Episode 2: 3.2 Million Bricks
Introduction
I want you to picture something with me. It's a Tuesday morning in May. The sun is just coming up over central Indiana. The grandstands at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway are empty. The track is empty. The pit lane is empty.
But if you walked out onto the front straightaway right now, and you knelt down at a specific spot, exactly thirty-six inches wide, you would be touching three feet of bricks that were laid by hand in the fall of 1909.
Three hundred million pairs of eyes have watched cars cross this exact spot on television. Roughly thirty million people have stood in person on the grandstand side of these bricks. Race winners have knelt down and kissed them. NFL quarterbacks have done it. NASCAR champions have done it. A grandmother named Sarah Fisher kissed them after her last Indy 500 start in 2010.
These bricks have a name. They are called the Yard of Bricks. They are the only piece left of the original 3.2 million bricks that paved this entire 2.5-mile racetrack in 1909.
In the last episode, we talked about how the Speedway got built and why four men chose to build it. Today we are going to talk about the surface itself. Because here is what most people do not realize. The story of the bricks is not really a story about racing. It is a story about a problem that had been killing people for two thousand years.
How do you build a road that does not kill you?
The Disaster
August 1909. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is brand new. The track has been open for less than a month. The four founders, Carl Fisher, James Allison, Arthur Newby, and Frank Wheeler, are watching a 300-mile race called the Wheeler-Schebler Trophy. They are watching their dream come true.
And then, in the space of two days, the dream almost dies.
The track surface is a mix of crushed limestone, gravel, tar, and asphaltum oil. It is the standard surface for the time. Five hundred workers and three hundred mules spent months laying down this gooey mixture and rolling it flat (History.com, 2025).
But the cars are heavier and faster than anything this kind of surface was designed for.
On day one of the August races, a driver named Wilfred Bourque flips his Knox car when it hits a rut in the surface. He and his riding mechanic die when the car bounces into a fence post (History.com, 2025).
A few hours later, a driver named Charlie Merz shreds a tire, loses control, and flies into the crowd. Two spectators die. A third person, his riding mechanic, dies of his injuries soon after.
Five people are dead on the opening weekend of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Two of them are spectators who paid for a ticket and never went home.
Here is what one historian wrote about the surface that weekend. Quote: "Drivers were quickly covered with dirt, oil, and tar. The track surface disintegrated in the turns, flying gravel shattered goggles and bloodied cheeks. Driving at Indy was like flying through a meteor shower." End quote (History.com, 2025).
The American Automobile Association, the AAA, threatens to ban racing at the track. Indiana's lieutenant governor calls for racing to be outlawed across the entire state. Carl Fisher and his partners are weeks away from losing everything.
They make a decision. They stop racing. They cancel the rest of the season. And they start looking for a better surface.
This is where the bricks come in.
Why Bricks?
So if you are Carl Fisher in September 1909, and you need to repave 2.5 miles of racetrack in the next few months before winter shuts everything down, what do you build it out of?
You have basically three choices. Concrete. Bricks. Or a better version of the surface you already have.
This is going to sound boring. It is not boring. The decision Fisher and his team made here, more than a century ago, is the same decision every road engineer makes today when they pave the street in front of your house.
Let's break it down.
Concrete was relatively new in 1909. It was strong, but it was brittle. Engineers did not yet fully understand how to keep concrete from cracking under heavy loads at high speed. Concrete also takes a long time to cure. If you pour 2.5 miles of concrete in October, parts of it might still be setting in December.
Asphalt and tar mixtures were what the track was already made of, and we just saw how that worked out. The problem is that asphalt softens when it heats up, and racing tires generate a lot of heat. The surface literally melts under the cars and forms ruts.
Bricks were old. Bricks had been used to pave roads since the Roman Empire. People had been firing clay bricks for thousands of years. The technology was completely understood (Brickhunter, 2024).
But the team did not just guess. They ran traction tests. And what those tests showed was clear. Bricks were less slippery than gravel. Bricks were stronger than concrete under repeated heavy loads. And bricks did not soften in summer heat (History.com, 2025).
So now we get into the science. Why do bricks have those properties?
Target: civil engineer, materials scientist, or Indiana Department of Transportation specialist. Topic: Why does a fired clay brick handle heat, weight, and repeated impact better than poured concrete or compacted gravel? Length: ~30 seconds. Fallback narration if clip is not available: "When you fire clay in a kiln at around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, the minerals inside the clay actually fuse together. The brick stops being a bunch of separate clay particles and becomes one solid piece. That fused structure is what gives a brick its strength and its heat resistance. Concrete is held together by a chemical bond between the cement paste and the gravel inside it. Both work. But a brick is essentially a small ceramic block. It is harder to break, and it does not soften when it gets hot."
Here is the other thing that bricks had going for them in 1909. Manufacturing capacity. Indiana sat in the middle of one of the biggest brick-making regions in the United States. The Wabash Clay Factory in western Indiana could fire bricks by the millions. The National Paving Brick Manufacturers Association had consultants ready to advise on every step (First Super Speedway, n.d.).
Bricks were not just the right material. They were the right material that you could actually get in 1909, in Indiana, in three months.
The decision was made. The track would be paved in bricks. Three point two million of them. And the project would start within days.
63 Days to Pave
I want to do some math with you, because the math of what happened next is genuinely incredible.
The project starts on September 16, 1909. It ends on December 14, 1909. That is sixty-three days (Burns Stainless, 2022).
In those sixty-three days, workers lay three million two hundred thousand bricks across a 2.5-mile racetrack.
Let me give you that number a few different ways.
- Per day: 3.2 million bricks divided by 63 days equals about 50,800 bricks per day.
- Per hour: if the crews worked 10 hours a day, that is 5,080 bricks per hour.
- Per minute: that is about 85 bricks every single minute of every working day for two months.
And each brick weighed about ten pounds (History.com, 2025). So every minute, the crews were placing about 850 pounds of brick. Every hour, more than five tons of brick. Every day, about 51 tons of brick.
Now, this was not done by giant machines. They had a few steam tractors and some rollers, but the actual brick placement was done by hand. Two hundred temporary workers were hired by the Wabash Clay Factory. They subcontracted with other brick suppliers to meet the order (First Super Speedway, n.d.). Mules pulled hand carts of bricks out to the laying crews.
And these crews were not just dropping bricks in place. They were setting bricks into a bed of sand and mortar, leveling them, and tapping them flat. The work had to be precise. A loose brick in turn one could shred a tire at speed.
The engineer in charge of all this was a man named Park Taliaferro Andrews. He was the same engineer who had designed the original track layout. He went by P. T. Andrews. He had to coordinate a small army across 2.5 miles of construction site, in fall and early winter weather, while shipments of bricks arrived from multiple factories (First Super Speedway, n.d.).
When the last brick was laid on December 14, 1909, the team did something memorable. The final brick was made of solid gold. Indiana's lieutenant governor, Thomas R. Marshall, came out to the track and laid it himself in a ceremony (Burns Stainless, 2022). Marshall, by the way, would later become Vice President of the United States under Woodrow Wilson.
So pause and think about that. The very last brick on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, in the middle of all those red clay bricks, was solid gold. Today, that gold brick is gone. It was paved over with asphalt in 1961 and almost certainly removed long ago. But for the first fifty-two years of the track's life, every car that crossed the start-finish line passed over real gold.
Sixty-three days. Three point two million bricks. About a thousand workers across the supply chain. The greatest engineering effort in American sports up to that time. And as the next race weekend approached in 1910, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened back up with what was now the safest racing surface in the world.
The Walls That Stand Guard
Bricks were only half of the rebuild. While crews were laying bricks across the track surface, a second team was building something most fans have never thought about. A wall.
Before 1909, racetracks did not really have proper walls between the cars and the spectators. There were wooden fences. Sometimes there was nothing at all. That is part of why those spectators died in the August disaster. A car shredded a tire, flew off the track, and there was nothing to stop it.
So while the bricks were going down, Fisher's crews built a 33-inch-high concrete wall in front of the main grandstand and all the way around the four corners of the track (Burns Stainless, 2022).
Think about that height for a second. Thirty-three inches. That is roughly waist-high on an adult. It is not tall. It does not block the view of fans in the grandstands. But it is high enough to catch the body of a car if a tire shreds and the car slides into the wall.
And here is something I find beautiful about engineering decisions like this. The 33-inch concrete wall was not designed to make racing safe. Racing in 1909 was not going to be safe. That was understood. The wall was designed to do one specific thing. Stop a car from leaving the track and going into the crowd.
That is what engineers call a bounded problem. You do not solve "make racing safe." You solve "if a car loses control on the front straight, what catches it before it hits a spectator?" The answer turned out to be a concrete wall, 33 inches tall, that fans could still see over.
This same idea, of solving a bounded problem, runs through every safety system you will ever see in any car or on any road. Episode 6 of this series is about a much newer safety wall called the SAFER barrier. It was invented at the University of Nebraska and first installed at this very same track in 2002. Same problem. Better answer.
So now, at the start of 1910, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has a paved brick surface that will not melt, will not rut, and will not shred tires. And it has a concrete wall that protects the spectators from the cars. The track is ready for the first full year of racing. And it is, for the first time in racetrack history, a place where you can plausibly hold a 500-mile race without expecting people to die.
I want to say that one more time. They built the place where the impossible became possible. And they did it because five people died on opening weekend and they refused to accept that as the answer.
The Asphalt Era
The bricks held up well. Better than anyone expected. By the 1920s, the surface had been smoothed where it needed smoothing, repaired where it needed repairing. The track kept hosting the Indy 500 every year except during World War II.
But here is the thing about technology. The cars kept getting faster, and the bricks stopped being the right answer.
By the late 1950s, the bricks were showing wear after decades of pounding from race cars. In some spots, the brick surface was uneven enough to literally fly small chips of clay into the air at racing speed. The track was still safer than it had been in 1909, but it was no longer the best racing surface in the world.
In 1961, IMS made a decision that broke a lot of hearts. They paved over almost the entire track with asphalt (History.com, 2025).
If you are wondering "wait, did they just pour asphalt right on top of the original 1909 bricks?" yes, that is exactly what they did. The bricks are still there, under the asphalt. They have been there for over sixty years. Every once in a while, when IMS does a major repaving project, crews dig down and find them.
In December 2025, during a repaving project in Turn 2, crews actually unearthed sections of the original 1909 brick surface that had not been seen since 1937. The president of IMS, Doug Boles, personally removed the first brick. Underneath those bricks, they even found the original crushed stone and tar surface from the disaster of 1909, still preserved like a fossil (WISH-TV, 2025).
But here is the part of the 1961 decision that mattered most. The IMS leadership did not pave over the entire track. They left one strip untouched. Thirty-six inches wide. At the start and finish line.
That strip is what we now call the Yard of Bricks.
It is the last surviving piece of the 1909 surface. It is the only place at IMS where you can stand on bricks that were touched by Ray Harroun, that were touched by every driver who has ever won the Indy 500 in the original era, that were touched by Lt. Gov. Marshall in that ceremony in December 1909.
The decision to leave that yard of bricks in place was deliberate. The Speedway leadership in 1961 understood that they were not just paving a racetrack. They were paving over history. So they kept three feet of it visible. As a reminder. As a tradition. As a kind of public memory of what this place is and where it came from.
And then, decades later, that decision became something nobody could have predicted.
The Yard That Remains
August 5, 1996. NASCAR is running its third Brickyard 400 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. A driver named Dale Jarrett crosses the finish line first.
What happens next has now happened almost every time anyone wins a major race at this track. But on that day in 1996, it had never happened before.
Jarrett climbs out of his car. His crew chief, Todd Parrott, comes over. The two of them had joked earlier that if Jarrett won, they would kiss the bricks. So they walk over to that yard of original 1909 bricks at the start-finish line. They kneel down. And they kiss it (Brickhunter, 2024).
That was not part of any tradition. It was a joke between two friends. But it was caught on camera. And by the time the next Indy 500 came around, kissing the bricks was a thing.
Now, almost every winner at IMS does it. Indy 500 winners do it. NASCAR Brickyard 400 winners do it. Drivers in the Battle on the Bricks IMSA sports car race do it. Sometimes the whole team kneels down together. Sometimes drivers bring their kids. There is a video of A. J. Foyt's team in the 1990s, where pretty much every member of the crew leaves a lipstick mark on the bricks.
Target: IMS Museum curator, IMS historian, or current IMS staff member (Doug Boles, Jason Vansickle, or similar). Topic: What does the Yard of Bricks mean to the people who work at IMS every day? Length: ~30 seconds. Fallback narration if clip is not available: "The people who work at the Speedway will tell you that the Yard of Bricks is the closest thing they have to a sacred place at the track. It is the spot where every winner has stood. It is the spot where the track first opened. It is the heart of the Speedway."
Target: Indy 500 winner, Brickyard 400 winner, or current IndyCar driver. Topic: What does it feel like to kiss the bricks? Length: ~30 seconds. Fallback narration if clip is not available: "Drivers describe it as one of the most emotional moments of their careers. The bricks are warm from the sun. They are rough on your lips. And every single one of them was placed by hand more than a hundred years ago by someone you will never meet."
Think about the layers of that. A spontaneous joke between two friends becomes a ritual. The ritual happens on a strip of bricks that was preserved on purpose by people who knew the track was changing but did not want to lose all the history. Those bricks were laid by workers in 1909 who were trying to fix a disaster.
Now in 2025, a different track, a college go-kart track at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, also has a row of original 1909 IMS bricks at its start-finish line. We will talk about that in the bonus episode of this season. Only two tracks in the world have those bricks. Both are in Indiana.
The story of the bricks just keeps going.
Wrap-up
Here is what I want you to take from Episode 2.
You drive on a road every day. You walk on a sidewalk every day. You go to a school that sits on a foundation. You have probably never thought about who designed any of that. You have certainly never thought about the math involved in choosing what kind of surface to lay down, or how the chemistry of one material is different from another.
But somebody did.
Somebody asked, "How many tons can this road carry? How hot does it get in July? How cold does it get in February? How much rain falls per year? How heavy will the trucks be? Will it crack in twenty years or in fifty?"
That somebody is called a civil engineer. Or a materials scientist. Or a construction project manager. Or any of about a dozen other titles. They do this for highways, for bridges, for racetracks, for parking lots, for the runway at the airport you fly out of.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway exists because a small group of people in 1909 looked at a disaster, asked the right materials question, did the math, and got the right answer. And that answer is still preserved today as three feet of bricks where drivers go to celebrate the biggest wins of their lives.
So here is your question for this week. The next time you walk into school, the next time you ride home in a car, the next time you cross a bridge, ask yourself, "Who designed this? What problem were they solving? Did they get it right?"
If you are the kind of person who finds those questions interesting, civil engineering and materials science are real jobs. They are well paid. They are everywhere in Indiana. And every single one of them traces back to people like P. T. Andrews and the workers at the Wabash Clay Factory, who, in sixty-three days, laid three million two hundred thousand bricks and changed what was possible.
Sources
Brickhunter. (2024). Use of bricks at the home of the Indy 500. https://brickhunter.com/blog/indy-500-the-most-famous-bricks-in-motorsport
Burns Stainless. (2022, May 31). One brick at a time. https://burnsstainless.com/blogs/articles-1/building-the-first-speedway
Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. (2022). Ray Harroun. Indiana University Indianapolis. https://indyencyclopedia.org/ray-harroun/
First Super Speedway. (n.d.). Paving the Brickyard. https://www.firstsuperspeedway.com/photo-gallery/paving-brickyard
History.com. (2025, May 27). Drivers make first test laps at newly laid Indy "Brickyard": December 14, 1909. A&E Television Networks. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-14/indy-brickyard-is-completed
Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (n.d.). Historical stats: Race results. https://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com/events/indy500/history/historical-stats/
This Day In Automotive History. (2021, December 14). December 14, 1909: The last brick is laid at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. https://automotivehistory.org/the-last-brick-is-laid-at-indy/
Wikipedia. (2026). Indianapolis Motor Speedway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_Motor_Speedway
WISH-TV. (2025, December 12). Indianapolis Motor Speedway reveals 1909 racing surface. https://www.wishtv.com/lifestyle/indianapolis-motor-speedway-history/