Auto Racing in Daytona Beach

By Teri Champigny

Daytona Beach says of itself that is The World’s Most Beautiful Beach and that it is, The Birthplace of Speed. The two claims are intertwined. The wide hard-packed sand beaches made it an ideal place to test cars when the automobile industry was in its infancy and the beach is most certainly beautiful. There were no wide paved roads in existence and the sand on Daytona Beach was there, it was available and, maybe most important, it was free.

John D. Rockefeller and his wealthy friends loved gathering on the beach and racing their sporty new ‘horseless carriages’.

The first ever timed race was held on Daytona Beach in 1902...actually the race was held on nearby Ormond Beach. The race was unofficial and it was between Ransom Olds and Alexander Winston. Alexander Winston beat Ransom Olds by a mere .2 seconds.

The American Automobile Association held the first official race in 1903. The event was billed as ‘The Winter Carnival’. It lasted an entire week and the top speed in the race was a mind-blowing 68.198 miles per hour. This race also included a portion of Ormond Beach and was sponsored by the Ormond Hotel.

A portion of the course also included a portion of Daytona Beach. A club house was built on the Daytona Beach portion and in 1905 and newspapers gave credit to Daytona Beach for hosting the event. There were at least thirteen (and maybe more) held between 1905 and 1935, and Daytona Beach quickly became synonymous with speed.

There were many attempts to set world land speed records. There were fifteen land speed records set at the site between 1905 and 1935. Drivers that set records at Daytona include Arthur MacDonald, Ralph DePalma, Henry Segrave, Ray Keech, and Sir Malcolm Campbell. Malcolm Campbell set the last record of 276.82 mph. After 1935 speed record attempts were made at the salt flats in Utah because the beach at Daytona was too narrow for such attempts to be made safely.

There are those who say that fast cars came into being thanks to prohibition and that most of the race car drivers of the early 1900’s were in fact bootleggers. ‘They’ say that the bootlegging profits is what financed their fast cars and that the fast cars were products of the need to drive fast to avoid being arrested.

NASCAR as we know it today was founded by a man by the name of William France, Sr. He moved to Daytona Beach because he had heard about the attempts to break world speed records and he was looking for a way to escape the Great Depression in 1935.

His idea was that people would pay to watch stock car races...and they did. The problem was the sport was fraught with problems and he saw the need for rules, regulations and championships. Finally, in 1947 William France, Sr. began talking with others who were influential in stock car racing at the time and in 1948, NASCAR was born at the Ebony Bar at the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach.