The first races at the Speedway, held on August 19, 1909, drew up to 20,000 spectators paying a dollar apiece. Louis Schwitzer won the inaugural event, a two-lap, five-mile sprint. But the crushed stone and tar surface disintegrated under racing conditions. Louis Chevrolet was blinded when a stone smashed his goggles mid-race. Driver William Bourque and his mechanic Harry Halcomb died when their car flipped end-over-end on the front stretch. Fisher responded by paving the entire oval with 3.2 million bricks, a massive undertaking that gave the track its enduring nickname: The Brickyard. The first Indianapolis 500 followed in 1911, and the race quickly became the most important event in American motorsport. By 1925, Pete DePaolo was averaging 100 mph for the full 500 miles. Speed had found its cathedral.

By the end of World War II, the Speedway was crumbling. Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace who had owned the track since 1927, was ready to sell, and most buyers wanted to bulldoze the facility for housing. Three-time 500 winner Wilbur Shaw returned to the track in November 1944 for a tire test and was appalled by its deterioration. Shaw spent months searching for a buyer who would keep the Speedway alive as a public racing venue. He found Tony Hulman, a businessman from Terre Haute who purchased the track on November 14, 1945, for a reported $750,000. Hulman poured resources into renovation, and the Speedway reopened for the 1946 race. The Hulman-George family would steward the track for three generations before selling to Roger Penske's corporation in 2019.

For 74 years, from 1919 to 1993, the Indianapolis 500 was the only sanctioned race at the Speedway. That changed when Tony George brought NASCAR's Brickyard 400 to the oval in 1994, drawing the largest crowd and largest purse in NASCAR history. A Formula One road course was added in 2000, hosting the United States Grand Prix through 2007, though the 2005 race became one of the most infamous in motorsport when Michelin's tire failures left only six cars on the grid. MotoGP arrived from 2008 to 2015. Today the Speedway hosts events from May through October, including IndyCar, NASCAR, IMSA sports cars, vintage racing, and the Intercontinental GT Challenge. The grounds also hold the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, opened in 1956, and the Brickyard Crossing golf course, where four of eighteen holes wind through the infield.

In 2004, Indianapolis Star journalist Curt Cavin counted every permanent seat: 257,325, a world record for any sporting venue. That number has since been reduced to an estimated 235,000, but with infield spectators, race-day attendance regularly exceeds 300,000. The track was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987, the only such site affiliated with automotive racing history. The Speedway's 2.5-mile rectangular oval, with its gentle 9-degree banking and four identical turns, has remained essentially unchanged since 1909. In the infield, the Pagoda tower houses race control and media operations. Outside the walls, the town of Speedway, Indiana, incorporated itself around the track in 1926. Even the street address carries weight: locals simply call it 16th and Georgetown.

The Speedway's history is a roster of racing immortals. A. J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr., Rick Mears, and Helio Castroneves are the only four-time winners of the 500. The 1989 race produced one of the greatest finishes: Emerson Fittipaldi dueled Al Unser Jr. for the final ten laps until Unser crashed in the third turn of the penultimate lap after wheel-to-wheel contact. In 2005, Danica Patrick became the first woman to lead the race. Takuma Sato broke through in 2017 as the first Japanese and first Asian winner. The track has gone more than two decades without a fatality, thanks to SAFER barriers and safer car designs. From Fisher's farmland to Penske's modern era, the Brickyard endures as the place where speed, ambition, and tradition meet on 2.5 miles of Indiana asphalt, anchored by one irreplaceable yard of century-old bricks.