Board Track - Old Racecourses

I've always been fascinated by the concept of racetracks made of wood. Unfortunately, I came along too late to watch big cars run on the board tracks that sprang up from coast to coast.

About the closest I came was listening to a sportswriter who came from Tipton, Indiana, to take my place for a couple of years during the Vietnam War.

Ham Rigg grew up in Pennsylvania, and he told me his first exposure to motorsports was a race at the board track in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1927. It was in the waning days of that track, and he told me of the children who climbed up through the support structure to stick their heads up through openings created by missing boards to watch the action "up close and personal."

"It had to scare the hell out of a driver to look down the track and see a head looking at him," Rigg recalled.

That image has stuck with me for 30 years or more, and it helped me realize why the board track era didn't survive nearly long enough for me to get in on it.

Wood didn't weather well back then, especially in locations where the tracks were subjected to the rigors of winter. Despite that, the track 12 miles north of Altoona lasted longer (1923-31) than any of the two dozen built between 1910 and 1928. It burned in 1936. Helping hasten the demise of racing at Altoona was the track's fatality rate. Among those who died on the Altoona boards were Indianapolis 500 winners Howdy Wilcox, Joe Boyer, and Ray Keech.

Another Pennsylvania track, at Uniontown, ran for seven seasons (1916-22) and is now a golf driving range.

The shortest life of any of the board tracks was the one built by Carl Fisher, who built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Fisher's board track was built at Biscayne Bay, Florida, near Miami in 1926. Peter DePaolo won the first and only race before a hurricane demolished the place.

Given the manner in which the board track era was ushered in, those racing fans of 90-plus years ago knew it was going to be an exciting one. It was a popular form of racing, one that appealed to a public curious to see just how fast a race car could run.

In 1916 a reported 85,000 fans turned out in the Chicago suburb of Maywood to watch Dario Resta win the first race at that track. That same year, 65,000 fans turned out at Sharonville, Ohio, near Cleveland, for the inaugural race.

The first race at San Carlos, near San Francisco, drew 40,000 fans in 1921. Four years later, a throng of 72,000 jammed the track at Rockingham, New Hampshire, to witness one of the several board track victories by DePaolo.

The first of the board tracks was a round, high-banked one-mile track at Playa del Rey, in the Los Angeles area just a short hop from the beach. The inaugural event for this novel new racing venue was to have been a match race between Ralph DePalma and Barney Oldfield, two rivals from the dawn of motorsports. However, DePalma wasn't able to get his 200hp creation, dubbed "Mephistopheles," to the race to take on Oldfield and his "Blitzen Benz."

Caleb Bragg not only agreed to step in to replace DePalma with his own Fiat 90, but the 22-year-old son of a wealthy Cincinnati, Ohio, publisher also posted the prize money.

The two agreed to race in three, two-lap sprints on the mile circle, with the entire $2,000 going to the driver who won two of the three dashes. To the surprise of the cigar chewing Oldfield, as much a motorsports veteran as anyone in the nation, Bragg won the first two sprints and put his prize money back in his pocket.

Although he moved on to road racing and three relatively unsuccessful starts in the then-new Indianapolis 500, Bragg returned to Playa del Rey in 1912 to prove his victory over Oldfield was no fluke. He won a five-mile match race and, along the way, set U.S. closed-course records for every mile distance except the first.