A reminder that Indianapolis Motor Speedway is enormous.
This story was originally published in 2020 and has been updated.
As the host to the Indianapolis 500, one of the biggest motor sports events in the world, Indianapolis Motor Speedway is absolutely massive with a capacity that can hold at least 350,000 people between the grandstands and the infield.
In fact, the infield of the iconic 2.5-mile track is so ridiculously gigantic that, at 253 acres, it’s large enough to simultaneously hold several other sports venues and international landmarks — if that were an actual thing that could happen, of course.
But in reality, it’s so big there are actually four holes from the adjacent Brickyard Crossing golf course inside the track.
So, with the 108th Indy 500 on Sunday, we thought this would be a good time to remind everyone just how enormous Indianapolis Motor Speedway is. The IMS infield could hold eight major landmarks inside of it simultaneously: Churchill Downs, Yankee Stadium, Rose Bowl Stadium, Vatican City, the Taj Mahal, the White House, Liberty Island and the Roman Colosseum.
In the image below, Yankee Stadium, Liberty Island, the White House and the Colosseum are on top of the golf course inside the track.
Image courtesy of the IndyCar Series.
Keeping things a little more local, the IndyStar previously reported that the infield also could fit all 14 current Big Ten football stadiums in it with plenty of room to spare. It’s similar to how Daytona International Speedway, also a 2.5-mile behemoth, could fit 15 Florida stadiums in the infield.
As Snopes previously noted about this astounding fact, we’re only talking about the Indy track’s infield and not the total property acreage, so that is the standard applied here to exclude the landmarks’ surrounding areas. More via Snopes:
Adding up the footprints of Churchill Downs (80 acres), Yankee Stadium (15 acres), the Rose Bowl (10 acres), the Roman Colosseum (6 acres), Vatican City (110 acres), the White House (18 acres), Taj Mahal (less than 1 acre), and Liberty Island (12 acres), produces an overall area (252 acres) that is smaller than the size of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (253 acres). (We’re ignoring the issue of whether the shapes of these landmarks would allow them to be placed within the IMS without any overlap or stacking.)
So yeah, Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a monster sports venue that could hold several major attractions if that were actually possible.
The 108th running of the Indy 500 is Sunday, May 26 with coverage beginning at 11 a.m. ET on NBC. The green flag is set for 12:45 p.m. ET.
