Word: speedways
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After taking a Moral Science Tripos at Cambridge University, Wing Commander Straight turned professional automobile racer, won many contests at England's famed Brooklands speedway, became a director of 21 British aviation companies, married sightly Lady Daphne Finch-Hatton, daughter of the 14th Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham, and in 1936 became a British subject...
More than 150,000 race fans turned out last week to celebrate Memorial Day in Indianapolis, i.e., the Indianapolis Auto Race, a 500-mile grind over a two-and-a-half-mile, brick-&-asphalt oval. Just before the start, the crowd listened to a radio message from the speedway's president, onetime Driver Eddie Rickenbacker, still in hospital in Atlanta from the plane crack-up that killed eight of his fellow passengers last February. "I hope and wish," said Captain Rickenbacker, "that this great outdoor laboratory will be permitted to carry on to help national defense...
...Would there be any smashups? Two of the cars that had qualified in test runs had already been wrecked: one the day before, in a last-minute tune-up; another only a few hours earlier, when a fire burned down a row of garages on the edge of the speedway. Would anyone break the record of 117.2 m.p.h.? Could Wilbur Shaw win the 500 for the third year in a row? It had never been done...
Whizzing around a pole (cable racing) is still the most popular form of miniature-auto racing, mainly because it can be managed on any gymnasium, floor or hard tennis court. But the spindizzies who gathered last week in Los Angeles' $3,500 Miniature Speedway were newfangled rail-racing enthusiasts, competing in the first miniature rail-racing championship of the U. S. In rail-racing, far more exciting to watch, cars usually race in threes (against time) around a banked wooden oval, one-sixteenth of a mile in circumference. They cling to the oval's steel rails by means...
...spectators watched last week's championship race. Round & round the little "hot-irons" whirred-motors whining, sputtering, filling the air with the peculiar odor of burning castor oil, dear to the nose of every auto-racing fan. No one has yet been killed on a Tom Thumb speedway, but accidents are not infrequent. Excited spindizzies have been known to get their arms or legs fractured by a whizzing car; tires have blown off into judges' faces; many cars have blown...