Motorsports

A packed crowd could convene in Washington, D.C., for IndyCar's Freedom 250 Grand Prix this summer.

IndyCar recently closed the request period for free tickets to the two-day event scheduled for August 22 and 23. The 1.7-mile track will run along Pennsylvania Avenue and race by monuments such as the U.S. Capitol, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and National Gallery of Art. According to RACER's Marshall Pruett, Penske Entertainment president Bud Denker claimed that IndyCar was inundated with ticket requests.

"The ticket request process ended last Sunday at midnight; it went for nine days, from Friday till Sunday, and there were 288,000 ticket requests," Denker said. "If we’d left it open five more days, we'd be up to Indy 500 numbers. Now we’re going back to my office to start putting the filtration process into place in terms of who gets the tickets, because we can't accommodate 280,000 people. Even if we divide that by 140,000 people a day, we just can't process that many people happily through magnetometers."

Denker said half of the people given free tickets will witness the Freedom 250 from inside the track. The other half will watch from outside the circuit. “We call it the Stars & Stripes. Outside is called Stars, inside is called Stripes. It's on our website that way, and we're comfortable with 50,000 a day, inside and outside. So, effectively 100,000 people," Denker said.