The American Automobile Association, Part Four

In June 1915, the Contest Board of the American Automobile Association (AAA) launched itself on a path that would create a change of direction not only in the design of the American racing car, but that of American racing itself.

The Chairman of the Contest Board, Richard Kennerdell, was forced to face certain realities in early June 1915. The first was that the International Motor Contest Association (IMCA) was gaining in popularity, many of the State fair ground promoters jumping ship to align themselves the "outlaw" organization, especially after the banning of J. Alex Sloan for three years (along with Earl Moross, the former entrant of Barney Oldfield) from AAA sanctioned events. Sloan was to prove to be the very man that the IMCA needed to lead the effort.

The second reality was that there was a distinct possibility of entries beginning to dry up on the Championship Trail, the three car maximum per make per event perhaps being in need of revision. Kennerdell upped the maximum number per make in an event to five after the International Sweepstakes on Decoration Day.

This shortage was due to a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that there was another European war raging, this one already nearing its first anniversary. Plus, there was the cooling of the enthusiasm for many of the domestic automobile manufacturers for racing. Increasing the number of cars per make in an event was an attempt to head off a possible crisis for promoters when it came to entries.

The path that the Contest Board would follow had perhaps started as a faint trail earlier in California, but in Illinois that trail would become anything but faint. In early June, there was a Championship Trail event on the dirt track at Galesburg, Illinois. This event was swept by the four Duesenbergs in the field, headed by Eddie O'Donnell - the "Sebring" in fourth place actually being a Duesenberg. It was at another Illinois track at the end of June that the board track mania literally changed the direction of the Championship Trail.

After the experiments at Playa del Rey and Oakland with board plank tracks, the notion of using the board track as a means to provide a venue for automobile racing events began to be seriously considered by a number of potential promoters. Encouraged by the man responsible for constructing Playa del Rey, Jack Prince, a number of potential promoters began to look at the potential of using board tracks as the medium for their new tracks. One of these was David F. Reid, a Chicago investment banker.

Reid decided to build an oval constructed of wooden planks in the Maywood suburb of Chicago. The track would be two miles in length with a banking of 17 degrees. Despite the early enthusiasm shown by the members of the Speedway Park Association formed by Reid to construct the board speedway, a string of construction delays pushed the opening of the new Speedway Park to the end of June, a week later than originally scheduled.

Well publicized and promoted, with the additional advantage of being accessible by not only a good street system, but by public transportation, tickets sales were brisk. The first National Championship Trail event to run on a board track saw nearly 80,000 spectators fill the stands and the infield. This was a larger crowd than the turnout for the International Sweepstakes a month before. Reid also decided to run the race over 250 laps, a distance of 500 miles. This was a direct challenge to the brick speedway in Indianapolis.

Unfortunately, the race itself was not up to the same level as its lavish surroundings. Dario Resta simply motored off from the field in his Peugeot with only Jean Porporato in a Sunbeam staying remotely close - about three minutes - at the finish due to Resta backing off his pace and stroking to the finish. Despite not pushing the Peugeot and leaving much in hand, Resta managed to average an astounding 97.582mph, the fastest 500 mile race ever.

In third was a Maxwell driven by Eddie Rickenbacher, the first American home. Whatever it lacked on the track in terms of competition for this event, the Chicago track was an artistic winner. The Speedway Park Association looking at a profit if the turnout continued to be similar to this one.

The Championship Trail headed to the two-mile dirt track at Sioux City barely a week after the Chicago race. Steady rains that turned the track surface into something more likely to be found out in the surrounding farmland, plus many of the potential entrants having just competed in Chicago held the attendance down from the previous event.

The race was marred by the death of Charles "C.C." Cox when his "Orgen" - actually a Duesenberg - crashed after hitting the outside rail. Despite being involved in the accident with Cox and having to pit to change a wheel, Eddie Rickenbacher managed to charge back through the field and win the race. The low turnout put the promoters in the hole financially. And the fatality was not the best of advertising for future events.

The day after the Sioux City race, another Championship Trail event was run, this time in Tacoma, Washington. This running of Championship Trail events within days of each other, often hundred or even thousands of miles apart, was to prove disastrous as promoters could not guarantee the appearance of a field which contained more than a few of the leading drivers of the day. And then the day following the first Tacoma race there was yet another Championship Trail event at Omaha! So, between the 3rd and 5th of July, there were a total of four Championship Trail events held.

The track at Tacoma was a board track, but not as one would normally associate with the term: it was the same dirt track used previously - in the form of a slightly bent "D-shaped" oval - which had been covered by three layers of board planks, with the gaps between the boards being filled with crushed stone and then covered by asphalt and gravel. Apparently, it was worse than it sounds. Although the "formula" for the cars competing in Class E was called for a maximum displacement of 300 cubic inches, the Tacoma promoters opened the door for those with cars with a displacement of up to 450 cubic inches, the limit allowed the previous season.

The field, as mentioned, was reduced by the splitting of the teams. The turnout for the first of the two events, the 250-mile race for the Montamarathon Trophy, was not bad, an estimated 30,000 spectators. The crowd was treated to an good race, Glover Ruckstell in a Mercer prevailing over Earl Cooper's Stutz and finishing ahead of another Mercer, this one driven by Earl Cooper. For the second straight day on the Championship Trail, there was a fatal accident. As he was charging around the track, Billy Carlson had a tire explode on his Maxwell. The car struck the guardrail, crashed into an embankment, and killed Carlson and his riding mechanician Paul Franzen (or Framzen according to some sources).

The Maxwell team manager, Ray Harroun, announced the teams immediate withdrawal from the Championship Trail. As one of the major forces behind the change to the three car limit in Championship Trail events, the members of the Contest Board were very concerned about the consequences of the Maxwell team's abrupt departure, particularly since one of the hottest drivers in American racing at that moment - Eddie Rickenbacher - was a member of the team.

On July 5th, not only did Tacoma stage the second part of its doubleheader - 200 mile Potlach Trophy race, but the new Omaha Auto Speedway made its debut. Yet another collaboration of Jack Prince with a local entrepreneur - in this case Omaha contractor Burt LeBron - the speedway almost did not built. During the Winter of 1914, LeBron and Prince had a falling out and work on the track was suspended for several months. LeBron then hired another contractor to complete the track, which was located in the Carter Lake Horseshoe area of Omaha.

The Omaha track was 1.25 miles in length and at its steepest point on the racing surface, measured 41 degrees. This allowed the cars to reach speeds far faster than anticipated. The 300 mile event was won by Eddie Rickenbacher with Maxwell teammate Tom Orr in third, the pair being split by the Duesenberg of Eddie O'Donnell. There were only eight starters - one not entering the race until after an hour after it had started - and Rickenbacher won by nearly three minutes. The average speed of just over 91mph was achieved despite staying on the lower part of the track. It was still higher than many could imagine.

Meanwhile, out in Tacoma, again there were only eight cars taking the starter's flag. Mercer won again, this time with the popular Eddie Pullen at the wheel, with Earl Cooper once again in second place. In third, driving a Peugeot, was Barney Oldfield. Ray Harroun had allowed the Maxwell team cars to race in Omaha, but not Tacoma. Although the Maxwell cars would reappear, they would be in the hands of a private team, the factory making good its promise to disavow any participation in racing.

In a season that at this point was unraveling badly, more lunacy as the Contest Board sanctioned a Championship Trail event on the half-mile dirt track at Burlington, Iowa, with the Tri-State Fair Association as the promoter. This was a mere four days after the Omaha race, incidentally. The 100-miler was the partly the result of the Contest Board Chairman trying to keep IMCA at bay and partly as the result of past performance, the previous events having gotten excellent reviews.

As Russ Catlin bluntly states, "The race was a fiasco." There were only seven starters and race took over two agonizing hours to complete. Eddie O'Donnell was leading by six laps - after only 86 laps! -when a hub broke and Bob Burman won the long grind (average speed: 47.061mph) at the wheel of his Peugeot.

On August 7th, the lack of any rationale to the Championship Trail schedule and the purpose of the Speedway Association once again was open to question - there was the 100-mile Challenge Cup Match Race at the Chicago Speedway and the inaugural event at still another board track, the 300 mile event at the Des Moines Speedway on the new one-mile Jack Prince built track.

In Chicago, the event was essentially to be a match race between Barney Oldfield in a Delage and Dario Resta in his Peugeot. It was decided to flesh out the field with the Peugeot of Burlington winner Bob Burman and the Stutz of Earl Cooper. Simply put, Resta creamed the other three in front a crowd generously put at about 20,000. The major point of the exercise was that both Resta and Cooper broke the one hour mark and averaged 101.862mph and 100.575mph respectively.

Oldfield struggled in the Delage, being flagged after 46 of the 50 laps. While many whispered less than complimentary things about the performance of Oldfield in the match race, the truth was that the Delage was poorly prepared and well down on power compared to the other three cars - Barney never stood a chance.

Meanwhile, in Des Moines, the 300-miler originally scheduled for 31 July and which was postponed due to rain was finally run on the same day as the Chicago Speedway event. Unlike Chicago, Des Moines decided to go whole hog and dangled appearance money in front of the name drivers and they showed up to contest the $10,000 purse. Bob Burman was committed to the Chicago race, so did not start the event. So was Barney Oldfield, but despite running in an exhibition race it was never clear if Oldfield actually intended to race in the main event at Des Moines, a problem which became moot when the race was postponed.

The event itself gave the crowd of over 12,000 its money's worth. The Stutz of De Palma battled first with the Duesenberg of Eddie O'Donnell and then with Ralph Mulford in another Duesenberg, the latter passing both De Palma and O'Donnell as they battled for the lead at about the one-third mark.

Just past the halfway point, Mulford pitted for a tire change and with about 75 laps to go, re-joined De Palma in a battle for the lead, O'Donnell never far behind them. De Palma held the lead until with only three laps remaining he blew a tire allowing Mulford to finally get past him. Initially, the scorers thought that Mulford had unlapped himself and flagged De Palma the winner; however, a quick scoring check gave the victory and the $5,000 prize money to Mulford.

Sadly, yet again there was a fatal accident on the Championship Trail. Early in the race, after completing the 39th lap, the "Sebring" - actually a Duesenberg - of Joe Cooper blew a tire as he was running with De Palma. The car veered up the track, hit the guardrail, vaulted over the edge of the track and crashed. Both Cooper and riding mechanician Morris Kessler (often erroneously listed as "Keeler") were killed almost instantly. This was the third such fatal crash of the season, something the Contest Board as becoming increasingly concerned about.

Two weeks later, on August 20th, the race for the Chicago Auto Club Trophy was held on the road course at Elgin, Illinois. The 300-mile race was open to the Class E Championship Cars (maximum displacement of 300-cubic inches), with the nine starters being excellent entries and promising an excellent race.

The early leader, Ralph De Palma in his Mercedes, was soon in the pits to change the spark plugs, allowing the Stutz of Earl Cooper into the lead. At just past the midpoint, Stutz teammate Gil Anderson passed Cooper for the lead until the latter regained the lead 10 laps from the end. A fighting third was Barney Oldfield in the Delage he had driven earlier at the Chicago Speedway, now properly tuned for racing.

On August 21st, the 300-mile Elgin National Trophy event was run, this time allowing cars with a maximum of 450-cubic inches to compete. This allowed a few other cars to join the field, but most were holdovers from the previous day's event. The result was another one-two finish for the Stutz team, this time Gil Anderson taking the flag first ahead of Earl Cooper, with Eddie O'Donnell third in a Duesenberg.

The attendance at the two Elgin races was very sparse and the promoters, the Chicago Automobile Club, took a loss estimated at about $16,000. Although the overcast weather was the reason most often given for the financial disaster, the truth was that perhaps there were too many events in too small an area in too short a time.

Within relatively easy travel distance (by rail) from Chicago, there had been six Championship Trail events within a 12 week period. The region had simply been oversaturated with events, the crowds being very thin in the waning weeks of the onslaught. The very problem the Speedway Association had been created to avoid was now worse than ever - the racing schedule was as much a shambles as ever.

The Championship Trail next moved to the one-mile dirt track at Kalamazoo, Michigan. This race was a bare week after the financially disastrous Elgin road races, but was promoted well and the crowd was large enough - 15,000 - to make the event a success. The 100-miler was another victory for Stutz, this time Ralph De Palma doing the honors, with the Peugeot of Bob Burman in second.

The next two events are truly unique in the annals of the Championship Trail: back-to-back races on concrete speedways. The first was the 500-mile event held at the Twin City Motor Speedway near Fort Snelling, just outside Minneapolis, on September 4th.

The two-mile concrete track was expensive, fast, and provided an excellent race despite a sparse field for 500 mile race - only 14 starters. The 500-mile grind was exactly that, only six cars managing to make the full distance, the last one almost an hour after the winner was flagged. However, the winner was only 0.230 of a second ahead of the second place finisher, the closest finish in a Championship Trail event for decades to come.

The winner was Earl Cooper and in second was teammate Gil Anderson, the pair giving Stutz yet another race victory, its fourth on the trot. The close finish was the result of the Stutz team not realizing that after a series of pit stops, that the two cars were actually running in tandem and not a lap apart as originally thought.

The Stutz team dallied signaling the information to the drivers as long as possible to avoid a possible dustup between the drivers as they battled for the lead and allowing the Duesenberg of Eddie O'Donnell, a very distant third, take advantage of any possible overzealous behavior by the drivers. As it turned out, the finishing sprint was conducted cleanly with Cooper managing to get the merest of edges over teammate Anderson. The pair had been relieved by John Aitken and Tom Rooney respectively.

Although it was claimed that 30,000 showed up for the race, the promoters needed more spectators to start to dig themselves out of their financial hole. The third 500-miler of the season may have been an artistic success at the front of the field, but the grumblings and mutterings were becoming more audible to the Contest Board.

The second event of the concrete doubleheader was held two weeks later at the Narragansett Park Speedway, just outside Providence. This one-mile concrete oval was the original American concrete speedway and one of the few actually built although many were planned or discussed. This event saw the return of the Maxwell cars and Eddie Rickenbacher to the Championship Trail.

The high-flying Stutz team had Ralph De Palma back in the team and wanted to make it five in a row. The race was quite an affair since Rickenbacher pitted early, after 36 laps and lost two laps, then fought his way back through the field, slipping past first De Palma, then the Duesenberg of Willie Haupt, and finally the Peugeot of Bob Burman in the last 25 or so miles to take the lead and the victory. It was an astounding performance and one not repeated until the great Jimmy Bryan did it at Langhorne in 1954, losing two laps early on and still coming home in first place.

On October 9th, yet another track made its debut in 1915: the Sheepshead Bay Speedway. This was another board plank track and this one had Carl Fisher from the Indianapolis Speedway (at least for awhile), among other notables, involved in the organization which was formed to run the new speedway.

Originally intended to be a brick speedway, the decision to make it a board track was made late in the day, so to speak. The site selected for the speedway was on the site of a former horse racing track and literally minutes from midtown Manhattan, also being adjacent to the Coney Island amusement park area.

The two-mile track was a actually a structure with a concrete foundation and a steel framework supporting a wooden racing surface, a departure from the norm of an all-wooden structure generally being used in the board tracks. Then again, it was originally intended to be a brick track, but with more banking than Indianapolis, in this case, 17 degrees. The original date targeted by the promoters was Labor Day, but the schedule slipped to early October as the result of construction problems.

The Astor Cup Race was intended to be run on October 2nd, but rain forced a postponement until October 9th. Originally scheduled as a 500-mile race, the promoters took the advice of Carl Fisher and changed it to a 350-mile event. The field entered was one of the largest seen since the International Sweepstakes in late May, 20 starters with another dozen either not qualifying or not starting for various reason. Unfortunately, one of those not starting the race was Vanderbilt Cup-winner Harry Grant.

Grant wrecked his Maxwell during a practice session, the car hitting the top guardrail, catching fire, and then crashing, with Grant trapped in the cockpit. Pulled from the wreckage with serious burns, Grant survived the rush to the hospital where his burns were later described as "serious but not fatal." That, unfortunately, was not the case and Grant succumbed to his injuries.

The race saw an estimated turnout of 70,000 spectators. Although by any measure a substantial number of people to attend any sporting event of the day, the promoters were disappointed. The Astor Cup was a quite a race with the win eventually going to Stutz driver Gil Anderson with teammate Tom Rooney in second, the pair having battled most of the distance first with the Peugeot of Dario Resta and than the similar car of Bob Burman, the latter falling victim to the broken transmission on a few laps from the end, the ever present Eddie O'Donnell in his Duesenberg moving up to third in the closing laps.

Barely a month later, the speedway held another event, the Harkness Gold Medal Race on November 2nd. The 100-miler saw only six cars start the event on a crowd generously estimated at 35,000 witness it. Half of the starters were driving Peugeots, including the first two finishers - Dario Resta and Bob Burman. Eddie Rickenbacher was third in a Maxwell and the only other driver to complete the race distance. The race was an "invitational" event and the absence of the Stutz team had an impact on both the field and the attendance.

A meeting of the Speedway Association after the second Sheepshead Bay event was not a pleasant one. The high hopes of the early days of the season had been dimmed significantly in the wake of the realities of the results from the season now nearly over.

The lack of scheduling coordination by both the association and the Contest Board had created situations where the promoters were working at cross purposes and undercutting the sport as a whole. Any hopes of catching up with baseball and then closing the gap with horse racing - the sport with the largest attendance - was looking more and more like a pipe dream than a realistic one.

As usual, there was more than enough blame to spread around so that no one left empty-handed. One outcome of the Speedway Association meeting was that one was probably the right number of 500-milers in a season on the Championship Trail.

The 1915 season ended with two minor events: a road race in Phoenix at the Arizona State Fair and a another event at the San Francisco Exposition. The only real names to race in Phoenix were the winner, Earl Cooper in the #8 Stutz, and Barney Oldfield in a Fiat - which retired with engine problems almost as the event was called due to darkness and shortened from 150 miles to 109 miles. The San Francisco race was more in the way of an exhibition than a real race - only four starters taking their places.

However, of these there were Earl Cooper (Stutz), Barney Oldfield (back in the Delage), the then unknown Cliff Durant (Stutz), with "Terrible Teddy" Tetzleff ("Gandy" Duesenberg) and that is the order in which they finished the 104-miler, barely a second and fraction between the first two and newcomer Durant just over 20 seconds back from the dueling duo at the front.

As mentioned earlier, the season had ended up delivering much less than what most had anticipated from it. The year was a flop in some ways, but then it was also recognized that the new board tracks were an avenue which held much promise. The interest by the fans and the press in the new tracks was such that perhaps something could be salvaged from the season after all.

There was one problem that neither the Contest Board, the Speedway Association, the manufacturers, the press nor the fans could do much about: the European War. By the end of the season, the war was beginning to have a definite effect on motor racing: the supply of top echelon racing cars was now essentially finite for the foreseeable future.

There were no new cars crossing the Atlantic to join the Peugeots, Mercedes, Sunbeams, and the odd Bugatti already in America. The American manufacturers were beginning to respond to the situation, but the scene was decidedly changed from just the previous few seasons where both foreign cars and drivers mingled with their American counterparts.

The Contest Board committed itself to doing better for the coming season and had high hopes, as did all the others involved in the action on the National Championship Trail.