Carb Night Classic: Racing's Friday Before the Big Sunday

Every spring, the Saturday night before the Indianapolis Five Hundred, a different kind of race runs just west of the city at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park in Brownsburg, Indiana. It is called the Carb Night Classic, and among open-wheel racing purists, it is both a warm-up and a ritual.

The event began in nineteen forty-six as an American Automobile Association midgets race, conceived as a way to channel the electric energy building around Indianapolis in the days before the Five Hundred. For much of the twentieth century the race moved around to different short tracks across Indiana, but since nineteen eighty it has lived permanently at the quarter-mile oval in Brownsburg. Over the decades it has taken on a rotating roster of sponsor names: the Night Before the Five Hundred, the Budweiser Night Before the Five Hundred, the NOS Energy Drink Night Before the Five Hundred. The Carb Night Classic name, a nod to the technical ritual of carburetor tuning that drivers once performed the night before a big race, stuck most durably.

The history of winners reads as a scroll of American open-wheel royalty. A.J. Foyt won it. Mario Andretti won it. Al Unser Senior won it. For drivers competing in United States Auto Club events, the Carb Night Classic has long been a proving ground: show well here on a tight quarter-mile bullring, and people notice before the bigger machinery heads to the two-and-a-half-mile oval a few miles east.

Today the event features multiple series racing on the same night: United States Formula Pro two thousand, USF two thousand, the National Pavement Midget Championship, and the USAC Silver Crown National Championship. Families line the infield, trailers ring the outer fence, and the smell of racing fuel drifts across a town that has built its identity around the speed and ritual of May in Indiana. For a brief Friday evening, Brownsburg becomes the warm-up act for the most famous race in the world.