The History of the Speedway Era

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The History of the Speedway Era


Fred E. Moskovics



The Speedway Era was launched with the opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909; construction had begun the previous year. The speedway concept was a simple and logical adaptation of the typical, well-built horse racing plant to the needs of the automobile. Others were quick to pick up Carl Fisher's idea. In the spring of 1909 Asa G. Chandler and Ed Durant began the construction of a two-mile oval at Atlanta, which they surfaced with local gravel. Simultaneously, out on the West Coast, Fred E. Moskovics hatched an idea which was to rock the racing world.

The Prince Speedway Construction Co.



This pioneer member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (and later president of Stutz) had a lifelong passion for speed. When Moskovics was a young student at the Armour Institute in Chicago and at the Polytechnic in Zurich his favourite sport was bicycle racing. In the States and in Europe he came to know many of the celebrities of this sport, including the British World's Champion, Jack Prince. When Prince's athletic years were behind him he came to the US and established a thriving business as the specialist in the design and construction of wooden velodromes for bicycle racing; it became the Prince Speedway Construction Co. Anyone who has witnessed a roller derby on a banked wooden track has a good idea of what these much more steeply banked 0.2 km and 0.4 km ovals and saucers were like.

The Remy Electric Co.



Then Prince began building board tracks up to 0.8 km in circumference for the new sport of motorcycle racing. Before 1910 speeds as high as 150 km/h were being reached on these tracks. Moskovics' employer, the Remy Electric Co., assigned him to the Los Angeles area early in 1910. There he promptly made contact with the racing fraternity, including well-to-do former competition driver Frank A. Garbutt. These men became good friends and when Fisher's Indianapolis Speedway showed promise of financial success they decided to try the idea in Southern California. But what sort of track should it be? "A huge wooden saucer!" Moskovics announced, stunning his about-to-be partner. "Nothing can be as cheap, as fast or as safe. And I know just the man who can do the job for us," he added, thinking of Prince.

Playa del Rey



The world's first 1.6 km board track was built at Playa del Rey, a beach town just a few kilometres from Los Angeles and connected with it then by fast electric trains. Its first race was held on April 8, 1910, and was a smashing success in every way. It was an astonishing structure, the likes of which never had been seen in history. It was 15 metres wide and was banked one metre for each three of its width - a very steeply curved, perfectly circular bowl. Garbutt had the idea of lining its upper edge with steel guardrails. They cost money but they saved lives and they may have been the inspiration for what later became general practice on public roads. The board track itself, including its huge, fine, covered grandstands, cost only $75,000 to build at the time.

Jack Prince



Then the partners invested a further $10,000 in a generating plant for lighting their wooden motor-drome for night racing. Working with Jack Prince, Moskovics did much of the designing on the project. It was he who specified that the lower guardrail should be 44 cm above the track surface, to snub the hubs of cars whose tyres were of that radius. A second rail was placed 30 cm higher to arrest any tendencies of out-of-control cars to overturn. Then, between the track and the turf infield, the designers laid a 10 metre wide strip of packed, crushed granite. Thus, it was almost impossible for a car to run off the outer edge of the track and, if it ran off the inner edge, it would have a hard time getting into trouble. The infield fence was located 38 m from the track edge for the safety of infield spectators.

The Los Angeles Motordrome



During its first week of operation the new plant drew as many as 15,000 spectators in a day - fantastic in view of Los Angeles' cow-town size at that time. The Los Angeles Motordrome as it was called, gripped the attention of the whole American racing world and it was hailed as the world's safest as well as fastest race course. Atlanta, having a smaller and less prosperous population to draw upon, was a failure, and so was its gravel surface. Indianapolis went through the agonies of the damned learning that the best tar and crushed rock pavement of the period went to pieces immediately under the punishment of racing.

3,200,000 Paving Bricks



In spite of staggering financial obstacles Fisher resurfaced his speedway with 3,200,000 paving bricks, weathered all storms and created his immortal institution. But out in the American Wild West was that utterly wild board speedway, where absolute world records tumbled at every meeting until the day in 1913 when it burned to the ground with, according to Damon Runyon, "a great saving of life". But it had shown the way that was to govern and shape American racing for almost two decades, and decades of almost unbelieveable glory they were. While the ashes were cooling at Playa del Rey, Jack Prince was one of the world's busiest men, dashing from city to city and coast to coast, spreading the new gospel among promoters.

Maywood Speedway, Chicago



Jack Prince found not just one taker for his ideas, but several, so that 1915 ushered in a nation-wide circuit of superb new board tracks. Maywood Speedway at Chicago was a 3.2 kilometre oval, as were those at Tacoma and Sheepshead Bay. Of the total of 24 board tracks that existed between 1910 and 1931, these were the largest built and, had they survived, still would rank among the wonders of the world. Also in 1915 a 2 kilometre board speedway was opened at Omaha and a 1.6 kilometre saucer at Des Moines. These extremely fast tracks consisted of two straights joined by 180-degree curves whose bankings were as steep as 45 degrees. The present Monza banking reaches only 38 degrees.

Dario Resta's Peugeot



The board-speedway era began in earnest on June 26, 1915 with the inaugural event at Chicago - an 800 kilometre race. Indianapolis had drawn about 60,000 spectators three weeks before, and the winning average of Ralph de Palma's Mercedes had been 89.84 mph. Chicago drew about 80,000 and the winning average of Dario Resta's Peugeot was 97.58 mph, a fabulous world record on many counts. Journalists were at a loss for words to describe what had taken place. Speedway racing - meaning board speedways - did much more than merely provide the world for a decade and a half with some of the most fantastic spectacles in history, automotive or otherwise.

Development of the Straight-8



It was the board tracks, with their almost boundless possibilities for speed, which brought about the remarkably swift evolution of the American thoroughbred race car and which astonished the Europeans who tried to repeat their overseas conquests after World War 1. It was the boards, which permitted full-throttle driving at all times, that dictated the quick adoption and brilliant development of the straight-8 engine, of supercharging, streamlining, and front-wheel drive. It was the boards that spurred brilliant progress in tyre technology and in the development of fuels, alloys, bearings and clutches. It was a period during which racing improved the breed in nearly every sense, and to the benefit of the motoring public.

The Indianapolis 500



The Indianapolis "500" never lost its major status, thanks to a management which made it a point always to offer the world's biggest purse, thereby making secure its rank as the world's most important racing event. However, any car that could win on the boards could win on the much slower bricks, providing its chassis was strong enough to take the pounding. Indianapolis was one event per year but during most of this epoch all the other Championship contests were fought out on the board speedways and always under the stress of much higher speeds. Hence their fundamental role in shaping the breed.

Art Pillsbury



Art Pillsbury, who died in September, 1966, knew them intimately well. He built the best ones. He said in an interview before his passing ... "Jack Prince was building all the board tracks and I was interested in racing. I was a civil engineer for the Rodeo Land and Water Co., which owned all of that big agricultural tract known as Beverly Hills. William Danziger, one of the company's directors, was also interested in racing. One day he came to me and said, 'We're going to have the world's finest board track, and you're going to build it. Prince was the only man who had built board speedways up to that time, so I naturally turned to him as a consultant. I made a deal with him:

"One, he would get a flat fee of $5000 for his services, including access to the designs of all his previous automotive tracks. Two, he would get credit as the designer of the Beverly Hills Speedway. Three, I would be free to try to engineer the new track since, as all of us knew, all the previous ones had been designed by guess and by God and according to the whims of the individual track owners. Prince agreed, accepted $500 for his travel expenses to come west and then collected his five grand. Then we began to get down to business and it became clear that there were no figures, no designs, and that Prince was quite innocent of any engineering knowledge. He was very helpful, of course, but that first track that I designed and built in 1919 was the first one built with any serious attention paid to engineering principles.

"As vertical supports for the floor I used 2 x 12s on four-foot centres. Prince had gone to using 2x3 planks on edge for his floors but I went back to Playa del Rey's 2 x 4s and to straight, vertical-grain lumber to minimise splintering. One of the notorious defects of the earlier banked ovals had been the difficulty of getting on and off the curves. The transitions were abrupt, tricky and dangerous. So I used a Searles Spiral Easement Curve. This is a formula widely used in railway engineering whereby a train is led into a central curve through a series of small curves of ever-decreasing radius. The formula includes the elevation of the outer rail to a calculated degree and the purpose of all this is to achieve a smooth ride around curves at speed.

"There was no limit to the speed for which those tracks could be built. If you want one to handle 200 mph it's just a question of how steep you throw it up in the air. There was no steering. That first track was a private venture of Danziger's and 10 other men, including Louis B. Mayer and Cliff Durant. They bought 200 acres from the Rodeo Company, in the very heart of what became the city of Beverly Hills. I put the whole 1%-mile (2 kilometre) track up in five days! I finished the whole plant in five weeks. It was beautiful and we spared no expense. We had roofed grandstands with large boxes, each holding 10 hand-built chairs that were contoured for real comfort. Everything was deluxe and so was our clientele, which included the whole film colony and about everyone else of importance within reasonable travelling distance of Los Angeles.

"The attendance was tremendous and the plant made nothing but money for five years, when it was sold because it couldn't afford to stay there. Those 200 acres had been bought for $1000 each. They were sold for exactly 10 times that. Of course we wanted another track and a group of us bought a property in Culver City between the MGM Studios and what finally became Jefferson Boulevard. Beverly was sold in 1924 and to hold our AAA franchise, we had to be in operation by Thanksgiving Day. We had to pay $4000 each for those 160 acres and we couldn't raise the necessary capital in time. When we opened we were over a quarter of a million in debt.

"Then, we thought we'd save money and we left the roof off the grandstand. We made the grandstand seats out of just flat planks. We cheapened the plant and we didn't get the same clientele that came to Beverly. Well, when we bought this property we were promised that Jefferson Boulevard would be in service before we opened. It never was and from the first race we were five to six hours getting the people off the premises. We could get 100,000 people in there but we couldn't get them out because there was only one exit. That gave us a black eye from our opening day and in four years the bank that had our loan foreclosed on us.

"So that's why Culver failed. But what happened to all the other board tracks? For one thing, in those days we knew of no preservative that we could use to treat the lumber to prolong its life that did not become slippery under friction. All we knew of was creosote. We tried everything, but nothing worked. So, at the end of about four or five years, depending upon climatic conditions, the life of the 2 x 4s, although they were laid on edge, sapped out. They became brittle and the floors started going to pieces. No floor was good for more than 7 1/2 years.

"The cost of the floor could have been overcome in any case. The real and final failure was that, as the cars became more perfect, any real racing ceased on the boards. The fastest car never was headed. There was no driving involved; there were just so many squirrels going around in a cage and positions changed only when there was some mechanical failure. Racing was lost and that, in the end, was probably the deciding factor."

Eddie Miller Sr.



Building the boards was one thing, driving them something else. The late Eddie Miller Sr., drove them for Duesenberg. He recalled: "Sheepshead Bay! What a beautiful thing it was, and two miles around! If we had it today we could lap it at an easy 180, maybe 200. We ran all those terribly fast tracks with wonderful reliability. I loved that kind of racing until the tracks began falling apart. You'd show up for a race, a few holes would show up in the floor during practice, but the carpenters would patch them up and things would look pretty good. Then, when you had maybe 15 cars starting a 250-mile race, holes would start developing under the pounding of the machines.

"They would have carpenters working away under the track. When a hole started as just a three- or four-inch crack there was nothing to do about it until it got bigger. Sometimes a crack would develop as much as a foot wide. Then you'd see a carpenter's head stick up like a gopher. He'd nail something on the side and duck his head down, then come back up and nail another one on. But he never could get the hole plugged. And kids who sneaked into the tracks used to watch the races from these holes, and between the kids and the carpenters, all those human heads bobbing up and down didn't exactly make for the most serene of driving conditions. But they made more than one driver swear off drink for a day or two!

"I remember times at Uniontown when there would be as many as 10 of these openings around the track, all from a foot to a foot and a half wide and up to about 40 feet long. All the way around you had either to dodge those things or to straddle them. That was hell at 110 mph and more and a lot of boys got caught and stacked up. You used to get hit with some terrific blocks and knots of wood. We all came in with pieces of wood bigger than kitchen matches driven into our faces and foreheads. They'd go in, hit the bone and spread out. Then you had to remove them, of course.

"At those speeds in those days we had our problems with tyres. The casings were remarkably good but we all lived in terror of throwing treads. At 100 mph or so, half a tread would come flinging off, throwing the wheel violently out of balance. Well, you'd go hopping along hoping that the rest of the tread would fly off, particularly if you didn't have too far to go to finish the race ..."
Beverley Hills Speedway USA
Everything at Beverley Hills was done on a spare-no-expense scale. The grandstand was huge and contained individually contoured, trimmed seats in boxes. The track was erected in just five days.
Aerial View of Beverley Hills Speedway
An Aerial view of the Beverley Hills board speedway track layout. This track was the first scientifically built track, and was opened in 1919.
Kansas City Speedway USA
Kansas City speedway track under construction. As construction methods were perfected, so speeds increased - however the biggest problem remained the durability of the wood.
Kansas City Speedway Race
Kansas City speedway during a race - the track managers employed carpenters to do maintenance work on tracks like this from below - even during the race!
Wooden Speedway Circuit Maintenance
Race track maintenance on the early speedway circuits was the work of carpenters. Eventually the tracks would deteriorate to the point that holes would form big enough for young boys to poke their heads through, and sometimes during a race.
Early Speedway Champions
The cars that held all the important speed and lap records in the early days were all Millers.
Duesenberg Speedway Team
This photo is circa 1919, and shows the Duesenberg team - bare headed Augie Duesenberg, Eddie Miller on his left, Tommy Milton below, Jimmy Millton below. Look closely at the track to see the debris the drivers had to cope with.

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