Nobody except Roger Penske looked at the National Mall and thought, “This needs a racetrack.” On August 22 and 23, IndyCars will hit 200 mph on the streets of Washington, D.C., as part of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, a race all about and around America’s 250th anniversary. The 1.66-mile circuit runs straight through the heart of the capital, the Capitol building in the background, history on all sides. That last part is where things get complicated.

The Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Constitution. The Wright Brothers’ plane. The Spirit of St. Louis. Every single one of them sits inside buildings that line this race route. And right now, the people responsible for keeping those things intact are quietly panicking.

Museums near the route are reported, “bracing for potential damage from vibrations,” with reports warning that “the vibrations caused by two days of Indy cars tearing past them at 200-plus miles per hour won’t exactly be good for them.”

The National Gallery of Art has already run its own vibration study and started moving sensitive pieces away from the walls that face the track. The National Archives, which holds the original Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are directly on the route. So does the Air and Space Museum, where the Wright Flyer and Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis hang from the ceiling on wires.

One block away, the National Museum of American History has the original Star-Spangled Banner and the Gunboat Philadelphia, America’s oldest surviving warship, which is already dealing with active wood warping and structural splitting before a single car has turned a wheel.

Here is the physics of it. IndyCar engines at full throttle reach close to 140 decibels. That is what standing next to a jet engine feels like. Conservation studies show damage to historic materials can start at 80 decibels. This race will run at nearly double that, for two straight days.

Under normal federal rules, ground vibrations near historic structures during construction are capped at 0.20 inches per second. There is no such limit on this race. That is not an oversight. It is a direct result of how the event got approved in the first place.

The Museums Were Left to Figure It Out Themselves, Courtesy of Roger Penske

Roger Penske took the idea straight to Trump. The route that D.C. officials had originally signed off on was toned down, kept away from the major landmarks. Trump, however, wanted the Capitol in the shot. An executive order went out instructing the National Park Service and federal land managers to issue full construction permits, with local zoning boards cut out of the conversation entirely.

Getting a race approved on the National Mall would normally mean years of acoustic mapping, seismic testing, and public comment periods. None of that happened here. Tying the event to the Semiquincentennial gave the administration a legal hook to classify it as a national heritage celebration, and that classification cleared the regulatory runway in weeks instead of years.

Roger Penske came reinforced with political backing,  impossible to miss. On July 13, he shipped an actual IndyCar chassis to the White House driveway. Drivers Alex Palou, Felix Rosenqvist, and David Malukas stood on the lawn in full gear while a Team Penske crew knocked out a tire change in 6.5 seconds on live television. It was not a publicity stunt so much as a statement. Nobody was stopping this race.

The consequence of all that speed was that the museums got no federal protection. No agency was required to study what 140 decibels does to a 240-year-old document or a hand-stitched flag. So the institutions did it themselves.

The National Gallery paid for its own emergency simulations. Smithsonian curators spent their own time applying conservation wax to artifacts and shifting paintings off perimeter walls. Sara Bronin, who ran the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation under Biden, was straightforward,

“You wouldn’t want to see some of these things topple over because of the rumblings and the vibrations.”

The Ben Shahn frescoes in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, also on the route, are already cracked. A GSA preservation contractor said in March the wall substrate is “slowly and systematically undermining the aggregate within the plaster.” That was before the race. Two days of sustained jet-engine noise come next.

The whole event is to celebrate what these buildings hold. Whether they come out of it in one piece is a question nobody with the power to stop it bothered to ask.