Dirt Track Racers at the Iowa State Fair
When automobiles arrived on the scene, drivers wasted no time in pushing their limits. The dirt track racers of the early 1900s were big superstars, like today's football players or rock stars.
Transcript
[Narrator] When automobiles arrived on the scene, drivers wasted no time in pushing their limits. The dirt track racers of the early 1900s were big superstars, like today's football players or rock stars. Barney Oldfield was the first. In 1907, he brought his Peerless Green Dragon to Iowa and showed fair officials they could make a profit with auto racing. When Oldfield swung around the track at an incredible 48 miles per hour, cigar clenched in his teeth, the fair knew they had a winner. An even bigger sensation buzzed around the track in 1914. Lincoln Beachey, an American aviator and barnstormer known as the man who owns the sky, raced his airplane against Eddie Rickenbacker, a race car driver.
(Engine sounds and Duesenberg car is in the lead)
At times, Beachey flew so low, he nearly scraped the Duesenberg car.
(The airplane is half the track length ahead of the Duesenberg car)
Rickenbacker lost the race, but people at the Grandstand would never see a spectacle quite like it again.