The Roots Of Racing
Sports Illustrated March 7, 1955
Written by: Horace Sutton

Shortly after the century turned, a band of social sportsmen went down to Florida to play in the sand. They brought along a new toy, the sports car, which they delighted in racing along the hard-packed, Atlantic-washed shoreline of Ormond Beach. William K. Vanderbilt Jr. showed up in a 90-hp Mercedes. Spectators came to watch in tweeds and wing collars, parking their fringed surreys at the edge of the grassy dunes and turning up the velvet collars of their chesterfields against the chill wind.

There were some unsocial aficionados too. An inventor, Henry Ford, lived in a tent on the sand. But he couldn't scrape together enough money to have his cracked crankshaft repaired, and he was never in the running. Alexander Winton, in cap and goggles, leaned on the bare steering wheel of the Winton Bullet, a contraption that was little more than an engine mounted on four wire wheels, and sent it zooming down the sands at 68.198 mph.

When Willy Vanderbilt cracked a world record in his Mercedes in 1904, a whole stream of speed fanciers headed south. Among them were Ransom E. Olds, who gave his name to the Oldsmobile and his initials to the Reo, Vincenzo Lancia of Italy, Louis Chevrolet of France and F.E. Stanley, who built the Steamer.

The raceway was incomparable. From Ormond the beach stretched southward to Daytona, a flat, gleaming straightaway for 23 unbroken miles, water-cooled and resurfaced by the tide twice a day. Daytona became Speed City by-the-sea. Victor Demogeot, in an eight-cylinder Darracq, covered an amazing two miles in less than a minute, and soon Major H.O.D. Segrave and Sir Malcolm Campbell were roaring up the sands at better than 200 mph. By 1935 Campbell and his Bluebird had done Daytona at 276.82.

The sand strip that the social sports car enthusiasts discovered is now officially classified as a state highway. It is safe to say that it is the only state highway in the nation that is underwater half the time. During the times that it is high and dry, it becomes a concourse for thousands of motorists either en route between Miami and the northlands or merely joyriding on what Daytona immodestly refers to as the World's Most Famous Beach.

Although the speed limit is 10 mph, a driver who would like to burst the bonds of propriety and the law may race over the sands once a year—during the Speedweeks just ended. Those who tried paid $10 to join NASCAR and another $2 for hospitalization insurance. Any driver able to get the family jalopy up to 100 mph over the two-way course qualified for membership in the Century Club.

There are signs that the mechanized pilgrimage may move from the beach to the mainland side of Daytona, where plans are afoot to build the fastest 2?-mile speedway in existence. With stands for 30,000, it will cover 600 acres adjacent to the Daytona airport. The nation's largest stock car races will be held in February, the object being to perpetuate racing in Daytona, its natural birthplace, rather than Indianapolis, its adopted home, or the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah, an upstart competitor.

A deserted sandbar in its early racing days, Daytona Beach now has 15 miles of motels; the dunes where Ford pitched his tent are now a beachfront occupied by Ellinor Village, the nation's largest family resort, with a capacity of 3,000.

When there are no races, Daytona visitors can browse through the new Museum of Speed, which contains Campbell's Bluebird and other immortals of the sands. Or with Walter Mitty dreams, they can send their own Buick along the World's Most Famous Beach, albeit at 10 mph. Overhead, Daytona's seagulls will wheel and wing and catch bread bits on the fly. And far above, down from the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville, Banshees and Cutlasses (600 mph), the new speed merchants, chalk lazy vapor doodles on the blue, flying over the Daytona Speedway like homing pigeons out of a new era, drawn irresistibly to their right cote.