{"id":91515,"date":"2026-07-22T23:09:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T03:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=91515"},"modified":"2026-07-22T23:09:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T03:09:14","slug":"nascar-drivers-kiss-the-bricks-indianapolis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bgodinspired-news\/bgodinspired-sports-news\/nascar-drivers-kiss-the-bricks-indianapolis\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Reason NASCAR Drivers Kiss the Bricks at Indy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>6 Minute, 59 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

Sunday afternoon at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, somebody is going to win the Brickyard 400 \u2014 and the very first thing they do afterward won’t be spraying champagne or waving to the crowd. It’ll be getting down on their knees, in a firesuit, on national television, to kiss the bricks.<\/p>\n

Not the whole track. Just one specific strip: a 36-inch-wide band of the original 1909 brick surface, preserved at the start\/finish line and left exposed while the rest of the 2.5-mile oval was paved over in asphalt decades ago. Everyone in racing calls it the Yard of Bricks. And for nearly thirty years now, it’s been tradition \u2014 Indy 500 winners do it, Brickyard 400 winners do it, sports car winners do it \u2014 kneel down, plant a kiss on 116-year-old clay, stand back up.<\/p>\n

It looks a little strange if you’ve never seen it before. Grown adults, some of the fastest and most competitive people alive, treating a strip of brick like it’s sacred ground. So why do they do it?<\/p>\n

The Yard of Bricks: Indianapolis’s Strangest Tradition<\/h2>\n

Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened in 1909 as a crushed-stone-and-tar track, and it was a disaster \u2014 the surface broke apart almost immediately, and cars crashed. So the owners tore it out and rebuilt the entire oval with 3.2 million paving bricks, laid by hand, packed tight in sand and mortar. It worked. It held. For decades, “The Brickyard” wasn’t a nickname \u2014 it was a literal description of the track’s surface.<\/p>\n

Racing has never fully outrun the danger that first rebuild was meant to solve \u2014 even with modern safety technology, the sport has produced some of the most harrowing crashes in motorsport history<\/a>. But the bricks themselves stayed exactly as they were built, one of the few constants in a sport built on speed and change.<\/p>\n

Asphalt eventually replaced most of the bricks for safety and smoothness, patch by patch, until by 1961 the entire track was paved over \u2014 except for one three-foot strip at the start\/finish line, left exposed on purpose. It’s the same brick a car crossed under in the speedway’s earliest years. It hasn’t moved since.<\/p>\n

Why NASCAR Drivers Kiss the Bricks<\/h2>\n

The kissing tradition itself is younger than the bricks by almost ninety years. In 1996, NASCAR driver Dale Jarrett won the very first Brickyard 400, and his crew chief, Todd Parrott, suggested they get down and kiss the bricks in celebration \u2014 half joke, half tribute to the track’s history. It stuck. Now it’s not written into any rulebook, but it’s expected. It’s part of what winning at Indianapolis means.<\/p>\n

Here’s the part worth sitting with: a trophy is portable. A checkered flag is portable. A winner’s purse is very portable. But the bricks stay exactly where they are, and every driver who wants to honor a win there has to go to them. You can’t take the moment home in your hands \u2014 you have to physically kneel down inside it.<\/p>\n

Psychologists who study memory and ritual point out that humans don’t actually trust memory very much \u2014 not our own, and not each other’s. Stories get retold, details drift, and eventually “I won at Indy” is just a sentence in a record book next to a hundred other sentences. But a physical object \u2014 something you can touch, something that’s still there decades later exactly where it always was \u2014 carries a different kind of weight. It doesn’t ask to be believed. It’s just there. You can go put your hand on it.<\/p>\n

An Old Instinct, Older Than Racing<\/h2>\n

Humans have been doing some version of this for a very long time \u2014 long before anyone paved a speedway. Ancient wisdom is full of moments where people stopped after something enormous happened to them and built something physical to mark it: a pile of stones on a riverbank, a name carved into rock, a monument raised at the exact spot a crossing was made. The Bible itself tells one such story \u2014 a river crossing<\/a> so significant that the people were told to gather stones from the riverbed and stack them into a monument on the bank, specifically so that generations later, a child who’d never seen the crossing could point at the stones and ask what they meant \u2014 and get the whole story in return.<\/p>\n

The instinct was never really about the stones. It was about making sure memory had a place to live, somewhere sturdier than a story that gets a little different every time it’s told.<\/p>\n

That’s the same instinct at Indianapolis. Nobody needs a brick to prove a race happened; the record books already do that. But a body needs a place to kneel. Gratitude, it turns out, wants a location \u2014 a physical spot where you stop, get low, and let something bigger than the achievement itself sink in for a second before the moment moves on. It’s the same pull that draws fans back, year after year, to honor the drivers the sport has lost<\/a> \u2014 some things aren’t meant to just be remembered in passing. They’re meant to be visited.<\/p>\n

What the Bricks Are Really Asking<\/h2>\n

You probably don’t have a Yard of Bricks in your own life. But you likely have something like it, if you look \u2014 a hospital hallway, a kitchen table, a mile marker on a road you drove a thousand times during a hard year. Most people walk past those places without stopping. The ones who don’t \u2014 the ones who pause, even for a second, to acknowledge what happened there \u2014 tend to carry their gratitude further than the ones who just keep moving.<\/p>\n

Sunday, someone is going to win a race and immediately drop to their knees to kiss a piece of 116-year-old clay in front of the whole world. It’ll look a little silly to anyone who doesn’t know the history. But it’s really just an old, good instinct wearing a firesuit: some moments deserve more than a memory. They deserve a place you can go back to.<\/p>\n

A Question Worth Sitting With<\/h2>\n

Is there a “Yard of Bricks” somewhere in your own life \u2014 a specific place tied to a moment you’re genuinely grateful for? What would it take to actually go back and stand in it, instead of just remembering it in passing? Tell us in the comments.<\/strong><\/p>\n