GRIM REAPER RODE SHOTGUN WITH HIM
Race car driver Oldfield’s laundry list of injuries highlighted in 1910
The name Barney Oldfield won’t ring many bells today. But in the early 1900s, he was “the most famous speed annihilator in the Western Hemisphere.”
Simple translation: he was a race-car driver.
Oldfield was a pioneer in the early days of automobiles, arguably the first professional auto racer in the United States. Originally a bicycle racer, in 1902 he was recruited by Henry Ford to drive his Ford-Cooper 999 race car in a five-mile race near Detroit.
He had never driven a car before, but won the race and was hooked. A year later he became the first person to drive 60 miles per hour. In 1910, he set three world records at Daytona Beach in Florida, including a new land-speed record of 131.7 m.p.h.
He was a dashing figure in a daredevil profession, fearlessly thundering around tracks in speedsters with names such as Winton Bullet, the Green Dragon and the Lightning Benz.
Racing cars in the early 1900s was a risky business; drivers were often killed or injured trying to manoeuvre their primitive machines at death-defying speeds. Which may be why on Oct. 22, 1910, the Vancouver World chose to run a feature story on all the accidents Oldfield had been in.
“He is credited with killing more spectators than any other knight of the wheel, and has been through more fences than any of them dared to attempt,” said the story, which was illustrated by a shot of Barney chomping down on a cigar, his signature look.
Then the story went through his accidents one by one. In 1902, he crashed through a fence during a race in Detroit and killed two spectators. Oldfield broke an arm and some ribs.
In 1904, he was blinded by clouds of dust in a race at the St. Louis World’s Fair, drove through a fence and killed two people. This time he broke a leg, “badly cut” his head and “crushed” his chest, leading to three months in hospital.
Thankfully Oldfield doesn’t seem to have killed any more spectators. But the story points out he broke his shoulder and smashed his arm and face when he was hit by a competitor and crashed through a fence in Detroit in 1905.
In 1906, he almost drowned when a tire exploded at Ormond Beach, Fla., and he was thrown into the ocean. In 1907, he broke his ankle when he struck a tree in a road race at Lowell, Mass.
Many early races featured cars driven by “chauffeurs” hired by rich men to drive their cars. But Oldfield was his own boss, spending big cash on his autos (he paid $14,000 for his Lightning Benz, which would be around $340,000 today).
A showman, he raced in exhibitions all across North America. In July 1907, he threatened to jump from the window of a hotel in Portland when he was accused of advertising a “bunco” auto race where he knew “none of the entries listed intended to participate.”
He often was at odds with racing officials, which sometimes got him banned from big racetracks like Indianapolis. But it didn’t seem to matter when he was able to charge $4,000 (almost $100,000 today) just to make an appearance.
On July 20, 1912, he came to Minoru Park racetrack in Richmond. More than 5,000 people came to the track to see Oldfield and four other racers, along with the regularly scheduled horse races.
Alas the 300-horsepower Christie racer Oldfield brought had engine trouble and he wasn’t able to set any Canadian speed records.
He did provide some thrills, however. Before it had engine trouble, the World reported the “big, lowslung, car” shot down the track “spitting flame and emitting a roar like a battery of artillery … dashing up the straight stretch dipping like a speedboat in a groundswell, seeming to clear yards at a single bound clear of the earth.”
Oldfield gave up racing in 1919. He lost $250,000 in the stock market crash of 1929, but didn’t go totally bust — he still owned a country club in Beverly Hills. He died of a heart attack on Oct. 4, 1946, at 68.