Indianapolis Motor Speedway marks 100th

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indianapolis Motor Speedway has made the reputation of racing greats: A.J. Foyt, Rick Mears, the Unser family.

It’s been a testing ground for safety features such as rearview mirrors and seat belts, well before they became commonplace in Americans’ everyday lives. It’s been a movie set, and the place where Janet Guthrie struck a blow for female athletes by becoming the first woman racer at the Indy 500 in 1977.

And, as of this year, Indy has been part of American driving and racing for a century.

“Not only is this the same joint, the [first] surface is still there ... the crushed rock and tar is still there,” speedway historian Donald Davidson said.

The common perception that bricks were used first as the first track surface is as untrue as the speedway’s reputation for being a race car-only facility — that was never the intent.

When Carl Fisher and three other partners bought four large plots of farmland for $72,000 in 1908, they wanted to make the speedway a showcase for what was then a major automobile-producing city.

Early cars reached maximum speeds of about 10 mph on the city’s dirt roads, so Fisher surmised automakers needed a place to demonstrate whose stripped-down cars were the best.

By 1911, with Indy automakers going out of business, track owners switched gears and started the Indianapolis 500 International Sweepstakes, which gave the speedway and generations of drivers their signature event.

It worked.