Auto Racing
See also: Indianapolis Motor SpeedwayIn 1909, Fisher joined a group of Indianapolis businessmen in a new project. He, Arthur C. Newby (president of National), Frank H. Wheeler (maker of the Wheeler-Schebler carburetor), and James A. Allison (partner in Prest-O-Lite) invested in what became Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which is now surrounded by the city of Indianapolis. The first automobile race in August 1909 ended in disaster. The loose rock track led to numerous crashes, fires, terrible injuries to race car drivers and spectators, and deaths. The race was halted and canceled when only halfway completed
Undeterred, Fisher convinced the investors to install 3.2 million paving bricks, leading to the famous nickname "the brickyard". (This persists, even though it has since been resurfaced.) The Speedway reopened and, on Memorial Day, May 30, 1911, 80,000 paying spectators at $1 admission (and many thousands more unpaid in overlooking buildings and trees) watched the 500-mile (800 kilometers) event, the first in a long line of races known as the Indianapolis 500.
Read more about this topic: Carl G. Fisher
Famous quotes containing the word racing:
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)