History
There is some evidence of racetracks being developed in several ancient civilizations, but the most impressive ancient racetracks were certainly the hippodromes of the Ancient Greeks and the circuses of the Roman Empire. Both of these structures were designed for horse and chariot racing. The stadium of the Circus Maximus in Rome, Italy, is an example that could hold 200,000 spectators.
Racing facilities existed during the Middle Ages and there are records of a public racecourse being opened at Newmarket in London in 1174. In 1780 the Earl of Derby created a horse-racing course on his estate at Epsom; the English Derby continues to be held there today.
With the advent of the automobile in the late 19th/early 20th century, racetracks were designed to suit the nature of powered machines. The earliest tracks were modified horse racing courses, and racing automobiles in these facilities began in September, 1896, at Narragansett Park in Cranston, RI. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was opened in August 1909.
During the 1920s, many of the races on the AAA Championship were on high banked wooden race tracks called board tracks.
Modern racetracks are designed with spectator safety paramount, following incidents of spectator and track marshals fatalities. These often involve run off areas, barriers and high fencing.
Read more about this topic: Race Track
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)