For many fans, plotting and executing a quick route to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indianapolis 500 is as much a tradition as seeing the race itself.

Best time to leave, secret roads, hidden parking spot. Bus, cab, bike, scooter, shuttle, walk?  A lucky few hundred get police escorts. Others, famously, camp overnight.

And then there are high-flyers, like George Szorenyi, who will avoid the traffic entirely, at least the ground traffic. For the third straight year Szorenyi will ride a helicopter into the Brickyard. Flight time: six minutes.

“You're flying overhead and you can see the traffic and you realize how convenient it is,” said Szorenyi, 61, a resident of Orange County, California. “It is quite an experience to get to the race in a different manner.”

Szorenyi’s escort is Sweet Helicopters, which has offered chartered flights to the Brickyard for 10 years. The Fort Wayne-based company provides 66 flights in and out of the track from four different Indianapolis-area locations – Indianapolis International Airport, Executive Airport in Zionsville, Metropolitan Airport in Fishers and the Indianapolis Downtown Heliport.

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Sweet Helicopters Director of Business Development Bob Bailey said all 400 seats of the four and six-seat helicopters sell out each year. They are most popular with corporate executives, sponsors and performers.

“But we also get some hardcore race fans that have gone for several years and want to splurge on a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said.

The flights are $895 per seat before 10 a.m. and $1,095 after. The first departures are at 7:30 a.m. and the last pick-up at the track is 7 p.m.

Bailey said most passengers take the helicopters from downtown, near the hotels in which they stay, and the fewest come from the Indianapolis airport, usually passengers coming into and leaving town the same day.

The flights from the heliport and the Indianapolis International Airport take six minutes; the flights from Fishers and Zionsville last 12.

Szorenyi, who travels for leisure frequently, said he first considered a trip to the Indy 500 about four years ago but friends warned him about the traffic.

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“I wasn’t much of a racing fan and didn’t know too much about it and was curious,” said Szorenyi, who works in industrial microbiology. “But a lot of people were telling me about how I’d spend three hours getting in and out of there in the traffic.”

“Then I had a great idea,” he said. “Maybe there are helicopters.”

Szorenyi will be attending his third race this year, arriving Friday and flying in from the heliport at about 10 a.m. Sunday. “That gives me a little time to party before the race,” said Szorenyi.

He usually grabs a seat in the front of the grandstands across from Pit Row and is now very much a racing fan. He’ll miss next year’s race, instead going to the Formula One Grand Prix in Monaco the same weekend “but I’ll be back the next year,” Szornyi said.

Tina Burks has taken the helicopters for the last three years and is only disappointed she didn’t discover them earlier.

“What a VIP thrill,” she said. “You see all the lines of traffic and you think, ‘Am I really doing this’? You have a golf cart waiting for you to take you to your seats when you get there. We are spoiled rotten. It is so nice.”

Burks worked for years at the speedway, managing the guest suites at the Pagoda, the glass tower that serves as the Brickyard’s nerve center. In that job she got to know Bailey over the phone because he arranged helicopter trips to the track for VIPs.

As an employee, she usually rode in a police escort on race day but when she left in 2016 those escorts got more complicated to arrange, though she was then affiliated with a race team. It was so inconvenient her husband, Keith, stopped going to the race with her after two decades of attending together.

But a few years ago she remembered the VIP helicopters, discovered they were available for the public and called her old work acquaintance, Bailey.

“When I told my hubby I booked a helicopter, he almost choked,” she said “But when I asked if that would get him to go to the race again he said he was all in and hasn't missed a race since.”

Sweet Helicopters also books charters from Fort Wayne to wine tastings, golf courses, weddings, and sporting events in Indiana, Chicago and Michigan.

Bailey said there are still a few seats available for the Indy 500 at the $1,095 rate. They can be booked at https://www.sweethelicopters.com/about-us/book-a-flight/

Call IndyStar reporter John Tuohy at 317-444-6418. Email at john.tuohy@indystar.com and follow on X/Twitter and Facebook.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: For these big spenders, just one way to beat Indy 500 traffic