History Auto racing 1894-1942

fur biscuit · Mar 18, 2010

kurtis said: ↑

They sure look Italian to me. The facial features suggest they are both southern Europeans and not Slavic.
Maybe they are Mexicans as one of the cars ended up there.
Click to expand...

The architecture is also very Italian.

Poor Williams.

Buildy · Mar 18, 2010

This might be a silly question,but is it possible the car Ray Keech was driving at Pottsville Was the Blitzen Benz,modified and re-powered with a Peugeot?

kurtis · Mar 18, 2010

The photo was definitely taken in Turin. Below is an medieval structure which is now a museum and it seems to match the photo with the FIAT.

Buildy · Mar 18, 2010

Nazzaro in the big Monster.

kurtis · Mar 18, 2010

Buildy said: ↑

This might be a silly question,but is it possible the car Ray Keech was driving at Pottsville Was the Blitzen Benz,modified and re-powered with a Peugeot?
Click to expand...

There's no such thing as a silly question Tony. It's only silly when we don't ask.

The front of the chassis certainly suggests it is a Benz.

bigken · Mar 18, 2010

On Ryan and I's Route 66 Adventure last summer, OLDBOBSIGN took us to this landmark near Lake Shore Drive, in Chicago..............

Michael Ferner · Mar 18, 2010

T-Head said: ↑

It was in very good unrestored condition with old paint & upholstery as last raced. It was in a small collection old racing cars that Bonhams? sold a couple of years ago.
Click to expand...

Found it!

http://www.conceptcarz.com/events/eventVehicle.aspx?carID=13580&eventID=161&catID=1198&whichpage=1

Surprised how much these old junkers still fetch! $216,000 for an also-ran that won less than a hundredth of that in competition - weird! And the wreck standing next to it, with lots of parts of uncertain parentage and no more success than the Lupasa, but a ubiquitous V8 Ford instead of its original and unique Brisko engine, had an estimate of up to half a million USD! The mind boggles, but then again, it was before 2007...

T-Head · Mar 18, 2010

J. Frank Duryea and Arthur Rice at the first auto race in the United States. I don't know if this is before or after the race but here they are sitting in the car.

Michael Ferner · Mar 18, 2010

fur biscuit said: ↑

Going to enlighten us further on the details of the "Beaver Bullet"?

It has a good look.
Click to expand...

Yes, a very nice car! Can't say too much about it, though. It was built by Charles Keene in 1914, and had a big Wisconsin T-head in it (5.1" * 5½" = 450 CID). Keene drove it himself at Indy, and was running second very early in the race, but soon dropped back and lost a lot of time. It survived the 500 miles in eighth position, out of thirteen finishers, and almost forty minutes back of the winner. A couple of months later, it retired in a 150 mile race at Galveston in Texas, and by 1920 Don Moore drove it in independent events. That's about it for the moment!

Michael Ferner · Mar 18, 2010

Buildy said: ↑

This might be a silly question,but is it possible the car Ray Keech was driving at Pottsville Was the Blitzen Benz,modified and re-powered with a Peugeot?
Click to expand...

I doubt that very much. The Blitzen was a very big car, and on top of it had a chain drive, so it would be a heck of a job to convert it. Maybe even the pointed radiator shell is a copy, rather than the real thing.

Michael Ferner · Mar 18, 2010

kurtis said: ↑

The photo was definitely taken in Turin. Below is an medieval structure which is now a museum and it seems to match the photo with the FIAT.
Click to expand...

Great find!

ehdubya · Mar 18, 2010

This certainly looks like Russian architecture and the same guy whoever he is.

kurtis · Mar 18, 2010

ehdubya said: ↑

This certainly looks like Russian architecture and the same guy whoever he is.
Click to expand...

Did you see the photo i posted of the medieval castle in Turin?

T-Head · Mar 18, 2010

You all liked the Fiat Beast photo I posted yesterday so I decided to post these.

I stumbled into these somewhere and have no information other than the first photo had a caption of 130 HP Fiat. It is obviously a European Road race. I have seen photos of the same inspection line that is in the last photo but cannot place it, regardless some great Fiat photos to study.

Someone out there I am sure knows where this took place.

ehdubya · Mar 18, 2010

kurtis said: ↑

Did you see the photo i posted of the medieval castle in Turin?
Click to expand...

Of course it's Turin and we know Soukhanoff was there, I'm thinking it's Bordino and Soukhanoff given the shot of apparently the same guy in what appears to be Russia and the likeness to Bordino.

fur biscuit · Mar 18, 2010

T-Head said: ↑

You all liked the Fiat Beast photo I posted yesterday so I decided to post these.

I stumbled into these somewhere and have no information other than the first photo had a caption of 130 HP Fiat. It is obviously a European or UK Road race. I have seen photos of the same inspection line that is in the last photo but cannot place it, regardless some great Fiat photos to study.

Someone out there I am sure knows where this took place.
Click to expand...

for a while, there was a website that had a great collection of prints for sale. They had purchased a collection of a guy who had been to a whole bunch of the GP's. The prints were very high quality giclee's, the down side was that the site was charging 100 euro's a piece for a print.

There were some amazing pit shots, and pre-race line up shots that i had never seen before. There were also a couple of shots that ended up in TASO Mathieson's book (which is the best pictoral history of the early GP's)

kurtis · Mar 18, 2010

T-Head said: ↑

You all liked the Fiat Beast photo I posted yesterday so I decided to post these.

I stumbled into these somewhere and have no information other than the first photo had a caption of 130 HP Fiat. It is obviously a European Road race. I have seen photos of the same inspection line that is in the last photo but cannot place it, regardless some great Fiat photos to study.

Someone out there I am sure knows where this took place.
Click to expand...

Felice Nazzaro - FIAT F2. Finished 1st.
1907 GP de l'ACF. @ Dieppe.

....through the villiage of Envernue.

kurtis · Mar 18, 2010

ehdubya said: ↑

Of course it's Turin and we know Soukhanoff was there, I'm thinking it's Bordino and Soukhanoff given the shot of apparently the same guy in what appears to be Russia and the likeness to Bordino.
Click to expand...

It's not Bordino either but the other photo could be in Russia. There's no other place on Earth with ugly, overdone, don't know when to stop architecture. Typically Eastern European.
There should be a photo from Brooklands out there somewhere so we can nail the identity of the Russian.

ehdubya · Mar 18, 2010

kurtis said: ↑

It's not Bordino either but the other photo could be in Russia. There's no other place on Earth with ugly, overdone, don't know when to stop architecture. Typically Eastern European.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be so sure it's not Bordino, there's definite similarities and I like Russian architecture and Gaudi'

gearguy · Mar 18, 2010

A friend of mine, Tom Arthur, posted a great "timeline" of American auto racing that he constructed on the vintage tab of the midget madness forum shortly before he died in November of 2008. He was chasing down a story of a road race in Wisconsin that predated the Chicago to Evanston event by several years. It stuck in that Bears fan's craw that my cheesehead ancestors could have been the "first" at racing. The timeline is on a "sticky" there yet today.

Tom would have loved this thread. He came to take photos at my church's car show in Wheaton, got lost and ended up on "Race Track Road." He was anxious to see if the historical society knew if there had ever been a track there.

When I lived in Warminster Pennsylvania I found another "race track road" and learned Carl Fisher of brickyard fame had tried to build a similar track there. If you look at Google Earth of Warminster you can see the remains of a sweeping 90 degree turn.

Chuck Schultz
Winfield, Illinois

T-Head · Mar 18, 2010

Some background information from a Pocher model site that has much Fiat info. They produced the beautiful 1/8 scale model we have all seen.

Three Fiat 130hp Racer's took part in the 1907 French Grand Prix at the Dieppe circuit and were driven by the greatest drivers of the time, Vincenzo Lancia, Felice Nazzaro and Louis Wagner. The winner was Nazzaro, running at the extraordinary average of 113.612 km/h.

Italy's Fiat Grand Prix car for 1907 was intended to end the French dominance of racing once and for all. A new formula was introduced based on fuel consumption (a maximum of 30 litre's per 100 km / 9.42 mpg) without any weight or engine capacity limits. Fiat introduced a car designed by Giovanni Enrico which was powered by a 4 cylinder 16,286 cc engine. The engine produced 130 bhp and the car weighed 1025 kg. Distinctive engine features were the 90° V-arranged overhead valves, hemispherical combustion chambers, centrally placed spark plugs and a Simms-Bosch magneto ignition.

Motor: 4 twin-block cylinders
Effective engine capacity: 16286 cc
Power: 130 HP at 1600 rpm
Speed: 160 km/h (100 mph)
Weight: 1025 kg

DRIVER FELICE NAZZARO

In 1907, at the age of 26, Felice Nazzaro was the greatest driver in the world. With his effortless and immaculate technique, he stayed at the top, retiring from premier level racing in 1924 after almost 25 years in the most dangerous game in the world.
A cagey driver, Nazzaro would often hang back at the beginning of a race, waiting for the leaders to fail and then would pounce into the lead, sometimes making the fastest lap in the process.

Nazzaro was very young when he started work in the workshop of the Ceriano brothers (Fiat founders) and he was soon competing for the new Fiat racing team. He won the Padua 200 km race in 1900 at the wheel of a red Fiat and the 1901 Giro d'Italia in a 6HP Fiat. The popular star of numerous Italian races early in the century, he even became an idol abroad, with a brilliant second place for Fiat in the Gordon Bennett Cup of 1905. Slight of build, gentlemanly of nature and immaculate in dress, his skill as a driver, mechanic and diplomat earned him the position of 'works' Fiat driver alongside Vincenzo Lancia in 1905.

1907 was Nazzaro's greatest year. He won the three most important races in the world; the Targa Florio in a Fiat 28-40hp, the Kaiserpreis Kaiser's Cup in Germany in a Fiat Taunis and THE most important race on the calendar, the French Grand Prix in the Fiat 130hp F2 Racer.

On the 8 June 1908, Nazzaro set the auto speed record at 193kph for 2.75 miles and briefly exceeded 200kph, the first driver in the world to do so.

kurtis · Mar 18, 2010

ehdubya said: ↑

I wouldn't be so sure it's not Bordino, there's definite similarities and I like Russian architecture and Gaudi'
Click to expand...

The work of Gaudi is, well, OK. I spent some time in Barcelona checking out most of his ideas and even climbed the Sagrada Familia.His smaller structure's were alot more tasteful. I came away thinking he was sniffing the same substance as Freud.

...back to racing.

Any info on this particular car?

1907 GP de l'ACF @ Dieppe.

Degrais stopping for fuel in the #2 Germain.
Finished 14th.

kurtis · Mar 18, 2010

gearguy said: ↑

A friend of mine, Tom Arthur, posted a great "timeline" of American auto racing that he constructed on the vintage tab of the midget madness forum shortly before he died in November of 2008. He was chasing down a story of a road race in Wisconsin that predated the Chicago to Evanston event by several years. It stuck in that Bears fan's craw that my cheesehead ancestors could have been the "first" at racing. The timeline is on a "sticky" there yet today.

Tom would have loved this thread. He came to take photos at my church's car show in Wheaton, got lost and ended up on "Race Track Road." He was anxious to see if the historical society knew if there had ever been a track there.

When I lived in Warminster Pennsylvania I found another "race track road" and learned Carl Fisher of brickyard fame had tried to build a similar track there. If you look at Google Earth of Warminster you can see the remains of a sweeping 90 degree turn.

Chuck Schultz
Winfield, Illinois
Click to expand...

Chuck,

The earliest known race in America was the Green Bay - Madison. 201 miler in Wisconsin held on the 16th - 23rd July 1878. Could this be the race you are referring to?

The37Kid · Mar 18, 2010

Another view of the 1907 Nazzaro FIAT

The37Kid · Mar 18, 2010

This is a new one to me, please tell us more.

kurtis said: ↑

Chuck,

The earliest known race in America was the Green Bay - Madison. 201 miler in Wisconsin held on the 16th - 23rd July 1878. Could this be the race you are referring to?
Click to expand...

ehdubya · Mar 18, 2010

The titans of Morris Park races 1905, it's reported Barney and Peerless weren't impressed with this type of racing not being able to oil or effectively water the horse tracks and wanted only to match race starting opposite sides of the track towards the year's end.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/ (Couldn't find a Christie pic)

gearguy · Mar 18, 2010

Kurtis:
That's the race Tom mentioned. It wasn't a popular topic in Chicago area historical circles as you can imagine.

Thanks!

Don Capps · Mar 19, 2010

kurtis said: ↑

Chuck,

The earliest known race in America was the Green Bay - Madison. 201 miler in Wisconsin held on the 16th - 23rd July 1878. Could this be the race you are referring to?
Click to expand...

This 200 mile odyssey was not a "race" and should not be considered one. It was along the lines of what would decades later be referred to as a "contest." It was a reliability contest for "steam wagons." However, there was a trial which could be construed as the first such "race" in America. I wrote an article on this some years ago and really looked into it because it was such an interesting footnote to American automotive history.

Here is something I wrote for an Italian sports encyclopedia ages ago:

<link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDon%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDon%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDon%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><style>  </style> In 1875, the Legislature of the State of Wisconsin offered a $10,000 prize by for a steam wagon for general agricultural and hauling purposes which had to be capable of hauling a heavy wagon and able to plow, run threshing machines, and perform other featsas the ingenuity or wisdom of the commissioners appointed by the Legislature might suggest. This had the unlikely result of the squaring off of two of the Steam Wagons as they were called produced to win this prize on the one-mile horse racing track at the Oshkosh (Wisconsin) fairground on a Saturday afternoon in August 1878. The two Steam Wagons one from Oshkosh and the other from Green Bay made one head-to-head run against each other on the track. The Green Bay Steam Wagon had better acceleration and was far head of the Oshkosh Steam Wagon, generally judged as being between an eighth and a quarter of a mile, when the Green Bay machine emitted a loud Bang! and rolled to a stop. The Oshkosh Steam Wagon chugged past the stopped Green Bay machine and recorded a time of four minutes and 41 seconds for its lap of the one-mile horse track. It is entirely possible that this contest on 20 August 1878 was not only the first race in America, but also supports the notion that racing literally began when there were two machines available and a track to compete upon.

Here is something from the files I have on this contest:

Green Bay
Daily State Gazette
Sunday, July 21, 1878

The Steam Wagons

Several tests were made with the steam wagons at Oshkosh on Saturday in which, as near as we can learn the Cowles machine made a good record. In estimating and describing the machine, the Northwestern which is generally fair is in this case apparently influenced somewhat by opinions of home mechanics who have a natural partiality for a home machine. It says: The Green Bay machine got here badly out of order and was all day yesterday in the hands of the machinists at Morses shop. Crowds of people were attracted to the shop to see the curiosity and a curiosity it was to be sure. The machine is the most clumsily built and contrived concern it would be possible to imagine. Without the slightest prejudice whatever it is pronounced a perfect curiosity by the best mechanics that look at it. It exhibits the most curious specimens of ingenuity, the ingenuity of puzzling movements and complications rather than simplicity and mechanical economy. All four wheels are on a sort of ball and socket joints and each turns in and out independently of the axle. The boiler is horizontal and the general outline, with cab and all, is much like a miniature railroad locomotive. Instead of propelling with an endless chain the motion is reduced from the cylinders by a succession of gears. It is massive and homely in the extreme, if any comparison is allowed with the Oshkosh machine.

The Northwestern continues in regard to the machines and the tests of power and speed.

Todays Tests

The programme for today was arranged for a hauling match and a trial of speed on the race track at the fair grounds. The hauling match consisted of hauling heavy loads of lumber weighing about three tons from Foster & Jones mill to the Fair grounds. The steamers hitched on the loads
at the mill and both then took a circle around the block in the loose sawdust roads of that vicinity.
Both machines were going along finely the Oshkosh in the rear, when the Oshkosh turned out of the road and undertook to pass the Green Bay machine. In so doing a wheel on the loaded wagon dropped into a hole which broke the log chain which attached the lumber wagon to the road wagon. A toggle was made and the next start, which was something of a jerk, broke a pin somewhere about the machine which necessitated sending to the shop for a new one. It had got so late that instead of hauling the loads to the fair grounds they were hauled about town in the various streets until noon and the trial of speed at the fair grounds was set for the first thing after dinner. The load hauled by the Oshkosh was put on the scales and weighed 9,100 pounds. The other load was not weighed, but probably was about the same weight. Quite a little mishap occurred to the load hauled by the Oshkosh in front of the Beckwith House. The machine was under considerable headway when, on account of a frightened horse, the engineer suddenly slacked up, and as there was nothing to hold back the load, the lumber wagon veered sidewise, snapping off the tongue and allowing the wagon to run into the sidewalk smashing one of the fore
wheels.

At the Fairgrounds

The trial of speed at the Fairground this afternoon resulted in a total failure for the Green Bay machine. She was totally unable to make a mile without stopping either for want of steam or from heated journals. She made three attempts without success. The Oshkosh made one run with her outside tires or shoes on in 4:35. Both engines were then started together and the Green Bay machine outstripped the Oshkosh in speed, and had she made the mile would have beaten the Oshkosh probably a quarter of a mile. Near the distance post, however, the Green Bay machine came to a stop with a bang and could not proceed a foot further. The Oshkosh sailed past and
came under the wire in 4:41. This time she was without her traction tires. The general opinion is expressed that the Green Bay machine cannot reach Madison in the required time should she start out.
Both machines start this afternoon for Fort Atkinson and are allowed to choose their own roads and running time. At Fort Atkinson a field test will be made when the machines that get there will be allowed to run wild to Madison via Beloit.
In regard to the hauling test, it is due Mr. Cowles to say that some who witnessed that test and described more accurately its details affirm that his machine gained more of a victory in hauling than appears from the foregoing. They claim that the Cowles machine pulled a heavier load, and with greater ease; also that the Oshkosh machine on a soft road can only start a heavy load with a jerk while Cowles machine starts off easily and smoothly. However, the report of the commissioners will determine these points.

T-Head · Mar 19, 2010

Nice photo of a Miller engine that someone must have been tuning. The jet bar is out of the forth carb and loose and unfastened from the fifth. The plug wires are also off. These are very time consuming carbs to jet correctly with the barrel throttles uncovering multiple jets.

I will try to show some photos or drawings of just how these Miller carburetors work in the future.

ehdubya · Mar 19, 2010

Great story Don, the snapping of the hitch sounds like peak torque is instantaneous from whoa-go-whoa. Could be the world's first 'truck' race too

History Auto racing 1894-1942

fur biscuit ALLIANCE MEMBER from ...wait, what Tucson?!

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