The first Night Before the 500 was held in 1946 at 16th Street Speedway, a short oval located directly across the street from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The headline event was a doubleheader of AAA-sanctioned midget car racing held the night before the 1946 Indianapolis 500, with wins going to Benny Emerick and Leroy Warriner. The event rapidly grew in popularity, expanding to a tripleheader format from 1948 onward. In the most popular years, the program ran from around 2 p.m. well into the overnight hours, with fans sometimes walking directly from the final feature to take their places in the queue for the Indianapolis 500 the following morning.
In 1951 the races were cancelled. Between 1952 and 1953 the format condensed to a single 100-lap feature. The tripleheader returned in 1954, but after the 1955 season the AAA withdrew from auto racing entirely.
USAC assumed sanctioning in 1956, maintaining the popular tripleheader format at 16th Street Speedway through 1958. After that venue closed, the event moved between several Indiana tracks over the next two decades: Kokomo Speedway hosted it from 1959 to 1961, then the Indianapolis Speedrome for 1962-1964, back to Kokomo from 1965 to 1968, and then Indianapolis Raceway Park from 1969 onward. The Indiana State Fairgrounds oval hosted the event in 1972 and 1973; the 1973 running was plagued by rain and ultimately cancelled.
A notable feat in the USAC era came in 1956, when Shorty Templeman became the first and only driver to sweep all three features of the tripleheader in a single night, earning approximately $1,500 in prize money after having failed to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 that year. Beginning in 1974 the Indy 500 was permanently moved to Sunday, meaning the Night Before the 500 settled permanently on Saturday night.
In 1980, upgraded lighting at Indianapolis Raceway Park made it the permanent home of the event. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the event attracted drivers who would go on to prominent careers in NASCAR and IndyCar, including Ken Schrader, Jeff Gordon, Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne, and Jason Leffler.
From 2010, the Road to Indy USF2000 and Pro Mazda series joined as support events.
In 2015, following USAC's cessation of paved midget car sanctioning, the headline event switched from midget cars to the USAC Silver Crown Series, and the race was briefly rebranded the Day Before the 500 and moved to a Saturday afternoon slot. The change proved short-lived. In 2016 the event was renamed the Carb Night Classic, shifted to Friday night, and separated from the Little 500 at Anderson Speedway, which it had long competed with for crowds and competitors. The new Friday night position created a sequence of four consecutive USAC events in Indiana leading to the Indianapolis 500: the Hulman Classic on Wednesday, the Hoosier Hundred on Thursday, the Carb Night Classic on Friday, and the Little 500 on Saturday.
The name refers to Carb Day — the traditional final practice day for the Indianapolis 500, held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on the same Friday afternoon.
In 2018 the event was named in memory of Dave Steele, a former race winner who was killed in a racing accident in 2017.
The Carb Night Classic occupies a distinctive position in American motorsport: a short-track oval race whose prestige derives almost entirely from its proximity to the Indianapolis 500. For nearly eighty years, in various forms and under various names, the event has drawn competitors who were also contesting or preparing for Indy, and spectators who made an evening at a small oval part of their Indianapolis 500 weekend ritual. The event's longevity, its ties to USAC's heritage divisions, and its continuing role in the Memorial Day weekend racing calendar make it one of the more distinctive fixtures in American open-wheel racing's grassroots tradition.