It’s been a circuitous and sometimes difficult ride but the complete tapestry of Championship racing’s hundred-year history is as rich if not richer than any major form of motor sport. In fact, the story of how we got here from there is an odyssey unlike any other in racing.
The Vanderbilt Cup and other road races of national championship racing’s early years gave way to the great board track era of the twenties followed by the Depression’s ‘Junk Formula’. Then came the post World War II Offenhauser-dominated roadster era which lasted through the fifties into the early sixties with USAC taking over from the AAA in 1955. A quarter century later CART took control of the sport from USAC and enjoyed a great run through the eighties and nineties before imploding after twenty-five years in a sad story of bankruptcy.
Let’s first of all return to the board track era which extended from 1915-’31 and was at its height from 1918-’28. During this eleven-year stretch, Indy 500 aside, only half a dozen races were run on something other than a board track. Twenty of these banked oval tracks were built around the country, most by ex-bicycle racer Jack Prince and his engineer partner Art Pillsbury. The tracks were built from pine boards and ranged in length from a half-mile to two miles but they required a huge amount of maintenance and most of them operated only for two or three years.
There were tracks in Beverly Hills, Culver City, Playa del Ray, Fresno, San Carlos and Cotati in California, Atlantic City in New Jersey, Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, Chicago (Maywood), Miami, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Omaha and Des Moines, as well as Laurel, MD and Salem, NH, Uniontown and Altoona, PA and Tacoma, WA. The longest running of these tracks was Altoona which operated for eight years from 1923-’31 thanks to a complete overhaul in 1928.
The board tracks attracted huge crowds and produced spectacular racing and lap speeds. With each new track they built Prince and Pillsbury made the banking steeper and steeper so that speeds shot up. In April of 1925 Harry Hartz won a 50-mile sprint race on the 1.25-mile Culver City track at 135.23 mph. The following year Hartz won a 300-mile race on the 1.5-mile Atlantic City track averaging 134.091 mph at a time when the world land speed record was less than 200 mph. In 1927 Frank Lockhart lapped the Atlantic City track at 147.729 mph during a qualifying run, setting an American closed course record that stood for thirty-three years, until the high-banked 2.5-mile Daytona Speedway was opened in 1959.
The superstars of the time like Lockhart, Hartz, Tommy Milton, Jimmy Murphy and Pete de Paolo raced supercharged Miller straight eights displacing between 1.5 and 2 liters. These beautiful, classic race cars had evolved rapidly from the giant behemoths which had predominated only ten and fifteen years earlier. The early Millers were rear-drive cars but later Millers put the power to the ground through the front wheels reducing the front area and enabling the driver to sit lower. Harry Miller’s California-built cars took over from Duesenberg in the early twenties as championship racing’s dominant marque and dominated the scene through the mid-thirties.
Jimmy Murphy famously won the French GP in 1921 driving a Duesenberg, then won the following year’s Indy 500 with a Miller-engined version of the same car. An American would not drive an American car to win another grand prix until Dan Gurney turned the trick at Spa, Belgium in 1967 in his Eagle-Gurney/Weslake V-12. Murphy won nineteen AAA races and two championships in 1922 and ‘24 before he was killed on the dirt at Syracuse in September of 1924.
Milton won twenty-three races and the (disputed) 1920 and (undisputed) ‘21 championships before retiring in 1928. Lockhart came on the national championship scene in 1926, winning the Indy 500 as a rookie and going on to win nine more AAA races over the next year and a half. Lockhart was killed on Daytona Beach in April of 1928 while trying to set the land speed record in his self-built, sixteen-cylinder Miller-powered Stutz Blackhawk.
The spectacular supercharged Millers and Duesenbergs from the twenties were rivals for the best European grand prix cars although the Great Depression put paid to all that. A new low-cost, stock-block-based 'junk formula' was introduced as the board tracks went out of business and championship racing struggled for survival through the thirties, running mostly on dirt ovals. Beyond the Indy 500 and the two Vanderbilt Cup revival races on Long Island in 1936 and ‘37 there were no major AAA races of any description. During this bleak period Louis Meyer became the first man to win the Indy 500 three times. Other top drivers from the thirties were Wilbur Shaw, Mauri Rose, Kelly Petillo and Bill Cummings.
The Offenhauser era emerged after World War II as cars with an Offy engine in front won every AAA or USAC race from 1947-'63. The four-cylinder Offy was based on the Miller design and started winning races in 1935. Interesting curiosities like the Cummins Diesel and supercharged Novis challenged but the classic Offy-powered roadster ruled. Frank Kurtis and Eddie Kuzma were the most successful roadster builders from the late forties through the middle fifties before being challenged into the sixties by builders like A.J. Watson and Quinn Epperly.
The great championship drivers of the forties were Rex Mays and Ted Horn. Mays was the 1940 and ‘41 AAA champion and was killed at Del Mar, California in 1949. Horn won the championship three years in a row in 1946, ‘47 and ‘48 but was killed at Du Quoin, Illinois in October of 1948. The superstars of the fifties included two-time champion Tony Bettenhausen, three-time champion Jimmy Bryan and 1953 and ‘54 Indy 500 winner Bill Vukovich. Bettenhausen spawned a racing family, as did Vukovich. Bryan was a big, cigar-chomping man from Arizona who also won the Race of Two Worlds on the banked track at Monza, Italy in 1957. He was killed at Langhorne in 1960. Bettenhausen perished during practice at Indianapolis in 1961.
USAC (the United States Auto Club) was created at the end of 1955 by Indianapolis Motor Speedway boss Tony Hulman after the AAA decided to pull-out of racing following the death of Vukovich while leading the 1955 Indy 500. There was more disaster at Le Mans the next month when eighty-three spectators were killed after Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes crashed and caught fire. After fifty years as America’s premier sanctioning body the AAA decided in the wake of these events that it would be prudent to get out of racing and focus on its core insurance business.
Under USAC’s directon Champ Car racing looked much the same for seven or eight years. The sixties were ushered in by the likes of Rodger Ward, A.J. Foyt and Parnelli Jones racing and winning in classic Watson-Offy roadsters before the mid-sixties were swept in spectacular style by the rear-engine revolution featuring Lotus founder Colin Chapman and drivers Jim Clark and Dan Gurney.
Chapman, Clark and Gurney arrived at Indianapolis in 1963 with the first rear-engined Lotus-Ford. The idea had been sold to Ford by Gurney, one of America's greatest road racers. Clark and Gurney drove a pair of Ford-powered Lotus 29s at Indy in '63. They were referred to as, "those little, foreign funny cars", but Chapman, Clark and Gurney triggered a revolution as USAC's somnambulent golden era of the fifties and early sixties in which almost everyone ran similar Offy-powered, front-engined 'roadsters' was blown apart.
Lotus’s arrival at Indianapolis triggered a remarkable era of technological revolution as forward-thinking invaded Champ Car racing over the following eight or nine years. The cars changed out of all recognition with the rapid-fire arrival of rear-engines, low-profile tires, turbines, turbocharging, wings and aerodynamics. Speeds and costs skyrocketed during this time and the road racers and foreigners began their irresistable takeover of Champ Car racing.
Jim Clark broke the front-engined Offy domination when he won at Milwaukee in August of 1963, then scored the first rear-engined win at Indianapolis in '65. By then almost everyone was running rear-engined cars and a new golden age arrived at Indianapolis as technology ruled, sending the Speedway's track record through the roof from 151 mph in 1963 to 195 mph in 1972 as drivers from F1, NASCAR and sports car racing took on USAC's best. Through this time the Indy 500 was a true melting pot of cultures and technology and stood clearly as the world's most important single motor race.
But rising speeds also challenged the limits of safety and a disastrous 1973 Indy 500 saw the beginning of a continuing thirty-year effort to slow-down the cars. In '73 Art Pollard was killed in practice, Salt Walther was badly burned in a startline accident and Swede Savage died a month later following a fiery accident in a miserable, rain-delayed race which took three days to run. In reaction, USAC cut the onboard fuel tank size by half, limited turbo boost for the first time and slashed wing sizes.
In the middle of all this USAC tried a temporary experiment adding a few road races to the championship from 1965-’70 with as many as nine road races in 1968. But a decision was made to cast aside the road races in 1971, a historical foreshadowing of Tony George’s original theory of the IRL a quarter of a century later. USAC also threw the dirt track races--which had formed the backbone of the series from the thirties through the early sixties--out of the national championship to concentrate strictly on paved superspeedways in the seventies.
Through the seventies USAC fought a losing battle to modernize itself as the old club struggled to cope with rapidly changing times in terms of both technology and America’s professional sports culture. USAC failed to attract serious sponsorship or television coverage or increase the promotion and prize money for most of its races. Meanwhile the teams were fighting steadily rising costs, little return, and extremely unreliable big-boost turbocharged engines. All of them found it increasingly difficult to sell sponsorship and stay in business and the stage was set for the creation of CART.