Weird Island

46. FIRSTS: First Oval-Track Auto Race

Episode Summary

In 1896, the very first auto race on an oval track took place at the Rhode Island State Fair, just one year after the first city-to-city auto race in the world took place. Cars were so new, no one knew what to call them. Horseless wagons? Motor wagons? Motocycles? Electric Traps?

Episode Notes

Episode Source Material:

Episode Transcription

The year was 1896 and Rhode Island was getting ready for the state fair. There would be livestock contests, recipe contests and the judging of agricultural products. And the management of the fair also had this other idea to draw crowds. The fairgrounds were set on what had previously been the Narragansett Trotting Park, a horse racing track built in 1867 in Cranston. And there would certainly be horse races as part of the fair, that was a given. But there were also these new contraptions that could be raced that might generate even more buzz. They were called Horseless Carriages - or today, early automobiles. And this decision to race them at the RI State Fair would be a historical one. It would be the first time cars were raced on an oval track.
I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I’ll be telling you about the state’s little known historic role in the world of auto racing.
News of the novel race spread like wildfire. There were initially 12 vehicles entered into the race, but by the time of the fair, only 8 showed up. Two were electric and the others were powered by gasoline. In the early days of automobiles, it wasn’t clear what power source would win out. Would it be electric? Gasoline? Steam? The verdict was still out.
The electric vehicles arrived first, several days before the start of the fair, and their owners had to find a place to charge them. The fair wasn’t prepped for this ask, and they had to quickly make an arrangement with the local electric light company who wired a cow shed some distance from the main entrance to the park.
Then the gas-powered vehicles showed up, and they were set up in stalls about a half mile away, and hundreds of people trudged from one end of the park to the other just to get a glimpse of these unusual motor carriages.
On Monday, September 7th, about 5:30 PM, it was time to race. It’s estimated about 50,000 people gathered to watch, as the carriages were brought to the track. Each was assigned a number, just like in a horse race, and the drivers got in their vehicles. In addition to the driver, each was required to carry a weight of at least 165 pounds, so for most that meant a passenger was also along for the ride.
To kick things off, there was no “start your engines,” called out. That wasn’t a thing yet. Instead, the announcer cried, “Now go, if you can!” which doesn’t demonstrate a ton of confidence.
There was a very strong wind blowing - storms were making their way into town - and the dirt track, which was considered to be very fast for horses, was rough and lumpy and irregular for the spoked bicycle tires that carried most of these carriages. As the vehicles made their awkward, slow start, shouts of “Get a horse!” could be heard from the stands. Only four vehicles in the race were actually able to run at an average speed of at least 15 MPH, as the rules required, so the pace was nothing like we’re used to in modern races.
But the vehicles steadied out and one pulled out into the lead. It was an electric carriage called the Riker Electric Trap No. 1, with a black body and wheels painted a cheerful red, and the driver, Andrew Riker, steered with a tiller that projected from the dashboard. The wagon could run at four different speeds, 5, 10, 18 or 25 MPH, controlled by a small hand wheel off the side. Another electric vehicle, from the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company, followed behind in second.
The race was five laps, or five miles, long and the Riker electric car won with a time of 15 minutes and 1 second. The other electric vehicle came in 2nd, and 3rd was taken by a gasoline powered Duryea. There were five total races planned throughout the duration of the fair, but that storm that was rolling in interfered. So by the end of the fair, only three had taken place. But these races, the first vehicle races held on a track, were a hit and the organizers of the State Fair were very pleased with attendance. Word spread through newspapers and magazines and people called the races, the “most novel event ever seen on a New England race track.”
It’s really not just that racing on a track was novel. Everything about automobiles was new.
So new, in fact, that they weren’t even called automobiles yet. That word wouldn’t appear in print until 1899, when the New York Times described these “newfangled vehicles” and “uncanny” and “unutterably ugly” and remarked that “never a one of them has been provided with a good or even endurable name.” The Times criticized the French for coming up with “automobile,” which “being half Greek and half Latin is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation.” They forged on to criticize speakers of English as being “fatally attracted to the irrelevant word horseless.”
This race in Cranston was among the very first automobile races in the world. The first true race took place just one year earlier in 1895, in France. It was a city-to-city race from Paris to Bordeaux and back. The first American race took place later that same year, on Thanksgiving day, on roads between Chicago and Evanston, Illinois. Six cars set out that morning. Only 2 made it back. The race was sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald, in an attempt to boost newspaper sales and create interest in the fledgling auto industry. But they, too, were struggling with what to call these new vehicles. So they ran a public contest ahead of the race asking for name submissions to replace “horseless carriage.” The prize went to the general manager of the NY Telephone Company, who came up with the word “Motocycle.” Not Motorcycle. Motocycle. It didn’t stick.
All of the vehicles taking place in these early races were hand-built works of craftsmanship, designed by individuals or groups on the forefront of the new technology. The history of automobiles is long and complicated, but the invention of the car is attributed to Germans like Carl Benz, Siegfried Marcus, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach. All of whom were working on the problem at the same time. Americans quickly joined the pack, and would soon dominate the automotive industry. But before Henry Ford took the market by storm with his Model N in 1906, there were two American brothers who have largely been forgotten today, who had a huge impact on the American auto industry.
Their names were J. Frank and Charles Duryea, and they were bicycle mechanics who designed the first successful American gasoline automobile. The Duryea Motor Wagon Company was headquartered in Springfield, MA, and they were the first to mass produce and sell a car in the US - beginning the same year of the Cranston race. Mass produce is a bit of an overstatement, because they sold 13 hand-crafted vehicles in their first year or so, but still they get the title. They had lots of firsts. They were the first car company to advertise using print media. Their motor wagon was involved in the first American automobile accident. Not with another car, but with someone on a bicycle. And they won that very first American race, the Chicago Times-Herald race on Thanksgiving Day, beating out a Benz. They were represented in the Cranston race as well. Aside from the two electric vehicles, all of the additional gas vehicles were Duryeas.
Today, oval track racing is the predominant form of car racing in the US. But people don’t think of Rhode Island when they think of racing. They think of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway or the Daytona International Speedway or the Talladega Superspeedway.
But after that first race on a track during the RI State Fair, additional races continued to be held there between 1896 and 1914, when the Narragansett Park Race track was closed for renovations. It opened up again a year later as what some consider to be the nation’s first superspeedway. The bumpy dirt track was renovated into a one-mile banked oval with asphalt pavement. Both of these things were very new in 1915. So new, that you wouldn’t see banked ovals with asphalt paving be common until about the 1950s, when NASCAR was invented.
Today, racing is a complicated world. It can mean “Indianapolis Style Racing,” stock car racing, drag racing, sports car racing, land speed record racing, off-road racing, go-kart racing. You name it. And each type of racing has its own rules, cars, fans and history. And even by 1915, things were more complex than they were in 1896 for that first race.
Was the Narragansett Park Speedway the first superspeedway? Well, not by today’s standards. Now, a superspeedway is defined as an oval track with a course 2 miles or longer. But at the time, anything one mile or longer was considered to be a superspeedway. And then, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built in 1909, six years before the Narragansett Park Speedway was reopened. But the surface wasn’t asphalt at the time. It was brick.
So, it’s kind of semantics at this point, and I’m sure someone with more knowledge of the racing world could do a better job than I can parsing through. But, regardless, when the Narragansett Park Speedway reopened, it was ahead of its time. And its very first race would be its most notable.
The opening race was held on another September day, but this time newspapers described it as “an ideal day for what proved the best motor race ever held in New England.” A number of notable racers competed, including Ralph De Palma (who had just won the Indianapolis 500 earlier that year), Bob Burman, and “Fast Eddie” Rickenbacker. The race would be 100 miles, or 100 laps of the one mile speedway. And, for some reason, there was no announcer or scoreboard, so at first spectators had a hard time following what was going on. But, soon it became clear who the frontrunners were. Ralph De Palma pulled into first, Bob Burman followed behind in 2nd, and Fast Eddie Rickenbacker sat in 3rd for most of the race. Around lap 58, though, things started to change. Burman passed De Palma and started building a larger and larger gap. But as he left De Palma behind, Eddie Rickenbacker was gaining on him. The spectators perked up. In lap 72, Rickenbacker passed De Palma, and the real race began. Fast Eddie chased Burman down until in mile 77, when he pulled into the lead and held it to the end. Rickenbacker won the race in a Maxwell with a time of 1 hour, 29 minutes and 24 seconds, which the Boston Globe reported as a new record for a 100 mile track. The Globe called it “one of the most spectacular races ever witnessed.” Eddie Rickenbacker would leave the world of racing less than 2 years later to enter WWI as a fighter pilot, as is today remembered as the United States’ most successful fighter ace in the war.
Despite its significance in the early days of racing, the Narragansett Park Speedway never made a name for itself as a major racing venue. The last race was held in 1923, and a year later a fire - which was reportedly started by a carelessly discarded match - burned down the grandstand. They never rebuilt it.
In 1925, the park was sold to a developer and the remaining structures were demolished. But the name was revived. Everyone in Rhode Island has heard of the Pawtucket Narragansett Park, another racetrack that adopted the same name as the original Cranston one nine years later. But the Pawtucket racetrack was used for thoroughbred horse racing. You would think that it would have been the other way around. That the horseracing tracks would predate the car racing tracks. But the history of racing wasn’t linear like I would have expected. In some places in the country, horse tracks were redeveloped into car speedways. But as car racing came into style in the early 1900s, horse racing had a boom as well. An anti-gambling sentiment in the early 1900s almost wiped horse racing out. But during the depression, states began making betting legal again as a way to find revenue, and thoroughbred racing took off again. The Narragansett Park horse racing track in Pawtucket was one of the most financially successful tracks in the country. That’s another story, but it’s important to know that the two tracks were different.
Today, there’s no racetrack in Cranston. But if you drive the streets where the track used to be, you’ll see evidence that it was once there. Streets named Fiat and Cadillac and Packard pay tribute to the track. And Fiat Avenue actually corresponds with the backstretch of the course, curving just where the track curved. So you can almost imagine you’re racing as you take the turn. Don’t go crazy with the speed, though! You only have to drive faster than 25 miles and hour to beat out the Riker Electric Vehicle that one that very first race historic race.
Thank you so much for listening! And thanks to Steve and to Jethro from My Motorcycle Adventure for the episode suggestion! That’s Motorcycle, not Motocycle by the way. Check them out for local tours and ride suggestions. If you liked this episode, I would love it if you could share it with your family and friends. And if you have an idea for an episode, I’d love to hear it! You can email me at weird rhode island @ gmail.com or find me on Instagram at weird Island podcast. See you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!