Indy 500

[oroto]

Since I've never been to the Indy 500 races before, I'm not sure about what the visibility is like there. I'm going in 2009. I understand it's a big event...although for some reason many people don't care as much about it on this forum...and it may be sort of hard to see everything if I'm sitting in one of the cheaper locations and don't exactly have eagle eyes?

Should I consider viewing glasses or binoculars? Here are some websites I've looked at for that kind of purchase:

www.binoculars.com
www.binocularspro.com

I was thinking that maybe some people who routinely attend sporting events that it's good to have optics for know what kinds of binoculars / whatever are best? Any recommendations? Is it true that I would need them?

[drdisque]

It does depend where you sit but even the worst seats there aren't really too far from the track. The bad seats are only "bad" because they're in more boring sections of the track or are too low to see very far.

Unlike most ovals, IMS is so big that you can't see all the way around it. The best seats are in the upper rows or "penthouse" of turns 4 and 1 as they can see all of the front straight, the turn in front of them, the next turn up the short chute (the two shorter sections of the rectangles are called the north and south short chutes) from them and can also see pit road. These seats are typically very hard to get unless you buy them from a broker, in which case they are typically very expensive. The best seats for the money in my opinion are the North Vista, South Vista, Grandstand G, and Grandstand J. The best seats are in Grandstand E, but as I said, it's very hard to get in there.

I do not recommend sitting in the Tower Terrace or Pit Road Terrace unless you really like seeing pitstop action. The Pit Road Terrace in particular has a lousy view of the track and you can't really see any of the corners.

I bring binoculars to the track but I rarely use them.