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Automobile Racing in 1911 -- Commerical Murder? Quotes from Barney Oldfield

Spectators run for cover as Pullen, driving a Mercer, loses a wheel at 'death curve' during the Vanderbilt Cup Race at Santa Monica.

Barney Oldfield and an airplane

Automobile Racing in 1911 -- Commerical Murder? Quotes from Barney Oldfield

Hi folks -- as I am beginning to get into the history of autoracing, one topic emerges as quite interesting -- the controversy over auto racing as a blood sport. I'll be following through on this stand in the weeks ahead, but wanted to give you a taste of the issues.

On September 16, 1911 a race automobile plowed through a crowd in Syracuse New York and killed ten people. In an article subsequently published in Outlook on September 30, 1911, the author used quotes from racer Barney Oldfield (from an article of his in Popular Science) to make the point that racing takes too many lives.
The following are quotes from Oldfield on auto racing as a blood sport:

"It has taken ten years to prove this…It has been a decade replete with black headlines and black mourning."
"I was never famous until I went through the fence at St. Louis and killed two spectators. Promoters fell over one another to sign me up."
"It is the call of the Roman arena, of the Spanish bull-ring. It is no more a sport than a hanging is a sport. It used to be called "instructive," "developing," useful," but that day is long past.
"In the recent race at Indianapolis, where the crowd's lust was satisfied by a black tangle of shattered men and machines, nineteenths of the entries were made against the desires of the manufacturers."
The simple fact is that automobile racing has ceased to have a business end, and ahs become a mere game, an entertainment in which business has little part."
"No, if automobile racing is to be perpetuated, it must be through the interest of the public. How large is this interest? Immense; but so was the interest in cock-fighting, in bull baiting, in prize-fights, in gladiatorial contests. So it is yet in the Mexican bull-fight, where in the sport's name they kill cattle instead of human beings. All of these have passed or are just passing. Modern humanity will not permit them. The Morbid cry for blood still lives in a few, but the many cry for mercy."
"Speed madness is one thing; blood madness is another."
"The American grows sentimental about killing cattle; the Mexican prefers cattle to human beings. It is merely a matter of taste."
"I never realized my foolishness on any of these occasions until I was in the hospital with doctors standing around and nurses looking serious."
"While the body of Basle still lay beside his machine, women tried to cut off pieces of his clothing as a souvenir…On the day after Basle's death then thousand persons fought for front seats at the track."

W.K. Vanderbilt and the Land Speed Record -- The Early Years

Ormond-Daytona Beach, 1905. W.K. Vanderbilt, A. MacDonald and H. T. Thomas

From G.E.T. Eyston, Fastest on Earth. Los Angeles: Clymer, 1946, pp.173-4.


The Land Speed Record



Date Place Driver Car M.P.H.
18.12.98 Achères Chasseloup-Laubat Jeantaud (electric) 39.24
17.1.99 Achères Jenatzy Jenatzy (electric) 41.42
17.1.99 Achères Chasseloup-Laubat Jeantaud (electric) 43.69
27.1.99 Achères Jenatzy Jeanatzy (electric) 49.92
4.3.99 Achères Chasseloup-Laubat Jeantaud (electric) 57.6
29.4.99 Achères Jeneatzy Jeanatzy (electric) 65.79
9.4.02 Achères C.S. Rolls Mors 63.1
9.4.02 Achères W.K. Vanderbilt Mercedes-Simplex 65.79
13.4.02 Nice Serpollet Serpollet (Steam) 75.06
21.4.02 Ablis W.K. Vanderbilt Mercedes-Simplex 67.78
5.02 Ablis W.K. Vanderbilt Mercedes-Simplex 69.04
7.02 Bruges P. de Caters Mors 75.06
5.8.02 Ablis W.K. Vanderbilt Mors 76.08
5.11.02 Dourdan Fournier Mors 76.60
17.11.02 Dourdan Augières Mors 77.13
7.3.03 Clipstone C.S. Rolls Mors 82.84

Of the early U.S. race drivers, perhaps no one stands out more than William Kissam Vanderbilt II, affectionately known as "Willie K." His activities reflect important themes related to first decade of auto racing, one in which society's upper crust played a dominant role in the story of the automobile in American life.
Born in New York City in 1878 to William Kissam Vanderbilt , he was thus was called Vanderbilt Jr. until the death of his father. Growing up in luxury, raised in Vanderbilt mansions, experiencing European travel at an early age, and sailing around the globe in his father's yachts, Willie K. enrolled at Harvard but left after his first year. Beginning with a ride in a steam car in France at age 10, he was captivated by the automobile. In 1898 Willie purchased a French De Dion-Bouton tricycle, and later other vehicles that he used to speed along to his parents Long Island estate, Idle Hour.
In 1904 Willie K. set a new land speed record at Ormond Beach near Daytona, and later that year he organized the Vanderbilt Cup, the first important American trophy race. The Vanderbilt Cup was America's answer to the Gordon-Bennett Cup races held in Europe, and showcased the competition between the U.S. and European manufacturers. However, European car makers dominated the road race until 1908, when American George Robertson finally took home the honors for the U.S.
Because of crowd control problems and the 1906 death of a spectator, in 1907 Willie K. established a firm that built the Long Island Motor Parkway. His 48-mile toll road not only was used in future competitions, but led to the economic development of Long Island.
Later involved in long-distance sea and air voyages, exploration, and a very messy divorce, the Vanderbilt story involving the automobile ended tragically in 1933 when Willie K.'s son William Kissam III died in an auto accident in South Carolina while traveling back to New York from the family's Florida estate.

The finish of the Vanderbilt Cup, 1906

Eddie Miller remembers the early days of auto racing

Eddie Miller (7 October 1895 – 7 August 1965. Eddie drove in the 1921 Indianapolis 500.
From Borgeson, pp.9-10

I was 20 years old and had landed a job in the test house of the Elcar Company in Elkhart, Indiana. It was the fall of 1915 that I wrote to the Duesenberg brothers, in St. Paul, saying that I'd like to work for them. Fred replied saying that they didn't have any money but that if I happened to be at Elgin, Illinois, for the road race there, he'd be glad to talk with me.
I showed up at Elgin and they let me help watching the wheels in the backstretch. In those days they used to have wheels spotted around the course against the inevitable blowouts. That was my start in racing -- watching a wheel. So I went to St. Paul, worked for Fred and Augie and became a mechanician. That's how you had to start unless you had a lot of money to buy a car.
In those days the cars were all four-bangers with up to 500-cu.in. Displacement. We had no more than 5 to 1 compression ratios but with those huge bores and strokes it took a real man to crank one over.
Pretty good cars, like the Stutzes, would get up to about 105 mph and then start to shake and that was the limit of how fast you could go. Still they were pretty reliable. The Duesies were a bit faster but they were really lacking in some areas, like the brakes. Their brakes were just no damn good. It took a lot of downshifting to second gear to get slowed down and there wasn't anything like a close-ratio gearbox: the spread was about 30%!
We used to think nothing of racing for six and a half hours. The pounding was so bad that you had to wear a corset. At the end of the race you'd be black and blue, unable to breathe, and you would have lost 8 or 9 pounds. To in a race, then, with the wheels and hubs and their weight and tire size and the steering and the weight of those clunkers and the way the springs worked, it took a good man even to ride in the things, just to get hauled around. Experience really meant a great deal and it was rough to be a rookie. Loads of us stacked up in our first races. Lots got killed and lots of others never got beyond the hard-luck stage, just couldn't break the barrier. You either did or didn't.
And you can imagine the life, getting around the country by train? Five days to get from Newark to Los Angeles in wooden coaches going 30 to 40 mph, crawling 3400 miles across the states. Getting anywhere was a terrific job.
And the technology, or lack of it. Who knew anything about spark plug ranges in those days? Nobody. About gasoline? Nobody. You knew that the engine would knock but that was all you did know. You knew it was making a noise but you had no idea of how to get rid of it. Solving it took a long time.
Each oil company blended its primitive fuel differently-- anything that would start and run and not knock too badly. Nobody had any conception of octanes and we used to test gas with a hydrometer, hoping to detect something about quality. Some producers back in the teens sent us a couple of barrels of alcohol and asked us to try it. Everyone said it wouldn't work and we used it to wash parts in. It was just too drastic a change for that far back. It's easy to be very conservative when you're running on your last few bucks.
…Look at the problems of space travel today. It was like that for us. You couldn't go down to the parts store and buy a rubber cup to go on a brake cylinder because there weren't any. The Duesenberg hydraulic brake was superb for its time, but it wasn't arrived at easily. Imagine! You didn't have hydraulic brake fluid. …We had to make our won brake cups out of leather. We had to find a fluid that wouldn't freeze, rust or get hard or sticky. But except for our not having servos on both brake shoes, those brakes were as modern as the industry's best 40 years later.

Tommy Milton on the early days of racing

From Borgeson, p.9.
Tommy Milton remembers:
"It was 1913. I was just a kid who wanted to race and I happened to have my own Mercer. Mercer was a very good name just then and once when Sloan brought his show to St. Paul he offered me a job with his fakeroo outfit. All I had to do was furnish the car, maintain it and drive it and he would pay me $50 a week. I took the offer and stuck it out for three years.
He had a cattle car with decking in it, which made it possible to haul nine race cars wherever there was a railroad. AS soon as we left my home town and hit the open road he cut my salary to $35 a week; that was his style. There was one eight -day period when we traveled 3000 miles and raced in five cities. For $35 a week. No prize money.
My Mercer was just a stock model. I never had a chance to do anything against the real race cars of the outfit, so I was never given any instructions. Louis Disbrow was the big star during most of that period and it was usually arranged that he would win. All the dirt-track promoters ran these phony shows.
One day we raced in Peoria, where I learned never to boo anybody. My sister and her husband lived there and they came to see their daredevil id-kin in action. I didn't stand a chance anyway, but those bums in the stands roaring at me, "Get off the track, you lousy coward!" --and a lot worse--got to me.
It sickened me with being so slow. I chapped my car's frame and shortened its wheelbase from 108 t0 96 inches. I installed a 450-cu.-in. Wisconsin T-head engine--which is what Stutz used in those days -- and I suddenly had a darn good track car. We sound up the season at Shreveport, Louisiana. I was tired of getting beaten, so I beat everybody, including Disbrow. Sloan fired me, putting an end to one of the dark pages in my history, and in 1916 I joined the Duesenberg team.

Dicing with death; the thrill of speed

Consisting of the hardware and direct interface between the user and the immersive 3D world he or she is placed in, the DaVinci Driving Simulator focuses only on what is necessary, and it includes a special purpose computer called the “Smart Box,” which is used to control the gauges and read the pedals instead of a PC.

Dicing with Death -- The Thrill of Speed

Taken from Borgeson, "The Golden Age of the American Car" p.3
"Why do they do it, then?"
One element, certainly not exclusive to motor racing, is the gamble for the ultimate in stakes. "Dicing with Death" is the British cliché for it, and death wins s the toss all too often. Along with this gamble is the gamble for victory against all one's competitors and the heady atmosphere of anxiety and aspiration which it creates. The delirium of victory in this esoteric form of gladiatorial combat is beyond the hopes of most of the contestants, yet they remain in avid competition. It is a strange drug, indeed.
It is compounded by the emotional thrill of the whole experience -- from the completion of a design, to the drawing board, to the patterns and forgings and machine work and assembly. Then to the dynamometer and finally to the track. The clout on the back of tremendous acceleration; the exhilaration of blazing speed, hurtling through the wind crouched in an open cockpit; the thrill of the sound and the smell and of the machine's savage, and the driver hopes, exquisite response to his slightest wish or command; and much, much more. There are plenty of men who will do almost anything to get a ride in a race car, with money the farthest thing from their thoughts.
A very real part of the thrill is sexual, a statement which will not come as news to most psychologists nor to most members of the racing fraternity. There are those of us who very consciously can experience degrees of orgiastic transport with a suitably inspiring mechanical companion.

Preliminary Working Bibliography on Automoible Racing in America to 1941

Working Bibliography, American Automobile Racing to 1941
John Heitmann, Professor
History Department
University of Dayton

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