Ormond Beach: The Birthplace of Speed
Near Daytona, Florida
You are passing through Ormond Beach, and if you have ever driven fast anywhere, you owe something to this stretch of hard white sand.
In the winter of nineteen oh two, a handful of wealthy automobile enthusiasts looked at this beach and saw something nobody else had: twenty-three miles of packed sand, five hundred feet wide at low tide, flat and firm enough to serve as the world's finest natural racetrack. They were right.
In January of nineteen oh three, Alexander Winton brought his Bullet racer here and raced it against Ransom Olds in the Pirate, a car named for what it felt like to drive. Winton won by two-tenths of a second. Henry Ford came too, testing the machines he believed would change the world. The American Automobile Association sent official timers, and Ormond Beach earned the title that still appears on its city signs today: the Birthplace of Speed.
The records fell fast and hard. In nineteen oh four, the flying mile world record was broken three separate times in thirty minutes. In January of nineteen oh six, a car called the Stanley Rocket, driven by Fred Marriott, hit one hundred twenty-seven point six miles per hour on this beach, a land speed record that stood for four years.
Then the money followed. Henry Flagler, John D. Rockefeller's partner in Standard Oil, had already bought the Ormond Hotel and turned it into a Gilded Age destination. In nineteen fourteen, Rockefeller himself arrived as a guest, drawn by the sea air and the sunshine. He liked it so much that in nineteen eighteen he purchased an estate here called the Casements, and spent his winters in Ormond Beach until his death in nineteen thirty-seven at the age of ninety-seven. Locals called him Neighbor John. He walked the streets distributing dimes to the adults and nickels to the children he met along the way.
The beach races eventually moved inland to the Daytona International Speedway, just a few miles south of here. But the obsession with speed that made NASCAR possible was born right here, on this sand.
