Yahoo Autos Thermal Club building up for IndyCar all-star race
The Thermal Club is about to ramp up ticket sales for March’s $1 Million Challenge all-star race and has invested in new infrastructure items to support the return of the NTT IndyCar Series.
The expansive road course in Thermal, Calif., which is lined by private homes built by its members, is set to welcome its first public event across March 22-24 for which the track has made 2000 tickets priced at $2000 apiece available for fans. According to Thermal GM Nick Rhoades, the circuit has been selling some tickets and will start ramping up its promotions to try and move the rest in the coming days.
“They’re going fairly steady,” Rhoades told RACER. “You always wish they will go faster, sell out immediately, and be done. But we really haven’t started advertising yet, so I think there’s a lot of people that still don’t realize where they need to go to get tickets. The advertising stuff should start here pretty soon and finalizing some sponsorship and things like that. We should have a lot of stuff coming out in the next week or so.”
IndyCar made its first appearance at Thermal in February for preseason testing ahead of the series’ season opener in March at St. Petersburg. The timing of the March 22-24 stop at Thermal comes after St. Petersburg and offers both testing and the all-star race that will be televised live on NBC.
Rhoades says the property owners took notes on some of the improvements that might be made last February and have taken action to make the sophomore event more convenient for the series.
“We’re about 100 days away and we’re already running fiber and things like that, trying to get ahead of things, doing some minor changes to the track — just some minor upgrades, trying to add a bunch of stuff in to make it a lot easier for IndyCar when they do show up so there’s a lot less work for them to do,” he said.
“We’re installing the EM corner marshal lighting system ahead of time, so we bought our own lighting system to match IndyCar’s for the digital flags. We’re gonna pre-install that kind of stuff, and then we’re running fiber for all of that so the IndyCar timing guys don’t have to show up and run miles of fiber when they arrive.”
