Indian Board Track Racer

 You won’t see many motorcycles here, mainly because I haven’t come across many that I thought were very interesting. I believe that this one that Walter O’Neal brought to the 2020 Foothills Antique Power Association Show is an exception. 

The show card that is displayed with the bike says it’s a 1919 Board Track Racer but I wonder if it’s not an earlier model. Most of the photos I have found online show two cylinder machines and they appear to be substantially heavier than this one. 

If you were to ask who was the first American motorcycle company, most people would probably say Harley Davidson, but Indian opened a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1901, almost two years before Harley Davidson was formed. The motorcycle company was involved in racing from the beginning. The first single cylinder Indians, designed by engineer Oscar Herdstrom, were intended to be used to pace bicycle races, but the story actually begins several years earlier. 

George Hendee was an industrialist who raced bicycles as a hobby. Apparently he was very good at it and managed to become well known as a successful racer. Being a smart businessman, he realized the value of his celebrity status and decided to cash in on it. In 1897 he began making his own line of bicycles under the name, Hendee Manufacturing Company.  This was the age when tinkerers were finding ways to power everything so a motorized Hendee bike followed a few years later. 

Hendee sold his first motorcycle in 1902 and an Indian won its first race, an intercity road race from Boston to New York City the same year. In 1903 Oscar Herdstrom set a world speed record of 56 mph on an Indian.  In 1906 two Indian dealers set a record by riding from New York to San Francisco in 31 days. By 1914 the nation's roads had improved to the point that Erwin ``Cannonball” Baker was able to cut the trans continental time down to eleven and a half days, riding an Indian from San Diego to the east coast. 

While these road races provided plenty of entertainment for the participants, they weren’t very exciting for spectators to watch and worst of all, promoters couldn’t charge admission. Early on, some races were held on horse racing tracks and even a few on the bicycle racing tracks that were called velodromes. It was the latter that inspired what was soon to come. The velodromes were constructed entirely of wood with steeply banked turns that permitted much higher speeds than a flat track. 

If they worked for regular bikes, why not motorized ones? Or so the reasoning went,  Labor and lumber were cheap and plentiful at the time and tracks could be constructed  quickly. The surface of the track was made of 2 by 4 and 2 by 2 inch boards and the spectator gallery was usually perched along the top edge of the steeply banked track, separated only by a low wooden wall that allowed fans to lean out and gawk at the action on the track. Some of these structures were quite large. One located in Beverly Hills was a one and one quarter mile track. If at this point you're thinking that all this sounds like a really bad idea you’re absolutely right.  

Those two bys quickly worked loose under the pounding of machines traveling in packs at speeds over 100 mph. They Became deadly obstructions, sending bikes and riders flying into other riders and spectators. The carnage was so bad that some wags in the press started referring to these motordromes as murderdromes. The mayhem at these events only served to increase their popularity and motordromes began popping up in cities across the nation.    

Race fans continued to pack these events throughout the roaring twenties. It wasn’t until the stock market crashed and the world was plunged into the Great Depression, that board track racing began to fade from the landscape. During the 30’s most people spent their time wondering where the next meal was coming from, not what they were going to do for entertainment. By this point most of the motordromes were so dilapidated that they were unusable anyway. All that remained was for the owners to arrange for suspicious fires and try to collect whatever insurance they could.   

Sources:

There are several websites where you can watch newsreel clips of board track races. One of the best that I found was at www.rockymountainatvmc.com/rm-rider-exchange/motorcycle-board-track-racing-forgotten…  this site has links to video clips and a good history of early motorcycles. 

www.smithsonianmag.com The early deadly days of motorcycle racing 

https://brainbucket.rumbleon.com/history-of-indian-motorcycles 

https://www.indianmotorcycle.com/en-us/history