One Hundred Years of the Indy 500

The first 500-mile race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway took place on May 30, 1911. That very first race was a story for the ages. Forty cars started, but only  a dozen finished.

People were excited by the amount of money at stake (the winner’s share would be $10,000, an impressive sum in an era when Cobb, baseball’s highest-paid player, made $10,000 a season) and the danger. (In the downtown saloons you could bet on how many drivers, who wore cloth or leather helmets and had no seat belts or roll bars, might be killed.) But with every mile the story line had become more and more scrambled and the spectators more and more subdued. Those charged with describing the “excitement” to an eager audience of millions were feeling the first damp signs of panic. Like every other lengthy automobile contest these experts on baseball and boxing had ever witnessed, this one was damnably confusing. The auto racing tracks of the day simply did not have the technology to keep track of split times and running order once cars began passing one another and going into and out of the pits.

Between crashes and the extreme length of the race, there was a time when no one was keeping up with how many laps each car raced. One hundred years later, people still argue about who actually won the first Indy 500. Link