Flashing back on some treasured auto artifacts
How about a brick from the actual Brickyard track at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway
With the popularity of Spectator columnist Mark McNeil’s Flashback pieces, I thought I would share some short anecdotes of auto racing memorabilia I have collected over the years.
I have amassed a lot of paper artifacts, such as old programs, photos and press kits, but here are three items that I believe are quite unique.
Ironically, I was given the Speedway Park piece by a fellow journalist at a drag race some years ago. The sign attaches to a car’s licence plate, and was probably sold at the track’s souvenir stand.
I have never seen another such piece, and it came to me wrapped in its original waxed paper. It must have been produced after 1965, the year Canada adopted its national flag.
Speedway Park was opened in ’61 on land at the northeast corner of Highway 20 (now Upper Centennial) and Mud Road.
The third-mile dirt oval ran regular Friday night shows and was built by the owners of Merrittville Speedway.
These owners sold the facility to a group of six, who paved the track and changed race night to Saturdays.
In 1975, the track’s name was changed to Satellite Speedway, but that was not enough to save it, as Cayuga and Flamboro Speedways were more popular, and it closed later that year.
While this part of the city has been highly developed, the land and vestiges of the track are still highly visible, including the berms on the corners and the main entrance off Upper Centennial.
In the mid-1970s, Cayuga Speedway owner Bob Slack commissioned the construction of a scale model of the facility. A group of modellers got together and not only replicated the track in 1/25th scale, they built models of the race cars that competed on the real track.
The display was exhibited at auto shows and malls to promote the speedway. This was a big undertaking as the display was the size of two ping pong tables and needed a full-size van for transportation. The display presented not only the track in miniature, but was complemented with the start/ finish stand, infield control tower and concession booths.
This monster sat covered up in a back room with other racing memorabilia under the auspices of the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame for many years. Slack was asked if he wanted it returned, but he declined. I was in the right place at the right time, and took the “Welcome Race Fans” sign off the display. The two boxes of packaged model race cars that went with the display were returned to those who built them.
The 9.5 pounds (4.3 kilograms) of baked clay is a brick from the track of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The 2.5mile (four-kilometre) oval opened in 1909 with a rough aggregate track surface that was deemed not suitable for racing after some motorcycle contests. So, that same year and 3.2 million bricks later, the Speedway was ready for business. The Wabash Clay Company was contracted to provide material and install the new surface, but 13 subcontractors were hired to help due to the size of the job. The bricks were laid on their side and, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, the cost of this resurfacing was $180,000, and if the bricks were laid end-to-end would stretch 455 miles (over 730 kilometres).
For 25 years, the Indy 500 was held on this brick surface after the first race in 1911, but by the mid-’30s the surface was dangerously rough for the drivers. Paving with asphalt started in ’36 with the track’s corners, and by ’61 the entire circuit except for a section of the front straight was asphalt. I acquired this three-foot (one-metre) section of original brick at the start-finish line at a charity auction years ago. After Dale Jarrett won NASCAR’s Brickyard 400 at IMS in 1996, he kissed the bricks, starting a new tradition that continues to this day.