Monday, May 26, 2008

Record Purse For 2008 Indianapolis 500

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway gave away a record purse of $14.4 million to the 33 drivers in the 2008 running of the Indianapolis 500. This year's purse was $3.8 million higher than the total purse in 2007. It's still not as big as the prize for NASCAR's Daytona 500, which this year had a record purse of $18,689,238, but the Daytona 500 also has ten more drivers than the Indianapolis 500. Winner Scott Dixon takes home a record $2,988,065 in winnings. That compares to Ryan Newman's $1.5 million for winning this year's Daytona 500. No driver in this year's race received less than $270,000. Second-place finisher Vitor Meira collected $1.2 million. Third-place finisher Marco Andretti picked up $782,065 in winnings.

This year's race took 3 hours, 28 minutes to run with an average speed of 143.5 miles per hour. Scott Dixon ran the fastest leading lap of the day at 222.057 mph. Marco Andretti had the fastest lap of the day at 224.037 mph. Scott Dixon's winning margin over Vitor Meira was 1.7498 sec. Ryan Hunter-Reay won the Rookie Of The Year award for his 6th place finish. It will be interesting to see what the television viewership ratings for this year's race are, particularly in comparison to NASCAR's Coca Cola race which ran later in the day. Last year, ABC's coverage of the event increased 40%. The wider viewership of the race was attributed to interest in Danica Patrick's participation in the race.

1 comment:

Sir Hailstone said...

At least Sarah Fisher won enough prize money to cover the bills. Unfortunately she likely doesn't have the funds to fix the car so she'll just have a damaged chassis sitting a shed somewhere to show for her efforts.