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Early last week, an announcement sort of came out of the blue for most of us, when the IMS Museum announced plans for an $89 Million capital campaign. The word they kept using was transform. That’s code-speak for finally bringing the aging museum into the 21st century.

First of all, let me start off by saying that I absolutely love going to the IMS Museum. It is an annual Month of May ritual with my family that is right up there with eating tenderloins and dinner at Dawson’s.

In fact, it is so ingrained into the culture of IMS that it is like going to your grandmother’s house for Christmas, The décor is usually about sixty years out of date, and the heat is turned up to 80° F. But you put up with it all, because – well, it’s tradition. Well, guess what – Grandma just came into a lot of money and her house is getting a badly needed makeover.

While I love going there, I freely acknowledge that the IMS Museum needs a makeover – or a transformation. Most regular readers here know that I generally abhor change and I live by the credo that Change is Bad. I developed that mantra from seeing a lot of things changed just for the sake of change (Windows 11, the new GM logo and “new” Coke – just to name a few). However, my philosophy does not apply to everything. There are some things that are in desperate need of change. The IMS Museum is one of them.

The current building opened in 1976, and there have been no major changes or renovations since then. Forty-seven years later, and it’s like walking into a time warp. There is a skylight in the center of the building, which brightens things up inside – but it also heats things up inside as well. On race weekend, the air-conditioning can’t keep up with the amount of people in there. To say it gets stuffy is being kind. The stench can be alarming; it gets so bad in there.

I’ve not been to many racing museums, but I did take in the Barber Museum in April of 2013. That’s when it struck me just how far behind the times the IMS Museum had fallen. The contrast in the two museums could not have been more obvious. The multi-level interactive museum at Barber was everything the IMS Museum was not. I left wondering how a small track in Leeds, Alabama could have such a showplace of a museum, while the museum inside the grounds of what is billed as The Racing Capital of the World was so second-rate.

That is when the IMS Museum went from charming to shabby, in my eyes. I still enjoyed going, mind you – but I knew that it had the potential to be so much more.

The day for becoming so much more was announced last Tuesday, at a gathering at the museum. Plans and renderings were on display for what museum visitors can expect once everything is done. One of the best things about the transformation is that they are going to use the same building. Regardless of the dated décor inside, you can’t beat the location. There had been talk of building a new location across 16th Street, in the parking lot of the IndyCar offices. That would’ve been very inconvenient to visit while spending a day at the track. There is something to be said of driving through the tunnel under the south end and popping up to be greeted by the iconic museum structure. I was not a fan of leaving that location, no matter how small it was.

With the pictures I’ve seen on what it might look like – I must say, it all looks and sounds very impressive. (All photos:IMSMuseum.org)

If there is a downside to this, it is that the museum will be closed for eighteen months while they essentially gut the inside of the current museum. The famous basement that holds the cars not on display will also be gutted and used as another floor for full display. That means the cars not on display will be housed offsite. That’s OK. That means it will almost double the capacity to have another floor to operate with. I’m not sure what is to be done with the photo shop and offices that are currently upstairs.

The IMS Museum will close in November of 2023, and will not re-open until April of 2025. So if you only go to the museum once a year in May as part of your Race Weekend routine – your routine for May of next year will have a major hole in it. But the plan is to have everything completed in time for the Month of May in 2025.

If you are wondering why Roger Penske doesn’t just cover this upgrade – he doesn’t own the museum. It is a separate not-for-profit entity, and operates on its own. I am hopeful that the promised transformation will turn the IMS Museum into the showplace that is worthy of the track that surrounds it. It certainly looks promising. It should be enjoyable watching the progress over the eighteen months after the museum closes this November.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on July 19, 2023 at 4:04 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.