Advertisement

Hear the Indianapolis 500 As it Sounded 84 Years Ago

Hear The Indianapolis 500 As it Sounded 84 Years Ago

The Indianapolis 500 runs for the 99th time this Sunday, and no race in America can match its rich, and tragic, history. Today’s cars will average 220 mph around the Brickyard, and while two manufacturers and more than a dozen teams will back 33 cars, most of the variety in the machines has been outlawed in pursuit of close competition. As this video of the 1931 race demonstrates, the Indy 500 was once far more wild.

The top qualifying speed in 1931 was 112 mph, which seems slow even by road car standards today — but in a narrow-tired, barely-sprung race car running on bricks and sprayed oil, was more than fast enough. While most of the field ran four-cylinder gas engines, the 1931 race saw the debut of the Cummins Diesel Special, a slow car that finished 13th by running the entire 500-mile race without stopping for fuel.

And at the end of this film, you’ll see the two men who took the checkered flag — driver Lou Schneider, a former Indianapolis motorcycle cop, and riding mechanic Jigger Johnson. The Indy 500 required riding mechanics from 1931 to 1937 even though they had not much to do during the race beside fear their own death. Schneider would never win another 500, but Johnson would cross the line first again as a passenger in 1937.