On This Day

Monday 4th September 1916

104 years ago

The 2-mile Cincinnati (Ohio) Board Speedway opened with a 300-mile event featuring 29 cars piloted by the country's premier racing drivers including Howdy Wilcox, Dario Resta, Tommy Milton and Louis Chevrolet driving Dusenbergs, Stutzs and Frontenecs. Josef Christieans in a Sunbeam set the fast time in qualifying with a speed of 110 mph. The race was won by John Aitken in a Peugeot at 97.06 mph. Wilbur D'Alene finished second in a Duesenberg which was numbered '13' over the objections of many superstitious drivers who subsequently persuaded the AAA to permanently ban number '13'. Motorcyclists like "Cannonball Baker" also exceeded the 100mph plateau at the Cincinnati Speedway on a regular basis. Endurance runs where a popular use for the track; manufacturers needed to test their new designs and racetracks were the places to perform those tests. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built to be used as a testing facility by the multitude of manufacturers in Indiana, the 500 mile race grew out of this enterprise as a way to prove the results of all that testing. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was constructed in 1909 and the first Indy 500 was in 1911, five years later the board tracks were becoming the rage due to ease of construction and the fact that they could be built with tremendously steep banking to assure high speeds that would wow the crowds into coming through the gates. The Cincinnati Speedway as banking reported to be over 30 degrees in the turns by many sources while and in some articles the banking is said to be 40 degrees at the top of the track. This explains the term "Daredevils of the Speedway" in describing the drivers and "riding mechanics" of the day. Being fabricated out of wood allowed the racing surface to incorporate "progressive banking" that gets steeper towards the top, this is the same metric that many NASCAR type tracks are applying, Las Vegas, Bristol, and Charlotte to name a few and allows a variance in speed that makes passing more frequent and the racing more exciting. Board tracks sprang up across the nation and provided entertainment for millions of spectators from coast to coast in places like Beverly Hills California, Daytona Beach Florida, Chicago and Altoona Pa. The track at Cincinnati was very similar to the track at Chicago in shape and size. The board tracks proved popular through the 1920s until the great depression came and the maintenance of these mammoth structures became impossible and the last of them were torn down. The Cincinnati Speedway was dismantled after the 1919 racing season, only a few years after construction, supposedly the wood was used to build parts of Camp Sherman near Chillicothe. The board tracks were very dangerous for the drivers and riding mechanics, of course there were no seatbelts and other safety features were decades away. The board track at Beverly Hills claimed the life of Gaston Chevrolet just a few months after his win at the famed Brickyard on Decoration Day, the same fate befell Joe Boyer just a few years later at Altoona Pa..