Indianapolis Motor Speedway has a cool new scoring pylon

2014 has been eventful for the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Two months ago, it was the host of a competitive Indianapolis 500. A couple of weeks before that, it held a new Grand Prix race on a newly modified road course. Then, the old scoring pylon, installed in 1994, was removed after 20 years of service, and has quickly been replaced with a new full-color dynamic LED one.

The old pylon was all black and only used electronic displays for lap counting, speeds and driver numbers. It showed positions 1 through 33 (the number of cars in the Indy 500) constantly, and had two additional electronic displays at the bottom that continuously switched between positions 34 and 43 during the NASCAR Brickyard 400 race, whose inaugural running was also in 1994. The new pylon is fully electronic on all four sides. Like the old one, it has room to display up to 33 spots at once, but only shows the top 10 constantly, and cycles between positions 11-33 and 34-43 in NASCAR competition. The new pylon can also expand to two lines per driver to show distances behind the leader and lap times.

In addition to the new scoring display system, the new pylon has many graphical improvements. It can show the exact logos of each car number during a race, qualifying and practice in single or double-line mode, although it sometimes just shows the numbers of each driver in plain white font. The pylon is also capable of displaying animations and can display special graphics during a flag change, such as yellow or checkered. One of the first things the new pylon displayed upon installation was a simple graphic with the text "INDIANAPOLIS" going vertically down each side.

The speedway is now working on installing digital video boards with the same LED capabilities along the track, which should be ready for next year's Indianapolis 500. There has certainly been no hesitation to modernize this more than 100-year-old speedway, and there is a lot of buzz about the new scoring pylon heading toward the Brickyard 400 on Sunday.