The years 1896 to 1903 saw a seccesion of scandalously dangerous road races, usually from Paris to another city, each more ambitious, more ruthlessly realistic, more callously indifferent to consequences than the last. France was not big enough for the visionaries of that age: after racing to Marseilles, they raced to Amsterdam to Berlin to Vienna, and finally with deadly finality they set out for Madrid.
These were great races, the hazards horrific, the drivers heroic, the cars gigantic. These spider wheeled chariots were usually big, often heavy, invariably ill balanced. Men were still learning how to make cars go well, having barely discovered how to make them go at all; but men were learning very fast - perhaps because of the spur of competition - and by the beginning of the twentieth century standards had risen considerably.
Racing was soon to be very different. It was the race of death which did it, the infamous ill-fated Paris - Madrid disaster of 1903. It drew 100,000 Parisians to see the cars start (one by one, against the clock). From Verisailles, and they thronged the roads all the way to the end of the first stage at Bordeaux. They thronged unchecked, undisciplined, untutored in the dangers that approached, unable to conceive the speeds that the cars would reach. They filled the narrow round-crowned roads, parting only reluctantly at the last moment to let a speeding car pass; but they were not always quick enough. Stray children, stray dogs, oxen, the clouds of dust raised by the cars, all added to the drivers' confusion; competitors and spectators alike were killed, their mangled remains sometimes discovered only after the blinding dust-clouds had settled. Gabriel, the fastest man to get through to Bordeaux, admitted that he sometimes had to steer his huge Mors by the poplar-tops that alone were visible to show the way the road went.
The race was stopped. All motor racing might have been stopped; but the sport had already been diversifying, and it was the newer kinds of competitions which saved it. The sprints and hillclimbs at Nice were examples of events growing in popularity; the first European hillclimb, a club outing in 1899, was a full-blooded speed event by 1902. The Alps were there for storming, and in Britain there were hillside bridle paths which offered a shorter but subtler challenge: one such, begun at Shelsley Walsh in 1905, retains the longest continusous history of all sporting events. Americans from 1916 would rise to the 14,000 ft. challenge of Pike's Peak, approached by 12 1/2 miles of dirt road winding into the clouds.
Climbing crude paths was a test of reliablity in the early days; speed itself hardly mattered. Britian's Thousand Miles Trial of 1900 was meant to prove the practicality of the touring car, as was the original Tour de France; by 1905 the car's practicality could be taken for granted, and trials became speed-oriented handicaps for 'touring' cars. The Herkomer and Prinz Heinrich events, staged in the Austrian Alps first with the participation and secondly with the patronage of His Royal Highness, shared with the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy the early development of the sports car; combined with contemporary efforts to organize a winter convergence upon Monte Carlo, they also nurtured what would become rallying.
It was all very deliberate, very earnest, very well intentioned; but what the people wanted was, like the ancient Romans, circuses. There was no substitute for the real pure racing car, for sheer undiluted speed. If the world's fastest cars could no longer be raced from city to city, let them be raced in some sort of closed circuit where the public could be better controlled; perhaps the cars would then prove even faster.
There had been since 1900 some ill-supported races for a cup put up by James Gordon Bennett, the sporting and prodigiously wealthy scion of the New York Herald. He had introduced the idea of national teams, each country fielding three cars made entirely within its boundaries and painted in national colours. Whatever country won the first race would play host to the second, and so on - until in 1902 England won, and that created a problem. The common-law freedom of the King's highways could not be suspended for any motor race; so the event was packed off to Ireland, where a course could be found by looping a few roads together. The 1903 Gordon Bennett event, in the same season as the last of the open-road epics, was the first closed-circuit motor race.
What the people wanted to see, once the novelty of actually seeing cars had worn off, was real fast intelligible mass - start races. A proper racing track should provide it. Brooklands, first and most famous, was built in Britain where racing on the roads was prohibited. A masterpiece of high speed earthmoving and concreting, it was readied by massed muscles in 1907. Men and horses made it, horseymen governed it; the very fastest cars could sustain top speed all around its bankings, the very dullest spectators could understand it. The Europeans who considered that cars were meant to be driven on real roads at whatever speeds those roads might allow, depised it; the Americans, across whose vast land the intricacies of road-racing seemed irrelevant, took a hint from it and built a more compact Indianapolis. By 1911 they too had settled on 500 miles as a proper length for what has survived as the oldest original race.
W/excerpts from "With Flying Colours a Pictorial History of Motorsport" excellent book with unbelieveable photos
