Carl Fisher Turned the Folly Into the 500 : Motor racing: He took the chance, opened the speedway in 1909, and drove the pace car in the first six races.

When Carl Fisher took some friends for a trolley ride to the far northwest side of Indianapolis in 1908 and told them he wanted to build a race track there for the newfangled horseless carriages of the day, it seemed like a bizarre idea. But Indianans were accustomed to that sort of thing from Fisher.

Once, to promote his downtown passenger car showroom, Fisher sat in a white Stoddard-Dayton suspended from a hot air balloon as it slowly cruised across the city. When the balloon descended and the car’s wheels touched ground, Fisher roared off in a cloud of dust.

“Stoddard-Dayton is the first car to fly over Indianapolis, it should be your first car,” his advertisements proclaimed.

When he was only 25, Fisher owned the first automobile driven in Indianapolis, a 2.5-horsepower De Dion motor tricycle. A year later, he founded the Fisher Auto Co. and toured county fairs with Barney Oldfield and a one-cylinder Winton that they raced against horses.

In 1904, with partner Jim Allison, Fisher began manufacturing acetylene lamps, forerunners of the headlights called Prest-O-Lights. When Fisher put them on the fenders of a 1904 Packard, he altered the course of history. Autos began running at night, and Fisher became a millionaire.

While touring England, Fisher drove at the new Brooklands track and became convinced that racing was an ideal way to promote sales of passenger cars. The first vague thoughts of what was to become Indianapolis Motor Speedway were planted in his mind.

“Galled by European superiority on the race track and convinced that our designers and engineers could best any foreign car, he committed his personal resources to building a speedway,” said Jerry Fisher of Poway, Calif., a cousin. He is the only living relative of Carl Fisher, who died nearly 52 years ago.

The 75th Indianapolis 500 will be held Sunday on the same 2 1/2-mile rectangular course configuration that Fisher laid out on 320 acres of the Old Pressly Farm, where a trolley line along Sixteenth Street intersected Georgetown Road, a narrow, dusty carriage path.

The site was purchased for $80,000.

Today, with the race 48 hours or so away, the corner of Sixteenth and Georgetown is the most crowded intersection in the country as racing fans from all over the world mill around temporary booths that sell souvenirs, racing jackets, T-shirts, hot dogs, beer and the most coveted item of all--tickets to the 500. By Saturday morning, it will take more than an hour to drive a couple of blocks along Georgetown.

If it stays as hot as it has been, it won’t be worth the effort. Along Georgetown is a camptown of motor homes, transients and drifters, which can turn it into a scary place when the beer flows 24 hours a day.

It was a simpler and gentler place in Fisher’s day. A box of Cracker Jack cost a nickel, ham and cheese sandwiches were a dime and the drink of the day was buttermilk. It cost five cents.

Fisher’s track was planned for more than just racing. He hoped it would become a laboratory testing ground for the young automotive industry growing in Indianapolis. Marmon, National and Cole were building cars in the city, and Fisher thought a test track would help push his city past Detroit in the race to become the country’s auto capital.

“The plan took shape, drawn on white table cloths at Pop Hayens’ restaurant, a frequent stop for C.G. (Fisher) and the three men who joined him in building the speedway--Allison, A. C. Newby and Frank Wheeler,” Jerry Fisher recalled.

Carl Fisher carefully laid out a precise track designed to fit into an area one mile long and a half-mile wide, with four identical quarter-mile turns. To accommodate the huge, lumbering cars of the era, Fisher built four straightaways 50 feet wide--two of five-eighths of a mile each and two of one-eighth of a mile each--with the track widened to 60 feet in the corners. Each turn was banked an identical 9 degrees 12 minutes to make them as close as possible to street corners.

Why did he decide on 2 1/2 miles? Because his original plan for a three-mile course brought the track too close to the property line.

Fisher paved the course with macadam, a mixture of tar and crushed stone. The speedway was to open with a three-day festival over the Fourth of July weekend in 1909, with balloon and motorcycle races leading up to a 300-mile auto race, but it was called off when Indiana rainstorms prevented the macadam from hardening.

When the track finally opened, on Aug. 19, 1909, it was a disaster. The surface broke up, two crashes resulted in the deaths of one driver, two mechanics and two spectators, and the race was called off after 235 of the scheduled 300 miles.

Most promoters might have folded their tent and called off what local newspapers called “Fisher’s Folly,” but not the determined C.G.

He immediately decided to pave the 2 1/2 miles with bricks, which meant talking his investors into anteing up another $200,000 for 3.2 million bricks that weighed about 9 1/2 pounds each and were grouted with cement.

Louis Strang, in an enormous 200-horsepower Fiat, proved the race-worthiness of the track when he ran two laps at a record 91.813 m.p.h. despite December weather of 9 degrees. He reached more than 111 m.p.h. on the straightaway, and Fisher immediately announced dates for not one, but three, grand openings on the holiday weekends of Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day in 1910.

Races were held at various distances, with few accidents, and appeared to be quite successful, but Fisher was disappointed to see the crowds getting smaller from event to event. His partner, Allison, came up with the revolutionary idea of holding only a single event each year.

Manufacturers wanted a 24-hour race, but Fisher thought that would be too long for fans to sustain interest. A 500-mile distance was chosen because, as Fisher said, “That’s about how long we can run during daylight hours.”

The first Indianapolis 500 was held on Memorial Day 1911, with a record $25,000 in prize money to be distributed to the first 12 finishers among the 40 starters. The race attracted a crowd that overflowed the wooden grandstands, and Fisher’s Folly was a financial and creative success.

It took 6 hours 42 minutes for Ray Harroun to reach the checkered flag in his Marmon Wasp, a hometown entry. Unlike today, when the race ends when the winning car crosses the finish line, the 1911 race lasted 40 more minutes, until the 12th-place car completed 500 miles.

The race was started in a manner never before seen. Instead of a standing start, as used in all earlier races, Fisher decided to have a rolling start, with himself in a white 1911 Stoddard-Dayton out in front acting as a pace car. It was such a novel idea that Fisher was nearly run down before he skidded off the track into the pits, a split-second ahead of the thundering race cars, as the green flag fell.

He continued to drive the pace car for five more years, and the custom of having a new-model car pace the field has continued annually. This Sunday, former sports car driver and car designer Carroll Shelby will lead the 33 cars for a parade and pace lap in a prototype Dodge Viper.

Fisher remained as president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway until 1924, but in the years after World War I he spent progressively less time in Indianapolis, as he turned a $50,000 investment for some swampland in the south of Florida into Miami Beach.

Will Rogers wrote at the time: “Fisher is the man who took Miami Beach away from the alligators and gave it to the Indianans. This guy has done more unique things, even before he heard of Florida, than any man I ever met.”

Buoyed financially by his Miami Beach investment, Fisher set out to create a coast-to-coast highway across the United States, on which ordinary folks could run their new cars. He coined the phrase, “See America First,” to generate capital for what became known as the Lincoln Highway.

While he was raising money for his transcontinental venture, nearly every automotive manufacturer contributed except Henry Ford, who according to Fisher, once agreed and later reneged on a pledge. From that moment on, Fisher always referred to Ford as “that scrawny little piker.”

In 1924, Fisher turned over presidency of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to Allison, and three years later they sold it to Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker and a group of Detroit investors for about $700,000. Rickenbacker, a World War I aviation ace who drove in two Indy 500s, expanded the facility to include an 18-hole championship golf course in 1929, but came close to shutting down the track during the Depression years of the 1930s.

World War II forced the track’s closure for four years, from 1942 through ‘45, after which the late Tony Hulman bought it from Rickenbacker and began the long-range refurbishing program that has continued to this day.

Fisher suffered from the stock market crash of 1929 and spent much of what was left of his wealth in an unsuccessful attempt to develop Montauk Point on the eastern tip of Long Island. He spent his final years in Miami Beach, where he died of sclerosis of the liver--a result of a lifetime of carousing as well as promoting--on July 15, 1939, in a hospital that he had built.

“Jane, his first wife, once asked C.G. what was more important, happiness or money, and he said money was happiness, because it lets you do what you want,” Jerry Fisher recalled.

Which is just what Carl Fisher did most of his life--for which all of racing and the city of Indianapolis can be grateful.