Racers from Harley-Davidson and Indian exit a corner of the 1.25 mile long Beverly Hills Speedway during the inaugural motorcycle races held on April 24, 1921. From front to back are #2 Ray Weishaar, #1 Otto Walker, #5 Fred Ludlow, #3 Jim Davis, #4 Ralph Hepburn, and #15 Curly Fredricks. See rare, original film footage from this race at the Archive moto Youtube Channel HERE!
Part IV:
In the years preceding WWI, motorcycle racing in the United States had grown from low-speed grudge matches on local horse tracks to unrestrained, factory-supported speed blitzes on motordromes, flat tracks, and superspeedways. With Harley-Davidson entering the sport in 1914, the two central competing brands, Indian and Excelsior, found themselves in a three-way battle against a well-funded and laser-focused adversary. Local dirt flat tracks continued to rise in popularity, and the Dodge City 300 became the sport's premier race. Still, as the gates of America's infamous board track saucers, the fabled motordromes closed, a new breed of track soon emerged.
Inspired by the success of the large speedways in Indianapolis and Atlanta, famed motordrome pioneer Jack Prince scaled his latest board track design to the proportion of those tracks in an effort to accommodate increasingly popular automobile races. In 1910, Prince had experimented with the idea with the circular 1-mile Los Angeles Motordrome at Playa Del Rey and once again with the 1/2-mile oval motordrome in Oakland the following year. Though the smaller circular motordromes of the early teens were no small effort or expense to construct, Prince's new extra-large wooden ovals, with their flat straightaways and banked turns, would be mammoth projects. These new timber speedways would be built using millions of board feet of lumber, hundreds of tons of nails, thousands of cubic yards of concrete for the foundations, and multiple acres of land—none of which came cheap.
In June 1915, fans poured into Chicago's massive new 2-mile wooden oval at Speedway Park in Maywood, America's first board track speedway. Construction began in late 1914 and occupied 230 acres of farmland just west of downtown Chicago. The design took the building techniques of the early circular board track motordromes and scaled them up several times over. Instead of a constant, circular banking with grandstands perched precariously along the upper rim, the track at Speedway Park elongated the course back into the familiar oval, banking only the corners while leaving the straights flat and placing the grandstands safely removed from the action along the straight-aways. Upon completion, Speedway Park used 14 million board feet of expensive yet smooth and fast poplar 2x4s, 500 tons of nails, 50,000 cubic yards of cement, 15,000 concrete piers, 1,000 tons of steel, and over 6 miles of new roads leading to the venue. The high-speed poplar boards were laid 60 feet wide on the straights, with an extra 10 feet of width in the corners, banked at 19 degrees. Opening day was June 26, 1915, with former motor-pacer driver turned auto racing icon Barney Oldfield hitting a blistering hot lap of 111.5 MPH in front of the 80,000 spectators.
Soon, the elites in motorcycle competition from the Big Three factory teams, names like Otto Walker, Joe Wolters, Carl Goudy, and Gene Walker, would be smashing speed records on the boards at Chicago’s Speedway Park. A new boom in track racing and construction had arrived, and in 1915 alone, similar tracks sprang up in Tacoma, Omaha, Des Moines, and Sheepshead Bay. However, in 1916 professional motorcycle racing was suspended given America’s seeming inevitable involvement in WWI, and many of the country's top competitors enlisted for duty. The F.A.M., America's sanctioning body since 1903, dissolved, and a new organization, the Motorcyclists & Allied Trades Association (M&ATA), took its place in 1919. Over the next decade, 17 more board track superspeedways were completed, hosting the world’s best auto and motorcycle racers well into the 1920s.
Professional racing also returned in 1919 with a season bookended by two spectacular 200-mile races. The first took place at Los Angeles’ Ascot Park and the second a Grand Prix in Marion, IN, both dominated by Harley's reassembled factory team. In the years to come, thoroughbred machines, world-class venues, and factory teams overflowing with superstars made for some of the most ferocious and exhilarating racing the country had ever seen. Though many manufacturers had met their demise in the lean years of WWI, the battle between America's Big Three was reignited. These were the years of Harley-Davidson's fabled Wrecking Crew, a factory team stacked with legends who defined the quintessentially American brand. However, the team itself was only together for three years before The Motor Company pulled the plug on its racing program in 1922. A few retired, some signed with Indian and Excelsior, and a handful continued racing Harleys under special contracts or onboard machines they purchased after the 1921 season.
This photograph comes from the high water mark of America's first great era of motorcycle racing. The racers exit a corner of the 1.25-mile-long Beverly Hills Speedway during the inaugural motorcycle races held on April 24, 1921. Speeds that day exceeded 100 mph averages, with Harley-Davidson's Otto Walker and Jim Davis each taking a first-place finish. Indian's Shrimp Burns took the other two wins despite a nasty crash during the second race. From front to back are #2 Ray Weishaar, #1 Otto Walker, #5 Fred Ludlow, #3 Jim Davis, #4 Ralph Hepburn, and #15 Curly Fredricks. This event is also one of the rare races caught on film that has survived until today; head over to the Archive Moto Youtube Channel to watch this priceless film footage.
At the start of the decade, the Prohibition Era was a time of purebred, Class A competition in which fearless men consistently pushed what was thought possible on two wheels. However, the 1920s also marked the end of the first golden age of American motorcycle racing, and by the close of the decade, American enthusiasts had smaller engines, abandoned tracks, and far fewer racing heroes to look up to. Few were spared when the markets crashed in 1929, and the Big Three, Harley, Indian, and Excelsior, all struggled to stay afloat. Innovation slowed, factory racing all but vanished, and for Excelsior, 1931 marked the end of the road for the storied American motorcycle marque. In desperate need of change, the industry pushed forward focusing on style and simplified engineering centering around on Flathead engines and middleweight displacement. The desperate times produced desperate measures, but the efforts across the industry soon gave birth to a new age in motorcycle racing. A new racing class emerged on the flat tracks and hills across America, the more inclusive class C, the everyman’s class, and more specifically the stout and sturdy 750cc displacement. It was the beginning of a new era, the age of the mighty "45" which would captivate American motorcycle enthusiasts for decades to come.