To World War II
In the early part of the 20th century, Indiana was the center of the young American automobile industry. Development efforts were hampered by the lack of paved public roads, so in 1906 Carl Fisher, a former bicycle racer turned auto dealer, proposed building a track that could be used by manufacturers for testing new designs, with an occasional race to bring in some revenue.
Originally, Fisher thought of French Lick as the location. Nothing came of his idea until February 1909, when Fisher and three partners, Jim Allison, Frank Wheeler and Arthur Newby, formed the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corporation and bought 328 acres of farmland as a site for the track.
The 2½-mile rectangular track, the first of its kind in the world, opened on August 19 with a 300-mile race that drew 12,000 spectators. After 100 miles of racing, the macadam surface had been obliterated. Two drivers, two mechanics and six spectators were killed. The race was stopped after only 235 miles had been completed.
After being resurfaced with 3.2 million paving bricks--hence the famous "Brickyard" nickname--the speedway reopened in 1910. Several automobile and motorcycle races were staged that year. Then Fisher made a momentous decision: the speedway would be devoted to just one race a year, but it would be a really big race, 200 laps, 500 miles, for a really big prize. That prize was $20,000 for the first Indy 500, held on Memorial Day of 1911. Engine displacement was limited to 600 cubic inches and a qualifying speed of 75 miles an hour was set. The forty cars that qualified started the race in a grid of eight rows with five cars per row.
The first running ended in controversy. Ralph Mulford was given the checkered flag first but took three extra laps just to make sure he'd completed 500 miles. When he finished, Ray Harrounwas being presented with the winner's trophy and Mulford's protests were ignored.
After winning the national championship in 1910, Harroun had temporarily retired from racing to become chief engineer for Nordyke and Marmon, an Indianapolis automobile manufacturer. He designed a car called the Marmon Wasp specifically for the race and came out of retirement to drive it. The Wasp was the first car to have a rear-view mirror and it was the only single-seater in the 1911 field. The other 39 cars all carried mechanics, whose chief job was to let the driver know what was happening behind him.
Harroun's innovation was short-lived. From 1912 through 1936, all entries at Indy were required to have a riding mechanic as well as a driver, a rule that remained in effect until 1937.
The American Automobile Association, which was the sport's sanctioning body, in 1912 established a formula for the size of a starting field, based on the length of the track. The underlying idea was that there should be 400 feet of track for each car, which meant that there could be 33 starters at Indy. However, the speedway imposed its own limit of 30 starters from 1912 through 1914 and didn't go to the maximum 33 until 1915.
World War I limited the 1916 race to 300 miles and forced cancellation of the next two. When the race resumed in 1917, winner Howdy Wilcox, driving a Peugeot, became the first driver to average more than 100 miles an hour for a lap.
After American cars won the first two Indy 500 races, there was a brief period of domination by European cars. They won seven straight races, led by Peugeot, which had three of the wins. Then the Miller-Duesenberg rivalry took over and, after 1923, European entries were rare. Duesenberg is still famous, though the last autos bearing that name were manufactured in 1937. The marque burst onto the world scene in 1921, when Jimmy Murphy drove a "Doozy" to victory in the French Grand Prix, the only time an American car has won that race. Ironically, Murphy then put a Miller engine in the Duesenberg chassis and won the 1922 Indy 500 with the hybrid.
Harry Miller designed and built the first genuine racing engines and cars. After Tommy Milton won the 1921 national driving championship with a Miller 183 (named for its 183-cubic-inch engine), the Miller became the engine of choice for most top drivers. Milton won at Indy in 1921 with a French Frontenac, but switched to a Miller in 1923, when he became the first driver to win the race twice.
Duesenberg operated very much on the European model, racing cars with company-supported teams. Miller operated on the free enterprise principle: he sold cars or engines to anyone who wanted them. From 1924 through 1927, Duesenberg won three of four Indy 500s, while a Miller car won the other. But 1927 was the last year of racing for Duesenberg. The company had been purchased in bankruptcy court by E. L. Cord, who was more interested in selling passenger cars.
1927 was also a bad year for Carl Fisher, who saw a hurricane wipe out his major investments in Miami Beach, Florida. To raise cash, Fisher sold the speedway for $700,000 to a group led by Eddie Rickenbacker, a former race driver (he finished 10th at Indy in 1925) who had become America's top aviation ace by shooting down 26 German planes during World War I.
With Duesenberg out of the running, Miller took over during Rickenbacker's tenure. From 1928 through 1938, Miller cars won four times at Indy and Miller engines powered the winners in six of the other seven races. Louis Meyer became the first three-time winner, driving an eight-cylinder Miller car in 1928 and 1933 and taking his third victory in 1936 with a Stevens chassis powered by a four-cylinder Miller engine. Meyer inadvertently started an Indy tradition after his third victory. He was photographed taking a swig of his favorite beverage, buttermilk. The photo caught the eye of someone at the Milk Foundation (now the American Dairy Association), who saw the publicity possibilites. The following year, the foundation began presenting a bottle of milk to the winner in Victory Lane immediately after the race, and the tradition continues to this day.
Purchasing the speedway undoubtedly seemed like a very good financial move in 1927, but the Great Depression arrived less than three years later. In 1929, it cost about $25,000 to field a racing car. That expense was beyond the reach of most drivers and promoters in 1930, so Indy adopted a new formula, allowing 366-cubic-inch engines and lowering the qualifying speed from 90 to 85 mph. Sometimes called the "Junkyard Formula," the move lowered the price to $5,000 and resulted in the largest Indy field ever - 38 starters instead of the usual 33. The formula remained in effect throughout the 1930s.
The depression hit Harry Miller's business hard. He went bankrupt in 1933 and his company assets were auctioned off. His long-time machinist, Fred Offenhauser, bought many of the tools, drawings, and patent rights and began producing his own version of the Miller engine. Generally known as the "Offy," the engine powered three Indy winners from 1935 through 1941 and became dominant after World War II, winning 18 consecutive races from 1947 through 1964.
Because of wear and tear on the paving stones, asphalt was laid over the track's turns in 1937. At that time, Indy was one of all only two tracks still operating in the country (the other was at Syracuse). But World War II shut down all auto racing and, when the war ended, the entire Indy plant was in bad shape.
Since World War II
At the urging of former driver Wilbur Shaw, Anton "Tony" Hulman bought the track for $750,000 in 1945. He spent much more getting it back into shape for the 1946 race, and he invested several million more in ensuing years. After the 1956 race, an eight-story Control Tower. thousands of new infield seats, a tunnel under the backstretch, and a new pit area, walled off from the main stretch, were all added.
Hulman was an excellent promoter who developed the Indy 500 Festival in 1957 as a major event, inspired in part by the festivities surrounding the Kentucky Derby. Later, 10,400 seats replaced old wooden grandstands. In 1961, A double-decked paddock grandstand was built in 1961, the Speedway Motel opened in 1963, track suites were added in 1973, and the Speedway Hall of Fame and Museum opened in 1976. After the 1985 race, the old Gasoline Alley garages were replaced by new garages housed inconcrete bunkers.
In the post-war period, a distinctive type of car, usually known as the Indy roadster, was developed. Powered by a four-cylinder Offenhauser engine burning methanol rather than gasoline, the roadster had most of its weight on the left, since it never had to turn right. The transmission had only two speeds because of the car's relatively light weight (less than 2,000 pounds) and the engine's high torque.
The top designer-builder of roadsters was Frank Kurtis. From 1952 through 1957, there were at least 22 Kurtis-built cars in the Indy starting lineup each year, and all six races were won by Kurtis designs. In 1953, his cars were the top 13 finishers. After Kurtis came A. J. Watson, whose cars won at Indy six times in the nine-year stretch from 1956 through 1964, which was the last year of victory for a front-engine roadster.
English Grand Prix driver Jack Brabham, who had won two straight world driving championships, showed up at Indy in 1961 with a rear-engined Cooper-Climax. The car looked small and fragile compared to the roadsters and it didn't have the power to beat them on the straightaways. But it went through the turns much faster and, to the surprise of many observers, it lasted the full 500 miles, placing ninth. No one realized it at the time, but it was the beginning of a revolution.
In 1962 Dan Gurney drove a rear-engined car built by Mickey Thompson, but it had been hastily prepared and didn't last the race. Gurney was a rookie at Indy that year but, as a veteran Formula 1 driver, he knew engine and chassis builders. He persuaded British designer Colin Chapman of Lotus that building a winning Indy car would be well worth the effort, and he hooked Chapman up with the Ford Motor Company, which was interested in getting back into racing.
While Ford was producing a 256-cubic-inch engine designed to run on gasoline, Chapman was redesigning a Formula 1 chassis with a longer wheelbase, offset to the left to run at Indy. Three of the Lotus-Fords were prepared, one as a backup. The other two, driven by Gurney and Jim Clark (who won the Formula One world driving championship that year), qualified with ease. Clark finished a close second to Parnelli Jones, driving a Watson/Offy roadster. The finish was marred by controversy over an oil leak from Jones' car that caused several spinouts and, many observers felt, should have had him black-flagged of the course.
The rear-engine victory had been delayed, but only temporarily. The revolution was in full swing. In the fall of 1963, veteran racer Eddie Sachs wrote in a magazine article that Tony Hulman's annual command would soon have to be changed to "Gentlemen, start your rear engines."
In 1964, 12 of the 33 starters were rear-engine cars, several of them built by Watson. A. J. Foyt won the race in a Watson roadster while Rodger Ward finished second in a Watson rear-engine model. Clark was racing well in a Lotus Ford until forced out by tire problems.
The following year, there were 27 rear-engine cars in Indy's starting grid. Clark set qualifying records of 159.377 mph for one lap and 158.828 mph for four laps and led the race almost the entire distance, beating Jones by a full two laps. The revolution was complete. One of its interesting side effects was that it at blurred the line between Formula 1 and Indy racing.
Emerson Fittipaldi of Brazil, who became famous as a Formula One racer, won twice at Indy and Mario Andretti, after years of success as an Indy Car driver, won the Formula One driver's championship in 1978.
The Indy-Formula 1 crossover became even more pronounced after Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) took over sanctioning most major races from the U. S. Auto Club (USAC) in 1979. USAC had run only closed-circuit races, but CART began adding road races to its schedule. In 1991, the CART season opened with a race in Australia, which bothered Tony Hulman George, the president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway. George publicly complained that CART was taking Indy car racing away from its roots.
Tony Hulman had died in 1977, but the speedway remained in the family. In 1990, Hulman's grandson and namesake, Tony Hulman George, had become president of the operation. The son of Elmer George, who raced at Indy three times with little success, George was himself a former driver in USAC and Sports Car Club of America competition.
George was willing to break new ground at Indy while also clinging to some old traditions. Early in his tenure, he made some major changes and improvements, including the addition of a new control tower and new grandstands on the track's north side, reconstruction of the pit lane, and revamping the Brickyard Crossing golf course. In 1992, he allowed the International Race of Champions (IROC) to run at Indy for the first time. The same year, he announced that a NASCAR race, the Brickyard 400, would be inaugurated in 1994.
The last straw for George may have come in 1993, when Emerson Fittipaldi flouted an Indy tradition by drinking orange juice instead of milk after winning the race. (Fittipaldi had a vested interest; he owned a huge orange plantation in his native Brazil.)
In any event, George announced in March of 1994 that he was forming a new racing body, the Indy Racing League. The chief goals of the IRL were to get racing back onto the traditional, closed-circuit tracks and to create a standard chassis-engine combination that would be relatively inexpensive, allowing younger drivers and smaller teams to compete.
The IRL began operating with a three-race series in 1996; 25 of the starting slots at the Indy 500, the third race in the series, were reserved for the top 25 IRL drivers after the first two races. CART responded by scheduling its own race at the Michigan International Raceway on the same day as Indy. The only top CART driver who showed up in Indianapolis was Arie Luyendyk. The race was won by a virtual unknown, Buddy Lazier.
After four years of warfare between the two bodies, CART cleared two weeks in its 2000 schedule to allow its teams to compete at Indy. The following year, Roger Penske decided to enter his formidable teams at Indianapolis for the first time since 1995. Penske was rewarded with first- and second-place finishes, as CART drivers taking the top five spots and Tony Stewart, a NASCAR driver racing for a CART team, finishing sixth.
Also in 2000, the irrepressible George revived the United States Grand Prix, a Formula 1 race, which had last been run in 1991 at Phoenix. A road course was constructed in the infield of the 2.5-mile track and the first revived USGP was run on Sept. 24, 2000. It continues as one of the three major annual races at Indy.
CART and IRL talked from time to time about resolving their differences and possibly even merging. Some sort of merger seemed inevitable after CART filed for bankruptcy in December of 2003. However, CART's assets were bought by investors who created a new operation called Champ Car and any merger was bought off indefinitely.