Over the weekend we had the good fortune to stumble upon some amazing ancient footage from the earliest days of American motorsport, thanks to a very interesting blogsite the Jockey Journal.
Imagine the noise and the reverberation of those incredible machines as they lapped a banked track at speeds of over 100 mph, and this in the first decades of the 20th century.
Apparently by the 1930s wooden board track racing had almost disappeared – a victim of economics (it cost a fortune to keep the wooden tracks in race-able shape) and safety regulations (numerous racer and crowd deaths were recorded over the short history of the sport).
And the machines that these guys were racing were truly beautiful in a stripped-down mechanically basic sort of way. We’d love to hear from any collectors of these machines, and of any board tracked racing venues still in existence.
BOARDTRACK INDIAN MOTORCYCLE RACING — 1920
DPLA_Auvinen | MySpace Video
