Racing & Motor: The early years

Motor, Mar 2003 by Milot, Claude

When William Randolph Hearst started MOTOR Magazine in 1903, he no doubt knew instinctively that the automobile was about to change the world. The first few issues read like a newsletter for Hearst's rich friends; after all, they were the only ones who could afford those fabulous new toys back then. But you can sense the excitement in those first pages about the real possibilities of the automobile industry.

We at MOTOR are proud to mark the 100th anniversary of our magazine, and are excited about celebrating this milestone, by looking back on those 100 years. A complete retrospective, of course, is impossible; the history of the automobile industry is so varied and extensive we could not possibly do it justice in these few pages. Instead, we chose to bring you one small piece of automotive history that MOTOR recorded rather well, we think. And that is the early history of automobile racing in America.

One of the most extraordinary accounts of the development of the American automobile industry appeared in the March 1909 issue of MOTOR. It was written by Charles E. Duryea, the man generally considered to have built America's first practical motorized carriage in 1893 and who thereby arguably launched America's automobile industry. Unfortunately, Duryea's first car proved to be underpowered, so he began work on a new vehicle with a two-cylinder, four-cycle engine. It was completed in the spring of 1895 and immediately "went into daily service," as he put it in that March 1909 issue.

Duryea credited four contemporary pioneers for the development of the automobile: Elwood Haynes of Kokomo, Indiana, who produced a vehicle in 1893 that was the first to use aluminum parts; George Selden, whose "road locomotive" wasn't completed until 1905; Henry Ford, whose first four-wheel, self-propelled auto was completed in 1893; and Alexander Winton, who built his first car in 1895 and began setting speed records in 1897.

The First Races in America

Charles Duryea won the first automobile race ever run in America, on Thanksgiving Day, 1895. There were six contestants. Duryea won with an average speed of 7.5 mph, not so bad considering the course was covered with as much as 12 to 18 inches of snow and ice, according to Duryea. He won several other races as the century neared its close.

For the next several years, all the important races were run in Europe, almost all of them in France. For this reason, France can legitimately claim to have been the country where motor car racing began.

Back in the United States, road racing had not yet taken hold. Other than the occasional one-on-one match, like the one between Henry Ford and Alexander Winton in October 1901, which was won by Ford, racing was confined to attempts at speed records, either on flat surfaces or on hill climbs.

The very first speed record is said to have been set in 1897 by Winton, who covered a mile in his little runabout in 1 minute, 47 seconds. But it wasn't until 1901 that records were taken seriously. On August 30, 1901, at Newport, Rhode Island, millionaire sportsman William K. Vanderbilt, Jr. drove his Mercedes five miles in about 7% minutes, and ten miles in 15 minutes. But in less than three months, on November 16 that same year, Henri Fournier drove his Mors one mile in 51.8 seconds at the speed trials on Coney Island Boulevard in Brooklyn, New York. This feat created a national sensation, and signaled that racing had come of age.

Records continued to be set. On January 13, 1904, on the ice of Lake St. Clair near Detroit, the Ford "999" covered one mile in an incredible 39.4 seconds. As unbelievable as that record was, it wouldn't even last to the end of the month. Records galore were about to be set in Florida on a long stretch of hard sand called Ormond Beach.

The First Race Tracks

Interestingly, horses made the first automobile speed races possible. In its inaugural issue in July 1903, MOTOR reports that the "millionaire colony" gathered in Saratoga for the summer was proposing the Saratoga racetrack as ideal for an auto race meeting. And cities that had speedways meant for horses, like New York's Harlem River Driveway, were petitioned to close them to equine traffic one day a week in favor of automobiles.

Horse tracks were located mostly near metropolitan centers and could draw large numbers of spectators to the grandstands. Since these spectators paid to get in, they provided some of the funds necessary to finance the sport, a formula that works well to this day.

Horse tracks weren't perfect, however. The two big problems were dust and danger to spectators. Track owners would be forced to modify their tracks to correct these problems, or to build new tracks specifically for auto racing.

Two modified horse tracks that figured prominently in auto racing's early days were Empire City in Yonkers, New York, and Brighton Beach near Coney Island in Brooklyn. To keep the dust down, the dirt surface was covered with a layer of oil before every race. And to cut down on the possibility of skidding out of control, the turns were banked-- a change that made it possible for speed records to be broken at just about every meet.