Speedway, Indiana

Speedway is a town of about eleven thousand people entirely surrounded by Indianapolis, and its entire identity is organized around a single facility: the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The track opened in nineteen oh nine as a testing ground for the booming automobile industry, its surface originally paved with three point two million bricks, earning it the nickname the Brickyard. The first Indianapolis Five Hundred was run in nineteen eleven, and the race has been held nearly every year since, becoming the largest single-day sporting event in the world by attendance, drawing more than two hundred fifty thousand spectators on race day. The town of Speedway was incorporated in nineteen twenty-six specifically to provide municipal services to the area surrounding the track, making it perhaps the only American municipality that exists because of a car race.