There’s More Than Just Brick at the ‘Brickyard’

Why is it called the “Brickyard 400?”

Well, considering the Indianapolis Motor Speedway once was paved with more than 3 million bricks, the name is a perfect fit for what soon will be the richest stock car race in the world.

NASCAR’s debut at the Speedway Aug. 6 will be the first non-Indy car race in more than 80 years on the 2 1/2-mile track, built early this century as a testing ground for the new automobile industry.

It originally was covered with crushed stone and tar, then paved with the bone-jarring bricks and resurfaced three times after that with asphalt. The nickname “Brickyard” endured, however, even though all that’s left of the original brick is a 36-inch strip that crosses the main straightaway at the start-finish line, producing a nostalgic “thump-thump” every time a car passes over.

Carl G. Fisher, a barnstorming racer from Greensburg, Ind., and an automotive pioneer who later turned a Florida swamp into Miami Beach, was the father of the most famous race track in the world.

Fisher was one of the first daredevils who drove those newfangled contraptions on the half-mile, dirt-covered county fair circuit. He made $20,000 in 1901 by racing a one-cylinder Winton against horses and by carrying passengers in his car at $10 a ride. But he made his fortune with partner James A. Allison, founding the Prest-O-Lite company in Indianapolis to compress carbide gas for auto lighting systems.

By the time Henry Ford replaced his standard equipment oil lamps with electric lights, Fisher and Allison were millionaires.

Fisher proposed construction of a race track in 1908. He joined Allison, Arthur C. Newby, the manufacturer of the National automobile, and Fred H. Wheeler, a carburetor maker, in forming the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corp. the next year, hoping to use the facility not only to test and race cars but also to lure other automakers to Indianapolis.

European cars were dominating American entries in international competition at the time, and Fisher believed U.S. factories could catch up by developing their products at the Speedway.

He picked a spot along the old Ben Hur interurban line to Crawfordsville, northwest of Indianapolis at the time but now within the city limits, and the track opened in June 1909.

There were a series of automobile, motorcycle and even balloon races at the Speedway that year and the next; Fisher himself was the pilot of one balloon in the first event at the track.

The first automobile race at the Speedway was on Aug. 19, 1909, a 5-mile dash won by local industrialist Louis Schwitzer, whose name now is memorialized on an annual Indianapolis 500 award for automotive innovation.

The first feature race was a 250-miler won by Bob Burman that same day.

The first deaths at the Speedway also occurred in that race, when driver William Borque and riding mechanic Harry Holcomb were killed in a crash on the main straight.

Lewis Strang, the 1908 American Automobile Association national champion, won the featured 100-miler the next day. Lee Lynch was the winner of the featured event the final day of the three-day meet in a scheduled 300-mile race that was called off after 225 miles when Charles Merz’s car lost a tire and plunged into the crowd, killing mechanic Claude Kellum and spectators Homer Joliff and James West. Two others were seriously hurt.

After that, Fisher and his partners decided that the stone and tar surface was too dangerous and had the track paved with 3.2 million bricks. Thomas R. Marshall, then Indiana governor and later U.S. vice president, laid the last brick: 52 pounds of gold-plated silver.

The newly nicknamed “Brickyard” opened Dec. 17, 1909 in near-zero weather for a two-day series of short trials. Strang won the first 5-mile dash; John Aitken won a 20-mile free-for-all; and Strang won the second-day feature. There were no accidents either day.

The Speedway was back in business.

In 1910, there were a series races in May, July and September.

Ray Harroun, the AAA national champion from Indianapolis, won a 200-miler in May and announced at the end of the season that he was retiring. Later, Fisher and his partners decided one large event would serve as a proper showcase for the track, and Harroun was talked back behind the wheel of his Indianapolis-built Marmon Wasp for the first Indianapolis 500 on May 30, 1911.

His was the only one of the 40 cars that did not carry a riding mechanic with the driver, so Harroun installed a mirror to enable him to see traffic behind him. According to legend, it was the first use of a rear-view mirror in an automobile.

Harroun won the inaugural Indy 500 at 74.602 m.p.h.

But the bricks, like the stone and tar before them, were not the ideal surface for racing.

“It was a very bumpy ride,” recalled Duke Nalon, who got his start as a riding mechanic in the ‘30s and twice won the pole position as driver. “It wore you out mentally, especially if the style of the driver was to set the car sideways through the turns. We used relief drivers because of the track conditions and the heat coming off the engine. The track is like a boulevard now.”

Nalon, 81 and living in Indianapolis, is one of the few people who can make that comparison.

After finishing third in 1948, he started on the pole in 1949 in one of the most famous Indy cars ever built, the Novi, but was severely burned in a fiery crash. He was out of racing until late 1950, then came back and won the pole in 1951.

The 1930s were the deadliest decade at the Speedway.

There were 22 drivers, mechanics and spectators killed from 1930-39, about a third of the 65 deaths since the track opened.

“Part of the reason was the cars,” said Speedway historian Bob Laycock. “They called it the ‘junk formula.’ People literally entered souped up stock cars.”

Fisher shut down the track during World War I and turned it over to the government for use as an aviation repair depot and landing field. The 500 returned after the war, but within a few years Fisher was considering tearing down the track because “it has accomplished its purpose” to establish the superiority of American cars.

Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, a World War I flying ace who drove at Indy from 1912-16, bought the track and ran the race through 1941. Then the Speedway was dormant until the end of World War II, when Terre Haute businessman and sportsman Tony Hulman bought the weed-infested, crumbling facility from Rickenbacker and rescued the 500.

A half-century later, Hulman’s grandson, Tony George, is president of the Speedway--and the father of the Brickyard 400.