More than two dozen IndyCar drivers will race 147 laps around Washington, D.C.'s National Mall this weekend for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, celebrating the country's milestone birthday.
The two-day event includes practices, qualifiers and warmups, culminating in the 250-mile race on Sunday afternoon. Cars will fly — at speeds up to 180 mph — around a 1.7-mile irregularly-shaped track smack-dab on the National Mall.
Along the route, they will zoom past cultural institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the National Archives Building and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space and Hirshhorn Museums.
And that has raised questions about the safety of the art and artifacts inside. Namely: Could they be damaged by vibrations from the cars whizzing by?
The National Gallery of Art, whose sculpture garden is along the course, has boarded up some of its outdoor works.
Spokesperson Chris Abanavas told NPR over email that it "conducted an extensive vibration study and based on the results we have implemented a set of measures to ensure the safety of our staff, visitors, collection, and facilities during the race."
Neither the National Archives and Records Administration nor the Smithsonian Institution answered NPR's questions about preparations or concerns. Race organizers — the White House and IndyCar, which is owned by Penske Entertainment Corp. — say they are taking proper precautions and don't anticipate any damage.
"The White House and Penske have followed all appropriate protocols and been in close coordination with all relevant agencies to ensure this is also the safest and most secure race for all visitors to enjoy," White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told NPR over email.
IndyCar officials point to the success of other races in sensitive areas, like one in Detroit's historic Belle Isle Park, and another that goes directly past the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. Beth Bell, chief marketing officer of The Dalí Museum, told NPR that the museum — which was designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane — has "remained safe and secure throughout the event's history."
"With this excellent track record and the thorough preparation we have done for this event, working closely with all the appropriate local and federal agencies, we do not anticipate any impact on the structures surrounding the circuit as a result of the race," IndyCar spokesperson Alex Damron told NPR in a statement.
But critics say the National Mall is different: Speed limits are generally around 25 mph. A race like this has never been held there before (other than centuries-old horse races, a favorite presidential pastime in the country's early days). And organizers had less than a year to plan the event.
"For several hours of racing cars, we might be risking … the access to these extraordinary works for future generations," art historian Mary Okin told NPR.
Okin is the assistant director at Living New Deal, an organization devoted to documenting New Deal-era art and public works. She is a longtime advocate for one landmark along the route: the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, formerly known as the Social Security Administration Building. It's a protected historic site both for its architecture and its murals inside.
Okin is concerned that buildings and artifacts could be damaged by vibrations associated with course construction and the race itself, plus worst-case scenarios like fires and flying debris, as she wrote in a late-July letter to the National Park Service (which issued permits for the event).
More broadly, Okin says that the planning and permitting process did not adequately explore that question or prepare for those possibilities.
"The fact that there is an insistence that it has to go by and around major collections of art — whether or not those collections get damaged — is absolutely ridiculous and foolish and indicates a lack of care about the things that belong to the American people," Okin said.
Neither the White House, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation, nor the National Park Service answered NPR's questions about safety and process concerns.
Okin sees the race as part of a bigger pattern of the Trump administration disregarding historic preservation in its pursuit of anniversary celebrations and construction projects. At the same time, it is working to permanently weaken protections for historic sites around the country.
"If this is how the federal government treats something this significant, what's to stop it from treating the rest of our cultural heritage nationally as poorly?" she asked.
The race was planned in less than a year
Even organizers agree that the turnaround time was less than ideal.
"Instead of having two-and-a-half years to plan this thing, I've had seven months," said Bud Denker, chair of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix. "So it's been a tough one."
Denker, who is also president of the Penske Corporation (the parent company of Penske Entertainment), told NPR that he and Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks had the idea for a race in D.C. over a post-board-meeting beer last year.
They couldn't get congressional support to build a course around the Capitol building, so President Trump authorized one around the National Mall through an executive order in late January. Denker has been living in D.C. on and off ever since.
"I love the city, I love the vibe, I love the history, I love the people I've met," he said. "And as a result of that, we are going to stage the most incredible celebration that we've seen this summer."
Beyond building the course, pit lane and viewing structures, preparations include standing up fences, closing off roads and temporarily welding shut hundreds of manhole covers on the route. Denker says Penske is covering all the costs except security, which comes from both district and federal funds.
Denker said he's been in close contact with the Smithsonian, National Gallery of Art and National Archives along the way and provided them with studies about things like noise, vibration levels and peak particle velocity.
IndyCars only weigh 1,750 pounds, Decker added, which is lighter than passenger vehicles or buses.
"There's no vibration," he said. "Our decibel levels are lower than those of a siren that goes up and down these streets, that I've heard a lot of over the last few months."
Okin has repeatedly asked the National Park Service to commit to installing vibration monitors ahead of the race. Neither she nor NPR got a response to that question.
Vibration monitors would provide some objectivity, said Leila Sauvage, a paper conservator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam who specializes in the impacts of vibration on art.
She said measuring and documenting the exact impact of the race on collections can help museums define — and communicate — their vibration threshold for future events. And it would be a valuable addition to the vast documentation of each object's life.
"For our colleagues in 200 years, I think they will appreciate if we have a report that says, 'Ok, there was this race and this was the level,' because maybe in 200 years the objects will show some damage … I think they will value that we would have measured this in 2026," she said.
How to measure — and mitigate — the risks
The impact of vibrations — whether from nearby traffic, construction or concerts — has become an increasingly hot topic in the museum world.
"The objects don't care about whether it's a race or it's … singing next to it. You just feel vibrations," said Sauvage, who is also completing a PhD in aerospace engineering.
Sauvage said the main risk of vibration is cumulative damage: a crack that deepens over time, a piece of a sculpture coming loose and falling off. That's where risk assessments and monitoring come into play.
Conservators know which works are especially vulnerable — from years of tracking their every detail — and which areas of the museum are closest to the vibration source (in this case, the racecars). Sauvage said the easiest, and generally most effective, solution is to move at-risk art to a different part of the building.
"I'm sure they're [keeping] an eye on them," she said of the D.C. museums. "And it could be that because of the way the collection [hangs] in the museum, maybe it's OK."
Okin's letter to the National Park Service asked about mitigation measures and suggested some specifics: installing temporary sound barriers (such as weatherproof curtains and freestanding panels), having a conservator monitor the Cohen building's murals during the race and "an explicit commitment to repair or stabilize any resultant adverse effects."
The National Park Service's emailed response to Okin this week, reviewed by NPR, does not directly engage with those suggestions. It says its permit review process did not identify the Cohen building as part of the "area of potential effects," and ultimately found there would be no adverse effect. NPS referred NPR's additional questions to event organizers.
Okin told NPR that the General Services Administration, which manages the Cohen building (unlike the museums along the racetrack), told her it would do post-race assessments, but did not specify what those would entail.
When asked for comment, the General Services Administration told NPR in a statement that "GSA reviewed the proposed route for potential impact to our nearby assets and identified no areas of concern."
Sauvage suspects that museum conservators will look closely after Sunday's race to see if any works were impacted. The biggest red flag, she said, would be if the buildings themselves show damage, because "that is the protective layer."
Okin reiterates her hope that there won't be any damage.
"But if there is, I hope that the government is honest with us about that and takes the appropriate steps necessary to address it and to do right by the American people," she said.
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