Episode 1: The Race That Started It All (1911)
Introduction
December 14, 1909. A cold afternoon outside Indianapolis. A man named Park Andrews kneels at the edge of a 2.5-mile oval track and watches as workers tap the very last brick into place. By the time he stands up, his crew has laid three point two million bricks across this track in just sixty-three days.
The bricks weigh ten pounds apiece. They were fired in a clay factory in Wabash County. Indiana's lieutenant governor lays the final one himself, and it is made of gold.
Five months later, an Indianapolis Star reporter asks a teenage boy what he thinks of the new racetrack. The boy looks out across the surface and says, "It's the finest brickyard in the world."
That nickname stuck. The track is still called The Brickyard today, more than a century later. And the race they would run on it, the Indianapolis 500, would become the largest single-day sporting event on the planet.
But here is the part nobody tells you. Almost everything you know about the modern car, the rearview mirror over your dashboard, the seatbelt across your chest, the antilock brakes under your foot, almost all of it traces back to a 2.5-mile loop of pavement in Speedway, Indiana. Built by four men. Tested by drivers who did not know if they would survive. And won, the very first time, by a retired engineer who almost did not race at all.
Four Men and a Cornfield
To understand the Indianapolis 500, you have to understand four men, a cornfield, and a problem nobody had ever solved before.
The year is 1906. The car has been around for about twenty years, but it is still a new and dangerous thing. There are barely any paved roads. There are no road tests, no safety ratings, no consumer reports. If you want to know whether a car is any good, you have to drive it until it breaks (Wishtv, 2026).
A man named Carl Fisher has a problem. He runs a company in Indianapolis called Prest-O-Lite that makes headlights for cars. Indianapolis has more than sixty automakers in 1906. It is one of the biggest car-manufacturing cities in America. But there is nowhere safe to test these cars at high speed.
So Fisher does something that sounds absurd. He decides to build a private racetrack the size of a small farm, just so the auto industry can test cars properly.
He recruits three partners: James Allison, his business partner at Prest-O-Lite; Arthur Newby, who runs the National Motor Vehicle Company; and Frank Wheeler, who makes carburetors. Together, in December of 1908, they buy 328 acres of farmland five miles northwest of downtown Indianapolis for $72,000 (Brickhunter, 2024). The price, in today's money, would be about $2.5 million.
They form the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Company on March 20, 1909. King Brothers Construction is hired to build the track in just sixty days. Two hundred workers, three hundred mules, five steam tractors, and one hundred fifty scrapers move tons of earth into a 2.5-mile oval with four turns banked at nine degrees (Burns Stainless, 2022).
But here is the first lesson the founders learn the hard way. They surface the track with crushed limestone, gravel, and tar. It is the standard surface for the time. And it does not work.
On the very first race weekend in August 1909, the surface breaks apart under the speed and weight of the cars. Drivers get covered in oil, tar, and gravel. Ruts form in the turns. Five people die that weekend, two of them spectators (History.com, 2025).
The American Automobile Association threatens to ban racing at the track entirely. Indiana's lieutenant governor calls for racing to be outlawed across the whole state.
Fisher has a choice. He can give up. Or he can fix the problem.
He chooses bricks. Traction tests show that bricks are less slippery than gravel and stronger than concrete. So in the fall of 1909, his team lays three point two million bricks across the entire 2.5-mile surface in just sixty-three days. The Wabash Clay Factory fires them. The National Paving Brick Manufacturers Association sends consultants. The job is so important to road-building experts that municipalities around the world send people to study how it is done (First Super Speedway, n.d.).
By December 14, 1909, the Brickyard is complete. Indianapolis has gone from a dangerous gravel track to the most carefully engineered racing surface in the world. And it happened because four men refused to give up on a problem.
The Race Nobody Knew How to Run
In 1910, the Speedway's first full racing season, the four founders try a different approach. Lots of small races. Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day. Three big weekends, dozens of short events.
It does not work. The crowds get smaller every weekend. By Labor Day, the grandstands are nearly empty (Wikipedia, 1911 Indianapolis 500, 2026).
So Fisher, Allison, Newby, and Wheeler sit down in a room and ask a question that will change motorsports forever. What if, instead of many small races, we hold one giant race? One day. One distance. One winner. Make it the longest race anyone has ever attempted. Make the prize money the biggest in the world. Force the best drivers and the best cars to come here.
They settle on a distance. Five hundred miles. Two hundred laps around the 2.5-mile oval. Memorial Day, May 30, 1911.
The total prize purse is $25,000. The winner alone will get $14,250 (Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 2022). To put that in perspective, the average American worker in 1911 earns about $700 a year. The winner of this race will make twenty years' wages in a single afternoon.
Forty cars line up on race day. Eighty thousand spectators pack the grandstands (The Henry Ford, n.d.). It is the largest paying crowd ever assembled for a sporting event in American history at that time.
But here is the thing. Nobody really knows how to run a five-hundred-mile race. The cars have never been driven that far at speed. The tires have never been tested over that distance. The drivers have never gone that hard for that long.
The race starts and almost immediately, the chaos begins. On lap thirteen, a car driven by a man named Arthur Greiner loses a front wheel in turn one. His riding mechanic, Sam Dickson, is thrown from the car and killed instantly. The crowd swarms around the body so thickly that state militia soldiers have to use their guns as clubs to clear a path for the doctors (Wikipedia, 1911 Indianapolis 500, 2026).
The race continues. It has to. There is no rulebook for what to do when a driver or mechanic dies during a race.
A second major accident, near the halfway point, damages the timing and scoring stand. The system that records which car is in what position breaks down at the worst possible moment. Officials are forced to rely on memory and partial notes to track who is leading.
After six hours and forty-two minutes of racing, a yellow car with the number thirty-two on its side, driven by a thirty-one-year-old engineer named Ray Harroun, crosses the finish line first.
But the second-place finisher, Ralph Mulford, says he is sure he actually passed Harroun late in the race when Harroun came in with a torn tire (History.com, 2025). Mulford argues he is the real winner.
Race officials examine the timing data they have. They check the eyewitness reports. They look at when Mulford himself made a pit stop to change his own tire. And they make a decision.
Ray Harroun is declared the winner of the first Indianapolis 500.
There are no formal protests filed. A few days later, Mulford himself offers congratulations to Harroun in the Detroit Free Press (Wikipedia, 1911 Indianapolis 500, 2026). And the era of the Indianapolis 500 has officially begun.
The Mirror That Changed Everything
Now I want to go back and tell you about Ray Harroun. Because he did something during that 1911 race that, more than a century later, is on every single car on every road in the world.
Harroun was not really a driver. He thought of himself as an engineer. He had been working for the Marmon Motor Car Company in Indianapolis on their design team. In 1910, the season before the first Indy 500, he raced sixty times and won forty-five of them (Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 2022). Then he retired. He was done. He wanted to focus on engineering.
But Marmon talked him into coming back for one last race. The first Indianapolis 500. And they let him design his own car.
In 1911, every race car carried two people. The driver and the riding mechanic. The mechanic sat in a second seat, watched the gauges, kept the engine oiled during the race, and most importantly, looked behind the car to warn the driver about other cars coming up to pass.
Harroun looked at this setup and thought, this is heavy. This is slow. Every pound of weight matters in a five-hundred-mile race. So he designed a car with only one seat. A single-seater. The first open-wheel single-seater race car in history (Marmon Holdings, 2026).
He named it the Marmon Wasp because it was painted yellow and black with a pointed tail.
But there was a problem. The other drivers protested. They said a single-seater was dangerous because Harroun would not be able to see the cars coming up behind him. Officials almost banned the car from racing.
So Harroun did something clever. He remembered something he had seen years earlier, on a horse-drawn taxi in Chicago. The driver had attached a small mirror so he could see his passengers without turning around. Harroun bolted a mirror onto brackets above his steering wheel so he could see behind him without a mechanic (IMS Museum, 2022).
It is believed to be the first rearview mirror ever mounted on an automobile.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. Harroun later admitted that the mirror barely worked. The brick surface was so rough that the mirror vibrated constantly. He said it was almost useless during the actual race.
But it did not matter. The idea was out in the world. Within a few years, rearview mirrors were standard on race cars. By the 1920s, they started showing up on production passenger cars. By the mid-1970s, they were required safety equipment in most vehicles in the United States (Epoch Times, 2025).
This is a pattern you are going to see again and again in this series. Something gets invented or improved on the racetrack because the racetrack is the hardest test. And then, slowly, sometimes over decades, it becomes part of the everyday car your family drives.
The racetrack is a laboratory. Always has been.
Oh, and one more thing about Harroun. His strategy in that 1911 race was not to drive as fast as possible. He drove at a calm, smooth pace. He focused on not blowing tires. The second-place car had to change tires seven times during the race. Harroun changed his only four times (Marmon Holdings, 2026). That tire strategy, just as much as the rearview mirror, is why he won.
Engineering. Strategy. Innovation. All three were already part of the Indianapolis 500 on day one.
Six Hours, Forty-Two Minutes
I want you to hold a number in your head for a moment. Six hours, forty-two minutes, and eight seconds.
That is how long Ray Harroun was behind the wheel of the Marmon Wasp on May 30, 1911. Five hundred miles. Two hundred laps. Average speed: seventy-four point six miles per hour (Indianapolis Motor Speedway, n.d.).
Let me give you that math in a way that lands. Today, the speed limit on most American highways is between sixty and seventy miles per hour. Harroun's average speed in 1911, on a brick track, in an open-cockpit car, was roughly the same as you cruising in your family's minivan on Interstate 65.
But the Marmon Wasp had no seatbelt. No helmet beyond a leather cap and goggles. No suspension worth mentioning. No power steering. And Harroun had to do this for almost seven hours straight, in front of eighty thousand people, with the constant rattle of brick under his tires.
Here is another way to think about it. In the 109th Indianapolis 500, run in 2025, the winner finished in about two hours and forty-five minutes (Wikipedia, Indianapolis 500, 2026). Same distance. Same track shape. The cars are now finishing in less than half the time it took Harroun.
Race car speeds have nearly doubled. Why? Because of everything else we are going to talk about in this series. Better tires. Better fuel. Better aerodynamics. Better engines. Better tracks. Better safety systems that let drivers push harder without dying.
But here is the part I find beautiful. The race is still 500 miles. The track is still 2.5 miles long. The grandstands still hold roughly 300,000 fans on race day, making it the largest single-day sporting event in the world (Visit Indy, 2024).
Some things change. Some things stay exactly the same. That tension between innovation and tradition is the story of the Indianapolis 500. It is also, if you stop and think about it, the story of every major scientific or engineering field. We push forward, and we honor where we came from. We change the tools, and we keep the question.
Wrap-up
I want to leave you with this.
Ray Harroun was an engineer first. He worked on a design team. He looked at problems and asked, "What if there is a better way?" The single-seat car was a question. The rearview mirror was a question. The tire strategy was a question.
Every single thing he did at the 1911 Indianapolis 500 came from him being curious about a problem and willing to test an answer.
Carl Fisher and his three partners were also asking a question. They asked, "What if we could build a place to test cars properly?" And then, when the gravel surface failed, they asked, "What if we built it out of bricks?" And then, when the small races did not draw crowds, they asked, "What if we made one giant race?"
Every part of the Indianapolis 500, from the bricks under the cars to the mirror on the dashboard, started with a question and a person willing to do the work to answer it.
Here is what I want you to think about this week. You are sitting in math class, or chemistry, or physics, or shop, or art, or English. And somebody on the other side of the room says, "When am I ever going to use this?"
Here is the honest answer. You may never use the specific equation. You may never recite the specific facts. But the habit of looking at a problem and asking "What if there is a better way?", that is the engineer's habit. That is Ray Harroun's habit. That is the habit that turns a brickyard in a cornfield into the greatest spectacle in racing.
Find one problem this week. Something small. A way your locker is organized. A way your team practices. A way your homework gets done. Look at it the way Harroun looked at the rear-facing mechanic seat. Ask, "Is there a better way?" And then try something.
That is how it starts.
Sources
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