INDIANAPOLIS – There’s an electric buzz in the air around Indianapolis Motor Speedway entering race week for the Brickyard 400, but perhaps the most-anticipated event of the five-day stretch of on-track action isn’t going to be run on the famed 2.5-mile oval at all.

The Driven2SaveLives BC39 presented by NOS Energy Drink – the richest and largest USAC P1 Insurance National Midget Series event of the season – will take place Sept. 5-6 on the new quarter-mile dirt track inside turn three at IMS, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more eager for the short-track spectacle to get underway than track president Doug Boles.

Boles, the head man for IMS who has overseen virtually all of the planning and preparation for the BC39, has also been one of its biggest advocates since the day it was first announced, which was only just over two months ago.

In that short span, a blank canvas within the Speedway’s third turn has been transformed into a palace of speed that will welcome more than a hundred of midget racing’s fiercest competitors this week.

“It’s hard to believe that seven or eight weeks ago, there was nothing here,” Boles told SPEED SPORT in an interview last week. “It’s certainly been a hustle. Just trying to figure out the layout … how big we could make it so that it’s competitive, but at the same time isn’t disrupting a lot of our other operations … that was certainly something we had to look at and figure out. We also wanted to make sure it fit what USAC envisioned in relation to this event, and certainly what the speedway wanted it to be.

“It’s been a lot of work over the last couple of months, but certainly after getting to see Sarah (Fisher) run it last Wednesday, it just feels really good and there’s a lot of pride in knowing that we’re close. The efforts of so many people have made this track and this race a reality.”

While the idea might have seemed foreign to some people when it was first announced, Boles has been quick to remind everyone that the idea of a dirt track within the speedway was an idea more than two years in the making

“The conversations about (doing) this probably started before Tony Stewart retired in 2016,” Boles admitted. “We thought it would be fun to reconnect to (the) short-track fans and racers, and then when Tony was retiring he said, ‘I don’t want people to make a big deal out of this,’ we decided to build a dirt track and let Tony play to what he’s passionate about.

“Really, for us internally and even for USAC, this was an experiment to see if you could even get something in turn three that would work. Once that happened, we had several more conversations and then those discussions got really deep last fall,” continued Boles. “It took a lot of massaging and work, both on USAC’s part and our part, to get people in our organization to understand what we were trying to do.”

Once that understanding was reached between all sides, plans were drawn up and potential dates began being tossed about as well.

“We didn’t make a final decision until … right before the Indy 500 this year,” noted Boles. “If you think about even the scheduling of (Indiana) Sprint Week, there was a TBA to kick things off in there, and that was held in the event that we could build something and get going to start this year, but we’re pretty happy that it’s one big midget race as part of Brickyard 400 weekend.”

As soon as the finalized details for the BC39 were released, including a $15,000 winner’s purse and a special format unique to the event, interest came flooding in almost instantly.

From the time entries opened to the deadline for blanks to be submitted on Aug. 29, the car count ballooned until it set a USAC record for the most national midgets to be pre-entered for a single event in the history of the sanctioning body.

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