INDIANAPOLIS — NASCAR’s big, bold Xfinity Series experiment worked. Officials fitted their mid-series cars with a big rear spoiler, threw in a restrictor plate, added air ducts, and voila: For the first time in years, there was competitive, unpredictable, fun racing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Saturday evening’s Lilly Diabetes 250 was the most tightly-contested Xfinity Series race ever held at this 2.5-mile layout. It included 16 lead changes, eight different leaders and the victor — 19-year-old William Byron — won by the closest margin ever (0.108 second).

By way of comparison, last year’s race had only two lead changes, two different leaders and Kyle Busch won by a whopping 2.126 seconds. In other words, Saturday was a vast improvement in competition and entertainment.

“Overall, I’m certainly pleased with what we saw on the race track. It definitely passed the eye test,” said NASCAR vice president of competition Steve O’Donnell. “We had realistic expectations. We never thought this would be Daytona or Talladega. The first objective was to close that gap from first to second, and we certainly saw that with the leader not really getting out that far ahead all day long.”

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The big question now, of course, is will these changes be implemented in the Cup Series for next year’s Brickyard 400?

It’s too early to make any bold declarations about a race more than a year in the future, O’Donnell said. NASCAR still needs to do a lot more research and talk with teams and drivers to learn if these changes can and should be made to the Cup Series cars. But O’Donnell was clear that it is within the realm of possibility.

Some drivers might not necessarily be too enthusiastic about making the changes. As a result of the new package, the racing was much slower than it has been — something that irritated a few of the drivers.

Immediately after the race, third-place finisher Joey Logano was hesitant to advocate for the new package. He said he needed more time to digest what had just happened but when asked simply if he liked the type of racing he had just participated in, he replied, “It was OK.”

Kyle Busch, the two-time Brickyard 400 defending champion who also has won this race three times, said over his radio during the race that he “couldn’t pass.”

“All they did was bring the fastest car of the fastest guy and bring him back into everybody’d else’s clutches,” Busch said. “It took the driver mostly out of it because you have a restrictor-plate package now where you can draft up on people. You take the fastest guy, like myself the last few years here who leads all the laps, and you drop him back closer to everybody else, and it’s just more circumstantial. … So that’s kind of frustrating.”

The two-time defending race winner, who finished 12th, isn’t wrong. This type of racing does not reward the fastest cars, but races that did weren’t drawing crowds. Races like the one Saturday just might.

“One of the things (our research and development people) have always advocated for was restricting the engine and that is not usually met with a lot of enthusiasm by drivers,” O’Donnell said. “But I think it’s hard for them to say what they saw today was not positive for the fans.

“We liked what we saw. It played out somewhat how we thought, but there’s still a lot to learn. … I think a great race was the objective, and I think that’s what fans saw today.”

Ayello writes for the Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network.