Overheard at Long Beach Friday

Randy Bernard hasn't seen the Indianapolis 500 in person, but he knows the impact it has on promoting the IndyCar Series — and he wants more of it.

Hinting at possible "major" changes in the open-wheel circuit, the new Indy Racing League CEO said on Friday an announcement will be made in the next two weeks to create excitement outside of the IRL's premier event.

"You have the Indianapolis 500, then you have a bunch of vanilla events," Bernard said at the Grand Prix of Long Beach. "Not to take away from this great event here, but it's not a national event, which we need to have two or three majors that stand apart and make them big, big events. I think what we're working on might help with that."

When IndyCar was run by USAC they had the triple crown 500-mile at Indy, Pocono and Ontario. Only the Indianapolis 500 is still around. When CART took over IndyCar they tried the triple crown races at Indy, Michigan and Fontana.

The IRL could take two or three events outside of Indy, make them 500 miles or offer big purses and dub them majors, but the more likely scenario would be to create a playoff-type system similar to NASCAR.

"It's not the end of all means," Bernard said of the changes. "I don't want to create too much excitement in something that's going to change the series. I think we want to set ourselves up for the future on how we can determine and build stars as well as major events."

He also told AR1.com that a race on the Indy road course would not be out of the question and that certainly would be a very big event, second only to the Indy 500.