Many of you have seen this emblematic photograph of four men posing proudly atop their Indian motorcycles on the sands of Ormond Beach, "The Birthplace of Speed" near Daytona in 1909. I am sure far fewer of you have caught a glimpse of this shot however, of one of the machine's after going down on that gritty surface at top speed. The bike belonged to one of the four Indian riders, Birmingham, Alabama's Robert Stubbs, dealer and one of Indian's earliest racing stars. He was asked to accompany Indian's chief engineer Carl Oscar Hedstrom along with teammates Walter Goerke and AG Chapple to Ormond Beach in order to stretch out the new lot of Indian racing machine's to their limits. Each man from the "tribe" reached and broke new records at the 1909 Carnival of Speed with the exception of Hedstrom, who was reported as being too busy tinkering with his Simplex powered Hot Shot, which had too large a displacement to qualify for any FAM record runs. During a run on Wednesday afternoon Stubbs met and exceeded the limit of his powerful Indian twin racer, and at over 80 mph, undoubtedly the fastest creature on the planet earth at that moment he went over the bars. Stubbs not only came out of the incident unscathed but smiling, an unusual emotional break for a typically stoic man according to all photographic accounts... his machine however was done for the day.

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