The Indianapolis Five Hundred

On Memorial Day of nineteen eleven, forty cars lined up on a new two-and-a-half-mile oval west of Indianapolis. The surface was paved in three million, two hundred thousand hand-laid bricks, hence the track's nickname, the Brickyard. The race was called the International Five Hundred Mile Sweepstakes.

Ray Harroun won it in six hours and forty-two minutes at an average speed of seventy-four point six miles per hour in a Marmon Wasp with a single seat and, mounted on a bracket behind him, a small rearview mirror, possibly the first rearview mirror ever used in competition. Carl Fisher, the Indianapolis entrepreneur who built the track, had conceived it not as a spectacle but as a laboratory. Automobile manufacturers were locked in a race to prove their cars reliable and fast, and Fisher offered them a five-hundred-mile test bed every May.

The speeds crept up year by year. Thirty years after Harroun's win, Wilbur Shaw was averaging a hundred and fifteen miles per hour. A little over a decade after that, in the early nineteen fifties, Bill Vukovich was pushing past a hundred and thirty.

By the nineteen nineties, Arie Luyendyk would qualify at over two hundred and thirty miles per hour. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway became the world's largest spectator venue, and the permanent seating and the infield together can hold more than two hundred fifty thousand people, and for decades the race drew capacity crowds. The event shaped American car culture, accelerated development of safety features from rearview mirrors to roll cages, and gave Indiana its most recognizable annual ritual.

The month of May in Indianapolis means qualifying runs and garage gossip and the slow build toward a race that has been running, with only a few wartime interruptions, for more than a century.