Indianapolis 500 History & Traditions

[IndyFan]

I want to introduce myself to the message board, and see if there are many people on this board who have similar interests as me, mainly in the history and traditions of the Indianapolis 500. I'm also interested in Grand Prix history and am going to check out the links at this website. I think this is a real great website and I hope that you might be interested in talking with me.

I really admire Donald Davidson's work with the Indianapolis 500, and I've been thinking about putting together some documentation and possibly a book on this subject.

Thanks,

Jeff

[quintin cloud]

I would say start off at the official indy 500 page at the following url:
http://www.indy500.com

Quintin

[IndyFan]

Yep, I have searched and found alot of helfpul stuff. I really like Johnson's Indy 500 page. The only thing I am really curious about still but have not found yet are things like, what the oldest auto races in the world are and where the Indianapolis 500 fits in with that, and also some of the unique things to the Indianapolis 500 are compared to other famous races or any other auto races period. I figured if anybody would know about these types of things, this would be the place. Looking forward to hearing your comments..

Jeff

[Vitesse]

The oldest race with a more or less continuous history is the French GP (1906 to date). The Pau GP dates back to 1901, but there wasn't another race until 1933. It could also be argued that the American Grand Prize (1908-16) and the American Grand Prix (1958 to date) are the same event. So, depending on your point of view, the 500 is either second, third or fourth oldest!

Other events with long histories dating from before 1914 were the Targa Florio (1906-77) and the Tourist Trophy (1905-94)

[Rob29]

Not the oldest but the most often held.Also the only one held every year since 1946.

[IndyFan]

Ok, I had seen recently where it was called the oldest auto race in the world, but I also remembered hearing about the Grand Prix races mentioned above. To me, it is to auto racing what the Kentucky Derby is to horse racing. Everytime I am there, I think of all those bricks that are underneath the asphalt, and the history being written right before my eyes.

The most unique thing to Indianpolis that I have read about is the qualifications process, which is how I think it should be done in all auto racing instead of some of the things series do today just to draw television ratings. I know all about the other traditions as well, and I get chills seeing them happen. One of the most awesome things I can pick out at Indy is when the cars line up and do their parade laps before the race. It gives me goosebumps to watch it.

[fines]

INDY RULES!!!!

There's no other event like that...

[mr-indy77]

The first year that I attended was 1977, hence my "handle".
I was 12 years old and my dad had been going since 1962. We used to stay in a tent in a backyard about 6 blocks from the turn 1. My dad and grampa(his first race was in the 30's) took me out on the track before the race and when I looked down that front straight I stood there in awe. Nothing compares to that the first time you see it, you can not describe to someone who has not been there. I watched most of the race from the turn 1 "snake pit" with my grampa. I even got to see Evel Kneival(he was sponsoring Gary B. that year with Aggy). The last part of the race I sat with my dad in Grandstand C(where we have had the same seats for over 25 years.) I have always been a Foyt fan and when Gordy broke down I was really excited. One of the really neat things that happened was the night before a van pulled up Hulman Drive, and some drunk guy said who is your favorite driver, I said A.J. and he gave me a Gilmore/Foyt baseball hat. I still have it!
I will relay more stories if anybody is interested.

[zealot]

The more stories the better, Mr. Indy. Keep 'em comin'.

[mr-indy77]

I am currently building a 1/43 scale model of the 1956 Novi's run by Paul Russo (car made the race) #29 and Eddie Russo (did not qualify) #31. I am trying to find color pics of the #31 car. The Speedway Museum can not help. I know the car was yellow but I need to know the color of the numbers. Help!

[strad]

The years 1896 to 1903 saw a seccesion of scandalously dangerous road races, usually from Paris to another city, each more ambitious, more ruthlessly realistic, more callously indifferent to consequences than the last. France was not big enough for the visionaries of that age: after racing to Marseilles, they raced to Amsterdam to Berlin to Vienna, and finally with deadly finality they set out for Madrid.
These were great races, the hazards horrific, the drivers heroic, the cars gigantic. These spider wheeled chariots were usually big, often heavy, invariably ill balanced. Men were still learning how to make cars go well, having barely discovered how to make them go at all; but men were learning very fast - perhaps because of the spur of competition - and by the beginning of the twentieth century standards had risen considerably.
Racing was soon to be very different. It was the race of death which did it, the infamous ill-fated Paris - Madrid disaster of 1903. It drew 100,000 Parisians to see the cars start (one by one, against the clock). From Verisailles, and they thronged the roads all the way to the end of the first stage at Bordeaux. They thronged unchecked, undisciplined, untutored in the dangers that approached, unable to conceive the speeds that the cars would reach. They filled the narrow round-crowned roads, parting only reluctantly at the last moment to let a speeding car pass; but they were not always quick enough. Stray children, stray dogs, oxen, the clouds of dust raised by the cars, all added to the drivers' confusion; competitors and spectators alike were killed, their mangled remains sometimes discovered only after the blinding dust-clouds had settled. Gabriel, the fastest man to get through to Bordeaux, admitted that he sometimes had to steer his huge Mors by the poplar-tops that alone were visible to show the way the road went.
The race was stopped. All motor racing might have been stopped; but the sport had already been diversifying, and it was the newer kinds of competitions which saved it. The sprints and hillclimbs at Nice were examples of events growing in popularity; the first European hillclimb, a club outing in 1899, was a full-blooded speed event by 1902. The Alps were there for storming, and in Britain there were hillside bridle paths which offered a shorter but subtler challenge: one such, begun at Shelsley Walsh in 1905, retains the longest continusous history of all sporting events. Americans from 1916 would rise to the 14,000 ft. challenge of Pike's Peak, approached by 12 1/2 miles of dirt road winding into the clouds.
Climbing crude paths was a test of reliablity in the early days; speed itself hardly mattered. Britian's Thousand Miles Trial of 1900 was meant to prove the practicality of the touring car, as was the original Tour de France; by 1905 the car's practicality could be taken for granted, and trials became speed-oriented handicaps for 'touring' cars. The Herkomer and Prinz Heinrich events, staged in the Austrian Alps first with the participation and secondly with the patronage of His Royal Highness, shared with the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy the early development of the sports car; combined with contemporary efforts to organize a winter convergence upon Monte Carlo, they also nurtured what would become rallying.
It was all very deliberate, very earnest, very well intentioned; but what the people wanted was, like the ancient Romans, circuses. There was no substitute for the real pure racing car, for sheer undiluted speed. If the world's fastest cars could no longer be raced from city to city, let them be raced in some sort of closed circuit where the public could be better controlled; perhaps the cars would then prove even faster.
There had been since 1900 some ill-supported races for a cup put up by James Gordon Bennett, the sporting and prodigiously wealthy scion of the New York Herald. He had introduced the idea of national teams, each country fielding three cars made entirely within its boundaries and painted in national colours. Whatever country won the first race would play host to the second, and so on - until in 1902 England won, and that created a problem. The common-law freedom of the King's highways could not be suspended for any motor race; so the event was packed off to Ireland, where a course could be found by looping a few roads together. The 1903 Gordon Bennett event, in the same season as the last of the open-road epics, was the first closed-circuit motor race.
What the people wanted to see, once the novelty of actually seeing cars had worn off, was real fast intelligible mass - start races. A proper racing track should provide it. Brooklands, first and most famous, was built in Britain where racing on the roads was prohibited. A masterpiece of high speed earthmoving and concreting, it was readied by massed muscles in 1907. Men and horses made it, horseymen governed it; the very fastest cars could sustain top speed all around its bankings, the very dullest spectators could understand it. The Europeans who considered that cars were meant to be driven on real roads at whatever speeds those roads might allow, depised it; the Americans, across whose vast land the intricacies of road-racing seemed irrelevant, took a hint from it and built a more compact Indianapolis. By 1911 they too had settled on 500 miles as a proper length for what has survived as the oldest original race.

W/excerpts from "With Flying Colours a Pictorial History of Motorsport" excellent book with unbelieveable photos

[strad]

for what has survived as the oldest original race.

[everett brown]

I to love the history of the Indy 500. i had two close friends involved in Indy car racing in the 70's, Rick Muther and Mike Mosley, two great racers as well as great mates that pushed me thru the tough times in FF and FA as those were my rookie yrs moving up from enduro karts. Muther was a easy going take it as it comes guy, while Mosley was a fierce intense racer that was amazed at his own luck, driving for some top teams including Gurney's AAR Indy team. God Bless them both. I miss them with all my heart.

[everett brown]

Overweight and bald, who couled never forget Jerry Grant and his 200 MPH lap at Ontario speedway in so. calif. Offy powered no less! How cool. A great era of racing.