Onboard a pair of Merkel motorcycles, Morty Graves and Al Ward run neck and neck on the 48-degree banked turns of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1910.
Part II:
The first decade of the American motorcycle was nothing short of sensational. Hundreds of manufacturers rolled thousands of machines out of their factories, each more capable than the one before. In a time when automobiles were still prohibitively expensive, motorcycles offered people of every status an urbane and practical mode of transportation. Local motorcycle clubs sprung up across the country, as did numerous trade publications describing the vast spectrum of motorcycling life. As an exhilarating offshoot of the wildly popular bicycle racing circuit, racing motorcycles had become one of the most popular sports in the country. Once competition reached a national level, the first racing stars emerged simultaneously with the first factory teams. Horse tracks remained an accessible venue for competitors and spectators alike, but hill climbs, and multi-day endurance runs allowed manufacturers a chance to truly test their machines. In the cycling world, motorcycle exhibitions became a popular featured event on the small, 1/8th mile wooden velodromes peppered across the country. Still, the machines had quickly grown too powerful for the bicycle velodromes; if the sport were to grow, a new venue would have to be built to accommodate them. With the velodrome as the blueprint, a new type of venue emerged that would take the country by storm—the American Motordrome.
These bygone cathedrals of frenzied triumph and recurrent tragedy produced a new breed of professional. The motordrome racers were a unique class, restless gentlemen of a newly dawned century who put their lives on the line every week to the delight of the enraptured masses. The brainchild of British high-wheel cycle champion John Shillington Prince, 26 wooden motordrome stadiums were constructed across America between 1909 and 1914. The first of which, the Los Angeles Coliseum, opened in March 1909 to sensation and acclaim, and within months the best motorcycle racers in America disembarked trains in Southern California to prove their mettle. Generally, the tracks were 1/4-mile circles with banking ranging from a soft 20 degrees to a nearly vertical 62 degrees and grandstands seating for up to 10,000 along the rim. They were typically bathed in electric light as night races were a favored spectacle, especially in the hot summer months. For those few daring enough to pilot their raw and untethered machines around these steeply banked and often roughly constructed board tracks, a prosperous life awaited, one full of adrenaline, accolades, and affluence. The machines quickly eliminated every comfort and convenience of the modern motorcycle, and the board track racers became little more than a 1,000 cc V-twin wrapped in a short, rigid frame with no brakes, transmission, or suspension.
The Motordrome was a sensation, and the sport swelled with both enthusiastic onlookers and the most daring contestants. Following the success of the Los Angeles Coliseum, Prince crisscrossed the country, erecting timber saucers from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Oakland, California, and from Atlanta, Georgia, to Denver, Colorado. Sadly, the combination of the rough and steep tracks and the powerful fire-breathing machines produced an uncommonly deadly result. Not all who entered a motordrome race crossed the finish line, and dozens of young men, often teenagers, many with young families, met a gruesome fate inside these 20th-century coliseums. Still, those who did find victory on America's motordromes and survived became sporting heroes and enjoyed careers in the industry long past their glory days. World War I hastened the inevitable end to what had been the intense and tumultuous five-year boom of the American Motordrome. The inherent danger of the increasingly capable machines, frequent weather disruptions, exceedingly high maintenance costs, and an undercurrent of distaste for the tragic gore hastened the Motordrome's abbreviated life span. Though the motordrome moniker would live on in the larger wooden superspeedways and smaller traveling Wall of Death thrill shows, the circular wooden bowls that spawned the name and captivated a nation began disappearing by 1915 and were officially banned in 1919. Now, over a century later, tales of the American Motordrome still captivate people, the machines have become some of the most sought-after in history, and the riders are icons of culture.
In this remarkable photograph, pioneer board track racers Morty Graves and Al Ward run neck and neck on the 48-degree banked turns of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1910. The LA Coliseum was America's first board track motordrome, built by Jack Prince in the Spring of 1909 after scaling up his initial experiment of a slightly larger wooden bicycle velodrome track in Clifton, NJ, the year prior. An experiment in design, the LA Coliseum was not circular but an oval featuring flatter straights and banked corners, a design Prince would return to in 1915 with the introduction of his massive multi-mile long board track superspeedways. The oval design, a direct adaptation of his wildly successful bicycle velodromes of the late 1800s, did not translate as well as he had hoped, and riders complained that it was difficult to take the increasingly powerful motorcycles to their top speed given the transition in banking. By the end of 1909, Prince would travel to Springfield, MA, home of Indian Motocycles, to build America's first circular, continuously banked Motordrome in an apple orchard leased by Indian co-founder George Hendee. Indian's other co-founder, Oscar Hedstrom, would develop and refine the board track racing motorcycle and begin recruiting the best riders in the country. After only a year since the first Motordrome was built, the first Golden Age of motorcycle racing in America had begun.