I see it I’m blown away by the incredible pinstriping detail. 

Track owner and museum benefactor Roger Penske made sure there was a wing dedicated to his team’s success at the speedway. With 20 victories at the Indy 500, Team Penske is kind of in a league of their own. The next closest teams, Andretti and Ganassi, only have six wins each. So, yeah, a wing of the museum is probably warranted. Each of Penske’s wins has a little display featuring Monday’s Indy Star newspaper cover story, as well as a ticket from the event and the race program from that year. There are only 20 slots on the wall, though, so when a Penske wins again, they’ll have to redo the hall. 

Inside the wing features some of the most important cars, helmets, engines, and trophies from the team’s tenure at the Speedway. Even the infamous “attenuator-gate” 2024 Indy 500-winning Josef Newgarden car is there. I didn’t notice until later that my photo included someone pointing at the aero-blended attenuator that got Newgarden and teammate Will Power booted from qualifying this year.

Bradley Brownell

There’s so much more to see outside of what I’ve described so far, you’ll just have to go to see everything. There’s a small gallery of NASCAR racers from the famed Brickyard 400 race, an upstairs section that features interactive video boards, large glass displays of extraneous Indy stuff, gorgeous paintings, and race suits of former Indy race winners. You’ll want to check out the tribute to the four 4-time winners, which is split to celebrate A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Sr., Rick Mears, and Hélio Castroneves. There’s even a section of interactive toys and building exercises for children (though they’re still fun for adults, too). 

For the $25 entry price, this is well worth your time and money. There’s a pretty extensive gift shop at the exit of the museum, as well, in case you want some Indy gear. Go, do it, visit this museum, you won’t regret it, and you’ll probably learn a lot.