Gasoline in His Blood

Automobile racing in America got off to a roaring start in Ormond Beach, Fla. a century ago on the hard-packed sand.

“This is where it all started,” says Tim Sullivan, standing on the windy shore at Ormond Beach, Fla. On this stretch of sand, he explains, gentlemen in racecars first started their engines, adjusted their goggles, and sped off down the beach.

Automobile racing in America got off to a roaring start in Ormond Beach a century ago on the hard-packed sand. The town’s flat, broad beach was an ideal place back in the early 1900s to test the newfangled horseless carriages, Sullivan says, at a time when roads—the few there were—were just rutted buggy trails.

“It must have been something to see,” declares Sullivan, who claims he was born with gasoline in his blood.

After a long career of racing-related jobs, starting with ticket-taker and working up to flagman, NASCAR racing promoter, and radio broadcaster, Sullivan now volunteers his time as president of the Motor Racing Heritage Association, a community organization the Ormond Beach resident helped establish.

“We want everyone to know that auto racing and the quest for world speed records in this country began here, and that led to NASCAR stock car racing on the beach, and later, on the paved speedways,” says Sullivan, who passed his love of motorsports on to his son, Tim Sullivan Jr., a publicist for NASCAR driver Bobby Labonte.

Among the organizers of a 1903 speed contest were two of the country’s leading auto manufacturers, Alexander Winton and Ransom Olds. The two Northerners were winter residents of Florida who, along with Ormond Beach business leaders, saw great economic potential for automobile races on the firm beach—an ideal racing straightaway.

When the green flag fell that blustery day 100 years ago, says Sullivan, it signaled the start of what would become one of the most popular sports in America—and gave the sleepy town of Ormond Beach its nickname, “The Birthplace of Speed.”

The 1903 Speed Carnival pitted Winton and his four-cylinder “Bullet” against H.T. Thomas piloting the single-cylinder “Pirate,” built by Olds. Racing the clock along a measured mile, the gasoline and steam-powered racecars reached speeds up to 68 mph, short of the record held by a French car and driver but, at the time, the fastest speed achieved in America. “In those days,” says Sullivan, “many people thought going that fast would cause brain damage.”

For more than a decade, before the time trials relocated a few miles south to Daytona Beach, the tournaments brought an assortment of hand-built motor cars and speedsters to Florida. Among those arriving by train with their racing machines were Henry Ford, Louis Chevrolet, and Horace Dodge—all hoping to better the current land speed record.

Between 1903 and 1935, dozens of world land speed records were set on the Florida beaches, says Sullivan, beginning in 1904 when William K. Vanderbilt pushed his Mercedes to 92 mph. The final speed record set on the sand, 276 mph, was captured by England’s Sir Malcolm Campbell in 1935.

After Campbell drove his 2,500 horsepower, 12-cylinder “Bluebird II” into the record books, the quest for land speed records moved to the salt flats in Utah.

And that’s when the page turned to a new chapter in the history of American auto racing, Sullivan says. A young auto mechanic and weekend dirt-track racer, Bill France, soon began organizing stock car races on the beach. In 1947, he formed a new sanctioning body, the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing, or NASCAR, in Daytona Beach. But it all started in Ormond Beach, Sullivan likes to remind people.

Bob Alexander is a writer living in Ormond Beach.

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