Welcome to Speedway, the Tiny Town Absolutely Obsessed with the Indy 500
Speedway is a town of 13,000, but one weekend in May, it welcomes a world of visitors to one of the world’s most famous auto races.
It was inevitable that Michelle Lidy would end up a massive racing fan. Long before she was born her grandfather, a welder and Indy 500 enthusiast, decided he wanted to live in a house by the racetrack. So her grandparents packed up and drove from northern Indiana, right to the edge of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There, in the town of Speedway—a suburban enclave surrounded by the capital of Indianapolis—they surveyed their options. When they found one they liked on McCray Street her grandfather climbed up on the roof to inspect it. “He could see inside the track through the bleachers,” said Lidy. “He said, ‘This is the one we're getting.’”
Lidy is now the third generation to own the home, which is just five houses away from the famed racetrack. And if you’re in town during the month of May, you’ll see it carrying on the family’s racing enthusiast tradition, decked out for the Indy 500 this Sunday, May 26. A homemade cardboard replica of the Borg-Warner winner’s trophy—the one with all the winners’ faces sculpted on its exterior—is on the lawn and her porch resembles the entrance to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, complete with the golden wheel, wings, and a flag up top.
Like a very specific Halloween, house after house in Speedway is adorned in anticipation of the race. Checkered flags abound, as do designs incorporating race tracks and scoring pylons, while others mimic the racetrack’s Gasoline Alley. Then there are the cardboard cutouts: A guy last year constructed miniature race car drivers and propped them up in his front yard. Lawn after lawn sport signs reading "Welcome Race Fans." Right now, a few days before the Indy 500, is the calm before the storm. This weekend 300,000 people will make their way in their direction for “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”
Speedway, a small city of just above 13,000 residents, sits immediately northwest of downtown Indianapolis, and is the technical home of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was to be an innovative “horseless city”; its architects wanted to exhibit a commitment to industry and progress by creating a utopian housing community for the automotive era. But though it was built for the future, it never quite got out of the shadow of the racetrack. So it leaned into it.
Conceived a couple years after the 1909 building of the stadium, prospective residents were encouraged to buy land through “Beautiful Speedway City” advertisements that touted sidewalks! Water! Electric lights! And “splendid gravel roadway.” The Prest-O-Lite headlight manufacturing company set up shop in town in 1906 and offered employment opportunities, followed by others including the Electric Steel Castings Company and the Allison Engineering Company. In 1926, with 507 residents, the city voted to incorporate. Today the population hovers around 13,000 but remains at roughly five square miles.
As Indianapolis expanded, it grew to envelop the city, but Speedway resisted annexation. Most people in Indianapolis see it as another neighborhood, but the residents of Speedway are adamantly independent. They live in a small town, which just happens to be a stone’s throw away from a bustling metropolis and its amenities.
Even if somehow you missed the massive Indiana Motor Speedway on the right edge of town, there are plenty of other ways to tell where Indianapolis stops and the race-obsessed Speedway begins: Fire hydrants are painted black and white like a racing flag, and street signs bear the Indy 500 branding. This year the signs tout the race’s 108th birthday.
And the shadow of the racetrack looms large, both on and off the roadways. The four elementary schools built in the 1950s and 1960s in the city were each named after a founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. If you went to a high school sports game in town, you’d cheer for the Speedway Sparkplugs. On Main Street a gigantic mural features a racecar and a checkerboard flag; the town motto is “Driven by Tradition.”
According to Airbnb, in the weeks leading up to and after the race, Speedway is one of the most sought-after locations in the US to book on the platform; last year hosts in the Indianapolis area brought in over $1.5 million the weekend of the race. Typically, rental occupancy in Speedway hovers around 50 percent for about $137 a night for a two-bedroom home. As of the writing of this article, there is one, one-bedroom apartment left, for $613, and another two-bedroom house will cost you just under a thousand. But parking is where most Speedway residents get their cash. All around town are signs advertising parking and camping space for $20 to $35 a pop. Lidy rents out her yard and driveway: She currently has four RVs parked for the week, and on race day, she will add up to 35 cars.
The town celebrates the upcoming race with a different event nearly every night of the month, like the Speedway Bike Night at Daredevil Brewing, or Rockin' on Main, a massive pre-race party in the center of town. You’ll also find both residents and visitors “porching,” essentially having a tailgate-style gathering on the porch or wherever there’s space. Taken all together, the people watching this time of year is sublime. “I think Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities said that, from her front stoop, she could watch the ballet of the streets,” says Joanna Taft, founder of the Harrison Center.
And the decorations are always a good conversation starter. “Right now there's people walking by my house to go to the track,” says Lidy. “They’ll see decorations and engage in conversation. It's just really kind of neat to have that interaction with people that normally would just walk by and wouldn’t say anything.”
On race day a cannon with fireworks shoots off at 6 a.m. at the Indiana Motor Speedway, signaling the opening of the gates, a tradition since the first race in 1911. “They will shake your house, they are so loud,” says Lidy.
Then Speedway becomes an attraction in itself as people begin filing through. Lidy and her husband split shifts manning parking in their driveway. “I'm an early riser, and he's a night owl so it works out perfect,” she says. “I'm usually up at 5 a.m. and I go out and survey the property, pick up any trash and kind of just get ready for the day ahead.”
Lidy doesn’t always go to the race itself. Others in the neighborhood will work as yellowshirt volunteers at the track. But mostly Lidy and her husband relax, and watch the rundown at the start of the race: flyovers, the singing of the national anthem and “(Back Home Again in) Indiana,” the state’s unofficial anthem. Then they’ll listen on the radio. “If it’s a nice hot day we'll go out and float in the pool,” she says. “We can obviously hear the race, and we can smell it. And, if she wants to get a glimpse of the action, all she has to do is climb on her roof.