Indy 500 Marriage Proposal on the Bricks!

My fiancée, Sheri and I just got engaged on May 29, 2010 and we’ve had so much fun sharing our story with friends, family and everyone else that wants to hear about it!

Back in may, I noticed a customer of ours was tweeting about some contests regarding the Indy 500 and it got me thinking about ways I could propose to her. She is a huge race fan, loves cars and we’ve gone to the Indy 500 and the Brickyard 400 together the past couple of years. I wanted to come up with a unique way to propose to her that incorporated some of her favorite things.

I contacted the Director of Digital Communications at Hare Chevrolet, the customer using our software to create online forms for the contests, and asked if I could get involved in one of their events to propose to my girlfriend. Keep in mind I had never spoken to this customer and emailed him out of the blue. He responded in minutes and was immediately on board. Receiving the go ahead from the owners, he secured an invite for their Corvette owners-only event where we’d get to go by police escort to the track, gave me a Corvette to drive for the weekend and helped get permission for me to propose on the bricks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. We had to contact both General Motors, who was sponsoring the event, and IMS officials in order to get clearance to get out of the car and step onto the track.

I had to have a cover story for all of this so I called Sheri one day at work and told her a client of ours at Formstack gave my boss tickets to a Corvette event, but he could not make it. I also wrote an email explaining the event and had my boss send it to me so it would look like it came from him. It mentioned that I would need to take the Flip camera to record some video so I could write a customer spotlight post for our blog and put up a video of it. Really I just wanted to be able to record everything without it being suspicious.

Sheri was under the impression that this was all for work and did not have the slightest clue what was going on. She was just incredibly excited about getting to go to the event and did not even know we would get to drive a Corvette. I told her we would be driving my Jeep and doubted they would let us on the track with it. I said we would most likely just meet everyone at the track for the dinner. She was still incredibly enthusiastic about it all and talked about it to her coworkers and friends during the two weeks leading up to the event.

Throughout the whole planning process, I really came to appreciate the tight-knit community we have here in Indianapolis. I sent a few emails to complete strangers hoping for a response, and within hours I was connected to executives at the IMS, Chevrolet, Andretti Green Racing, and even Sheri’s favorite driver, Tony Kanaan. It was amazing how excited everyone was to help out and go out of their way for someone they had never met.

I was even fortunate enough to be approached by the Vice President of Marketing at Chevrolet, Jim Campbell, during the event where he congratulated us and mentioned how they were talking about my proposal idea at dinner the night before. He was genuinely interested to hear about how it all happened and it was exciting to get to share it with him. Rather than give you the long story like I did with him, (as if this wasn’t long enough already!), you can see it for yourself in the video. Spoiler alert – she said yes!

Twitter: @austin_dillman