Amid tight security, all 11 Formula One race teams were in town on Wednesday, two days before the start of practice for the series' best-attended race. On Sunday, some 200,000 fans will find the extra time it takes to file through the gates is part of the price for their safety.

"There will be more uniformed officers at each gate. Everybody carrying a cooler or a backpack or a bag is subject to inspection," Speedway spokesman Fred Nation said. "Consequently, we ask that people arrive earlier."

The gates will open at 6 a.m., seven hours before the start of the 73-lap race that took Michael Schumacher just more than 96 minutes to win last year. Two support races, the Porsche Pirelli Supercup and the Ferrari Challenge, will be run before the U.S. Grand Prix.

"I think it's going to be a very emotional race for everybody. I'm very happy to go back there. ... I don't really see a problem," said Juan Pablo Montoya, the 2000 Indianapolis 500 winner who captured his first Formula One victory two weeks ago in Italy.

Before the Italian GP, Schumacher questioned whether that race or the race in Indianapolis should be run because of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. An Italian newspaper reported the Ferrari team would allow Schumacher to skip the U.S. Grand Prix if he wished, but Schumacher later said he never had any intention of missing the Indianapolis race.

"But of course, like anybody else, I wanted to wait and see if something might happen following the attacks in the U.S. But, as I said, in principle, I always wanted to go there and race," he told the British Press Association.

"I very much hope that we can provide a little moral support and maybe some distraction to the Americans. We want to give them some courage and help them to overcome their despair," said Schumacher, who already has clinched his fourth Formula One series title.

Security at the track, meanwhile, probably will be the tightest since the Indy 500 in 1991, when then-Vice President Dan Quayle and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf War, visited the Speedway.

"There will be a lot of additional security measures in place, building on the 30-year plan we've had," Nation said. "But details of those, we're not talking about.