A History Nerd’s Very Incomplete Timeline of American Flat Track Racing
It’s a shitty, rainy Saturday afternoon, so no motorcycling going on. Not that the weather is making much of a difference anyway since both of my bikes are down.
Feels like the kind of weather that would have prompted Raymond Chandler to write “Killer in the Rain”. I don’t have such lofty aspirations, but Sean decided to give me homework as I was leaving The Basin on Thursday evening. “Give me something on American Flat Track” he says to me, as I’m walking out the door.
Fitting, since we’re going to the Sons of Speed Vintage Outlaw Motorcycle Racing event in 2 weeks (assuming I actually got off my lazy ass and wrote this whole thing on February 17th). Not fitting, since I know virtually nothing about flat track racing and this means I have to do research, which is work, which is something I don’t particularly enjoy doing.
But if you’re reading this, then I did the research and we’re all a bit more knowledgeable… maybe.
Oscar Hedstrom historic motorcycle
Oscar Hedstrom with his prototype racer, what may have been the very first Indian factory racing motorcycle, in front of the Ormond Hotel in late March, 1903
Now, you might not know it, but as Floridians, we walk on racing hallowed ground every day. Obviously, we all know about all the current yearly events that take place in our state.
But what you might not know is that everything that IS now can trace its origins right back to the hard packed sands of Daytona Beach on March 26th, 1903. On that day, in front of the Ormond Hotel, 3000 of the Gilded Age gentry gathered to bear witness to the first ever officially sanctioned automotive race, between (weirdly) 3 automobiles and 1 motorcycle – built and piloted by one Swedish immigrant named Carl Oscar Hedstrom.
On the side of his motorcycle, a marque destined to become iconic was painted – Indian. That fateful day changed people’s relationship with internal-combustion powered vehicles forever, as Hedstrom’s Indian motorcycle set a land speed record of 57 mph. 57 MPH IN 1903!!! With no suspension, no safety gear, running on bicycle tires.
It took Hunter Stockton Thompson another century to put into words what people instinctively realized that day: “… fast is better Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube.
That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba…”. From that day on, speed became a means, a goal, a purpose, a reward, a drug, a cure, a GOD.
As motorcycle manufacturing slowly found its footing in America, the first real wave of racing crashed against the shores of the New World in the early 1910s with the big (at the time) 3 – Harley Davidson, Indian and now long defunct Excelsior duking it out for supremacy on wooden velodromes, with high-tech, cutting edge, expensive prototypes.
If you’ve ever laid your peepers on one of those old sepia-toned photos of racers from back in those days, you might have noticed that the machines were really no more than bicycles with engines strapped to them and the safety gear, if any at all was about as crude as it got
