With rain in the forecast for Friday’s two-hour final practice session for the Indianapolis 500, IndyCar president Jay Frye says the series is monitoring the situation and will be ready to run whenever Mother Nature relents.

“We’re optimistic we’ll get Carb Day in on Friday, but if you looked at the forecast right now, it doesn’t look so good for the scheduled time from 11 to 1,” Frye told RACER. “But by later in the afternoon, hopefully we can get some running in. Really, if we can’t do the whole two hours — which is something we’ve been doing with a longer session recently — and we can just get an hour in by the end of the day, we would call it a day and I think we’d be in good shape.”

Carb Day has been the traditional outing for teams and drivers to perform installation checks on cars that have been completely disassembled following qualifying and reassembled with fresh engines and componentry for the Indy 500. Although the session is also used to make final chassis tuning adjustments prior to the race, Frye says IndyCar is committed to giving its teams enough time to complete safety checks whenever the track will be ready for final practice.

“Remember a few years ago we had the longest red flag in motorsports history when we got rained out at Texas,” Frye said of the race that started in June of 2016 and resumed at the end of August. “We showed back up at Texas months later, went out and had a 10-minute practice session, and then put on a great race. So I’m not so much worried about not having enough time to practice, if that’s what we end up dealing with.

“We would look at Saturday’s schedule if we have to — which is packed already — or who knows, depending on what the weather gives us, but they’ll get some time to check their cars and we really hope to get it all in on Friday and go have a great Indy 500 on Sunday.”