SPEEDWAY, Ind. (WISH) — The Indianapolis Motor Speedway made some upgrades to the track ahead of this year’s Indianapolis 500.

IMS says it’s always trying to improve the fan experience. In recent years, it noticed people were waiting in concessions lines far too long.

To combat that, a new grab-and-go concession stand will let fans get drinks, chips, and a bunch of hot food items before using one of several self-checkout scanners to pay.

Doug Boles, president of IMS, said Monday, “The idea here is the staples you want. Make it easy, get in and get on out, and make it back to watching the race.”

Boles and his team have been putting the final touches on the track before throngs of people arrive for the May 26 race. The track opens Tuesday for the first Indy 500 practice sessions after the Indy Grand Prix happened Saturday.

“In terms of energy for the 500, the ticket sales are stronger than they’ve ever been really. We are little over 16,000 units up where we were last year,” Boles said.

The possibility of sellout in the grandstands is a possibility. If those are gone, only general admission tickets will be left.

Those fans will fill up the viewing mounds in Turn 4, which also saw an upgrade.

“The problem with these seats is you couldn’t really keep track of the racing because you didn’t have a videoboard, other than that big videoboard over there, which was really designed for the people on the outside of the racetrack,” Boles said.

That’s changed this year with the addition of 12 new videoboards in the infield of Turn 4. “It really adds value to the cheapest seat in the house,” Boles said.

Turn 4 got another upgrade this year, too, this one on the outside of the grandstands. It’s also a new videoboard.

“On our big days, it’s either our busiest, or second-busiest gate, and so that means everybody that was sitting here when they come out to the concessions or just want to get out of the grandstands, they didn’t have a way to continue to keep up, so this was just replicating what we did at Turn 1,” Boles said.

Whether it’s a grab-and-go convenience store or the videoboards, IMS thinks these types of improvements are test runs. If they get good feedback from fans, the improvements will be seen elsewhere at the track in the future.