Indy 500: If the 105th goes on as planned, it would smash a record

By Asher Fair | Aug 29, 2020

Takuma Sato, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, IndyCar, Indy 500 (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images) /

If the 105th running of the Indy 500 takes place as planned on Sunday, May 30, 2021, it would set a new record — by far — for the shortest time between two Indy 500 races.

The 104th running of the Indy 500 took place this past Sunday, which was far from a sure thing a few short months — even weeks — ago.

That was undoubtedly a major positive for IndyCar and for motorsports as a whole, even though what is annually the most attended single-day sporting event in the world was run without fans for the first time and it ended under caution for the first time since 2013, something no racing fans enjoy seeing.

But there is one additional positive takeaway from the first — and hopefully last — August/non-May edition of the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing”, which was postponed from Sunday, May 24 to Sunday, August 23 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

And that is a takeaway which we can hopefully dwell on for 40 straight weeks.

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The 105th running of the 200-lap race around the four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval in Speedway, Indiana is scheduled to take place on Sunday, May 30, 2021. Should that race take place as planned — hopefully with the usual 300,000+ fans in attendance to boot — it would mark the shortest time between two Indy 500 races in race history.

So Rahal Letterman Langigan Racing’s Takuma Sato could go from being one of 73 Indy 500 winners to not only one of 20 two-time winners but one of 11 three-time winners in a span of only about nine months.

Never before had one Indy 500 taken place fewer than 362 days (52 weeks, minus a maximum of two days of rain delays) before or after another.

That is set to change, which can only serve as a silver lining in what has been a tough year for many to say the least.

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There are only 280 days from this past Sunday until next Memorial Day Sunday. So instead of having 365 days to go right now (not 358 since it was initially slated to have been a 53-week, 371-day wait from this year’s race to next year’s race), we have just 274 days until the green flag flies again — once again, hopefully. But who’s counting?