Indianapolis Motor Speedway announced today that the Independence Day event hosting both the IndyCar GMR Grand Prix and NASCAR’s Brickyard 400 will be run behind closed doors.
“While we certainly worked diligently to run our events with spectators, we reached a point where we needed to make a final decision because the race weekend is less than a month away,” Penske Entertainment Corp. President & CEO Mark Miles said.
“Today it’s not possible to be confident that Indianapolis will be at Stage 5 of the state’s reopening plan by the Fourth of July weekend.”
The event will be the first time that IndyCar will be paired with NASCAR’s top series and the track was hoping to be able to allow fans to witness the action-packed weekend.
Fans who have purchased tickets for the event will have options of either getting a refund or applying their tickets towards future IndyCar events at the track, including the Indy 500 in August.
In addition, the statement announced that the NASCAR race will be officially renamed to the Big Machine Hand Sanitizer 400 Powered by Big Machine Records, in recognition of the company’s ongoing efforts to support the supply chain of hand sanitizer available to the public
As of this upcoming weekend, both IndyCar and NASCAR will have resumed races without any spectators at the tracks. At this time, the first race that has confirmed it will allow fans is IndyCar’s REV Group Grand Prix at Road America which is set for the July 11-12 weekend.
