There’s a Sunday every year that I refuse to miss.
Doesn’t matter what’s on the calendar, what the weather is doing, or what anyone else has planned. The last Sunday in May is spoken for. The 110th Indianapolis 500 is this Sunday, and I’ll be there — in person, same as I have been for years now. But the way I got here is a little more roundabout than you might think.
I grew up listening to the Indy 500 on 103.9.
Not from a couch at home, either. My family spent Memorial Day weekend at Versailles State Park every year, camping, doing what families do at campgrounds in late May in Indiana — which is mostly enjoy the fact that it’s finally warm enough to be outside. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the race was on. The radio was on. For 500 miles on a Sunday afternoon, the campground had a soundtrack
That was my Indy 500 for a long time. The one on the radio. The one I could hear but not see.
I didn’t know then that I’d end up on the other side of a microphone for a living. I didn’t know that one day I’d be working in Indianapolis radio, and that race day would mean something completely different. But that’s what happened. And when it did, we did something called Breakfast at the Brickyard — a special race morning edition of the show, broadcast right there, with all of it happening around us.
The first time I walked into Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I was an adult with a radio job and a reason to be there.
And I still stopped and just stood there for a minute.
Because you can listen to a place your whole childhood and still not be fully prepared for what it actually is. The Speedway holds a quarter of a million people. That’s not a crowd. That’s a city that appears for one day and then vanishes. The largest single-day sporting event on the planet, happening right here in Indiana. The first time you feel the scale of it — the grandstands, the noise, the fuel smell, the energy of people who’ve traveled from everywhere just to be in this one place — something shifts. Something the radio, as good as it is, could never quite deliver.
And then the engines fire.
I’ve heard that sound on the radio. I’ve heard it in person. They are not the same experience.
This year, Alex Palou starts from the pole. Defending champion. His second career Indy 500 pole — the first was 2023, also with Chip Ganassi Racing. He’s the only Spanish driver to ever win that pole, and he’s been the class of the field all month. Nine past winners are in the starting field. Between them, they’ve won this race fourteen times. Helio Castroneves, 51 years old on race day, four-time winner, still out there. Scott Dixon, who has led more career laps at Indianapolis than any driver in history. Four rookies, including Mick Schumacher, whose last name carries a weight that fills a room without saying another word.
This field is deep. This race is going to be something.
But here’s what I keep coming back to.
The Indianapolis 500 has a way of weaving itself into Indiana childhoods whether you go or not. It finds you. It found me at a campground in Versailles, on a radio, on a Sunday afternoon. And something about it stuck — the sound of it, the scale of it, the sense that something genuinely enormous was happening just up the road.
That feeling never really went away. It just eventually had a parking spot attached to it.
The sport is real. The spectacle is real. The engineering, the strategy, the sheer nerve it takes to run 230 miles an hour for 500 miles with the wall always right there — all of it is real, and I love all of it. But underneath the field notes and the starting grid and the defending champion on the pole is something simpler.
It’s a race I grew up with. On a radio station I grew up with — the same one that carries it this Sunday, same as always.
Some things in life are worth being stubborn about. This is one of mine.
Sunday can’t get here soon enough.
Brent Lee is the morning host at WRBI 103.9 FM.
Want to know more about this year’s field? Here are some other fun facts to get you ready for Sunday:
- Car No. 10 has now won the Indianapolis 500 pole four times. All four were with Chip Ganassi Racing, and two of them belong to Palou (2023 and 2026).
- Chip Ganassi Racing has earned nine Indianapolis 500 poles, all since 1993. Only Team Penske has more, with 19.
- Six different teams are represented in just the first two rows of the starting grid: Chip Ganassi Racing, ECR, Team Penske, Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb Agajanian, A.J. Foyt Enterprises, and Arrow McLaren.
- The four rookies in this year’s field are Mick Schumacher (starting 27th), Dennis Hauger (29th), Jacob Abel (30th), and Caio Collet (32nd). The last time the top-qualifying rookie started lower than 27th was 2007.
- Romain Grosjean and Katherine Legge are the only non-rookies in the field who didn’t start the race in 2025. Both last competed in 2024.
- Helio Castroneves is the most experienced driver in the field with 25 previous Indianapolis 500 starts. The all-time record is 35, set by A.J. Foyt between 1958 and 1992.
- The oldest driver in the field is Castroneves at 51 years and 14 days on race day. The youngest is Nolan Siegel at 21 years and 196 days. Both Castroneves and Takuma Sato will actually be older on race day than Al Unser was when he became the oldest winner in Indianapolis 500 history in 1987.
- Nolan Siegel and Kyffin Simpson will both be younger on race day than Troy Ruttman was when he became the youngest winner in race history back in 1952.
- Dennis Hauger is only the second Norwegian-born driver to compete in the Indianapolis 500. The first was Gil Anderson, who raced in the first six editions of the event from 1911 to 1916.
- There are a combined 256 previous Indianapolis 500 starts among the 33 drivers in this year’s field. The record is 260, set in 1987 and 1992.
- The most experienced row in this year’s starting lineup is Row 5, with a combined 49 career starts (Ed Carpenter 22, Helio Castroneves 25, Christian Rasmussen 2). The least experienced is Row 9, with just eight combined starts (Kyle Kirkwood 4, Katherine Legge 4, Mick Schumacher 0).
- Six past Indianapolis 500 Rookies of the Year are in this year’s field: Helio Castroneves, Santino Ferrucci, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Scott McLaughlin, Pato O’Ward, and Alexander Rossi.
- Twenty of the 33 starters have previously competed in INDY NXT by Firestone (formerly Indy Lights), the traditional IndyCar feeder series.