Evening Star Newspaper, March 2, 1930, Page 99

SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C,.. MARCH 2, 1930. Speed Tests at Day- tona Beach This Month May Write a New Chapter to the Story of How Racers Have De- wveloped Since the Days of Winton’s Bullet. - BY ISRAEL KLEIN. o | OR 24 miles, almost without a break, stretches the gleaming beach along the east coast of Florida, between the cities of Ormond and Daytona. Sloping slowly into the sea, it leaves & 500-foct strip high and dry at low tide. Coquina, that hard mixture of seashells and corals found abundantly in this and other Southern States, forms the base of a particu- larly tough surface along the entire beach. Mixed with the sand of the beach and wave- rolled by the incoming and receding tides, it leaves a smooth, hard course. Hardly a ripple may be found over the entire beach. It is the smoothest natural surface, say those who have sought them, in the world. So it is that automobiles have been driven over this stretch of sand, first to see how fast these machines could go, now really to dearn how fast man himself can go. Some time this month, Kaye Don of Great Britain will shoot his unique 2,000-horsepower racer down this beach at what is expected to be the fastest speed man has ever gone in an automobile. The first eight-in-line. Alexander Winton booted this rarer” down the sands to make motor history. CHANGING with the years like women's fashions, the automobiles have been pa- raded up and down this beach, excelling one another each year in appearance, power, speed. - And as the stage has foreshadowed the fash- ions of future years, so has this beach displayed the modes of what was to come in the automo- biles of the street. Looking backward through the years, back to the days when Alexander Winton first drove his famous red “Bullet” over these sands in 1903, it reveals a remarkable history of the auto- - mobile, not only in racing, but in engineering and design. Back in those early days the racers that chugged along the beach at what was then con- sidered the break-neck speed of 70 to 75 miles an hour, were not so good to look at, but they drew a select gallery. In those days society alone went in for motoring, and society alone lined the beach. At least one of the leaders of New York’'s 400, William K. Vanderbilt, act- ually took the wheel of a racer and drove it to a new speed record. FROM the present viewpoint the array of _automobiles facing the course at Daytona in those early days was spectacular and funny. ‘They look like so many freaks out of Barnum’s museum. Caps, goggles, long flowing veils, linen dusters were the motoring mode of. those . days. The contraptions that chugged by these early onlookers were the freakiest of freaks. Even to the bystanders in those early days, Winton's “Bullet” and Olds’ “Pirate” were odd. They were merely engines propelling four wheels and grudgingly making room for a driver. Appearance has nevér been considered in the construction of any of these racers, except in designing the body to reduce wind resistance. The motor held the attention of racing en- gineers, and to Daytona have been brought the most radical advancements of motoring. After trials on this wide stretch of beach, these in- novations bhave found themselves surrounded by handsome hoods and bodies to take to the streets and highways. Back in 1903, for example, the society that gasped at the racers as they flashed by them on the beach never dreamed that Winton's “Bullet Number 2" would be the forerunner of the high-powered eight-cylinder motor cars of today, or that Walter Christie’s laughable “Ice Wagon” would herald the day of the front- wheel drive automobile. EVEN from the more sophisticated viewpoint today, we might be excused if we failed to see any connections between those early racing buggies and the cars of today. For buggles they were, slung high on four bicycle wheels, with the motor in front driving the rear wheels by means of chains, with the driver perched precaripusly behind, his entire body exposed to the wind and sand. b ‘Winton’s “Bullet” was the first racer on these sands, although several races preceded it at other places. As early as 1895, there is record.-« s 1N BOU g el A RS With stirrups and everything, seated precariously on his super-sulky, H. T. Thomas coaxed this R. E. Olds contrap- tion to a record. of a race from Chicago to Evanston, Ill, in which Charles E. Duryea, one of the earliest automotive inventors, drove what ‘was really a motorized buggy, at the record speed of seven and a half miles an hour! Real speed, however, was first displayed at Daytona in 1903, when Winton drove his racer down the beach at an average speed of 68 miles an hour, or a mile in 52 -5 seconds. That was considered highly remarkable. And it was. The vehicle in which Winton made this speed makes his performance even more remarkable. Instead of placing the eylinders of his engine upright, he lay them horizontally below the body of the vehicle, eight in all—the first straight-eight motor in. history. A radiator like a bale of hay covered the front of Winton's car.. The body was merely a box-like enclosure over the “works,” with a bucket seat set high up directly in front of the tank. The stream-lining depended largely on how the driver hunched his back. FOUR large wood wheels, with tires that in those days were. considered extra large, helped in carrying the car to its record speed of 68 miles an hour. It was in this race in 1903 that Winton in his red-painted “Bullet” de- feated Willlam K. Vanderbilt's German-made Mercedes. i . ‘ In the same year R. E. Olds, the pioneer auto engineer, produced his freakish “Pirate.” This consisted of four light buggy wheels con- nected by a light frame, on which was hung the four-cylinder motor, two rocket-like gas tanks, the “bale of hay” radiator and other necessary parts. It had practically no body, - but deft a seat for the driver, somewhat like the sulky seat behind a trotter. It was this contraption that H. T. Thomas, his feet set in stirrups hung from the rear axle and his hands holding the steering wheel so low that he had to crouch uncomfortably, made the measured mile on the Daytona Beach course in 42 seconds. Winton’s record had no stood long. 2 QUI'I‘E as erratic in-its appearance as the “Pirate” was the “Stevens-Duryea” that Otto Nestman drove to a new speed record.in 1904. Here was another chassis on wheels, without semblance of body. : . LR L The same ‘old “bale’ of “hay” wadiater stuel. « milin worl! o8 el Miles of coquina . . . the hard, level stretch of beach between Ormond and Daytona, Fla., has been the Mecca of speed bugs ever since the first motorist said, “This bus will make yours look like an ox-cart!” out in front, while the motor hung below the center of the frame. Above this sat the driver, hunched uncomfortably low over a steering wheel that extended vertically down to the workings beneath. Bicycle wheels- and old-style carriage springs accentuated the.gawky appearance of this con- trivance, yet, impossible as it may seem, to look at a picture of the vehicle, Nestman was able to win a new record when he drove it early in 1904. There were speed contestants in those early days of motoring whose designers considered appearance as well as performance. For in- stance, the Packard “Gray Wolf,” with which William Schmidt did a mile in 46 seconds in 1903, looked more like the modern streamlined racer than any of its competitors. Its motor in front was covered by a slender V-shaped hood, and only the driver sat alone and a little too high in back. Its wheels were smaller than those of other racers and its tires larger. It was sprung low to bring the entire body closer to the ground. The Gray Wolf was the first racer that really looked like one. & The Gray Wolf started the mode in racing. ™ For following that came all sorts of sleek looking as well as freakish, bullet-shaped speedsters. Two of these were particularly noteworthy. One was the Baker electric “Torpedo Kid,” the first of a very few electric vehicles to compete with gasoline cars in speed contests. The other was Walter Christie’s “Ice Wagon,” the first front-drive automobile to appear. For an electric automobile, the Torpedo Kid, shaped in a small way like Major Segrave's “Mystery 8” of 1927-—squat turtle-back strad- dling four disk wheels—was a wonder. W. J. Hastings in 1904 drove it a mile in 372-5 sec- onds at Daytona, to & new record for all types of racers, WALm CHRISTIE'S Ice Wagon, so named . because its huge hood had to be kept packed with ice to keep the motor from over- heating, might also have rung up a new record had there been enough ice available. Trouble was, the motor was so powerful it overheated . despite the ice and had to be withdrawn before the length of the course had been covered. But it was a front-drive car, the pioneer of a sys- tem that only today is beginning to be prominent. It wasn't long after the first efforts at racing that engineers began to build automobiles to suit the needs of the race track. More powerful engines were put in and bodies streamlined to to reduce wind resistance. Records fell fast, By 1906 Victor Demogoet, French mechanic, driving a 200-horsepower Darracq, had the satisfaction for the first time in automotive history of making two miles in less than a minute. Today the record speed is nearly four miles a minute, yet considering the conditions of the time and the position of the industry in 1906, the two-miles-a-minute speed was a greater accomplishment than that of Maj. Segrave last year. 3 Amt.benmuwym.ndngatm waned, until the war put a check to it altogether. After the war, however, Daytona Beach became the center of an international i boe mevass o A w e