With Speed Capital, Brian M. Ingrassia has added substantial new insights to the modest literature on the history of automobile racing’s early years, but he has also done much more. This book chronicles the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from industrialist and real estate developer Carl Graham Fisher’s idea for the facility, which opened for competition in 1909, through the early post-World War II period. Along the way, Ingrassia situates the speedway’s developers and contestants within a fascinating matrix of cultural changes.

Ingrassia defines emergent automobile racing as “a new type of pop-culture ritual sited at the intersection of technology and infrastructure” (59). The city of Indianapolis and its regional context play an important role in setting up this analysis, with the city’s location making it an intersection point for roads and canals even before railroads helped it boom. It grew as an industrial center with a large hinterland in the late nineteenth century. Fisher (1874–1939) moved from an enthusiasm for riding bicycles to selling them, along with, soon, cars and motorcycles. Profitable forays into parts manufacturing followed. A car racer himself for a time, Fisher cooked up the idea for a speedway not long after the turn of the century, drawing in as partners other automotive industrialists whom he had known since his youthful days of cycling.

Speed Capital underscores the broad cultural importance of speed and mobility when Ingrassia points out that the first event at the speedway in 1909 was in fact a ballooning competition. Americans’ fascination with the rapid “annihilation” of distance was not limited to terrestrial technology; airplane contests also periodically brought the Indianapolis speedway to the press’s attention (5). Car racing, though, became the speedway’s mainstay. Its famed brick paving was added in late 1909 after the initial surface proved dangerous. In 1911, Fisher extended the main event’s distance to five hundred miles, and the new format attracted massive crowds and national publicity. Fisher and some partners capitalized by developing a suburban community nearby called Speedway City. As automobility spread through U.S. society, advocacy for improved roads between cities and their surrounding regions went hand in hand with technological change and increasing speed. Ingrassia explains, “Spectacle and improvement were intertwined” (125). Even before World War I, Fisher’s attention began shifting toward his development work in Miami Beach and his advocacy for the Lincoln Highway (running from New York City to San Francisco) and the Dixie Highway (from Michigan to Florida).

Although he covers Fisher’s career beyond Indianapolis, Ingrassia emphasizes the speedway, narrating its use by aviators during the war, racing’s revival after the armistice, and the speedway’s sale in 1927 to investors fronted by former racer and pilot Eddie Rickenbacker. During and after the Depression, Ingrassia argues, speedway marketers increasingly used nostalgic appeals as a way to remain attractive in a nation where motorized speed had become routine. World War II again threatened the speedway’s viability, but after a sale in 1945 to businessman Tony Hulman, it recovered and began to thrive again. Ingrassia does a good job throughout of showing the racialized and gendered exclusivity at Indianapolis and within auto racing more broadly. Automobility was typically coded as white and male in American technological culture. Despite interest from others in earlier times, not until Janet Guthrie in 1977 did a woman qualify for the Indianapolis 500; Willy T. Ribbs was the first African American to do so, in 1991.

This study’s tight focus arguably leads to overstatements, as when Ingrassia contends that Fisher “had almost single-handedly created the modern sport of speedway racing” (142). Although the reader gets occasional peeks at sanctioning bodies, other promoters and tracks, and other styles of auto racing, the analysis might have been enriched by more attention to the sport’s development outside Indianapolis. The American Automobile Association and the Automobile Club of America perhaps deserved more attention in the discussion of Indianapolis’s founding and early history, while more explanation of post-World War II competition from the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing could have enriched the context for Indianapolis’s later evolution. We can hope that Ingrassia’s study will inspire other historians to do additional research along those lines. In the meantime, Speed Capital is an innovative and important cultural analysis of what is inarguably a key venue in the history of racing and automobility.

The above review was commissioned and edited by Daniel Platt. Brian M. Ingrassia did not contribute substantially to its production.