The Legend of the First Super Speedway
The Battle for the Soul of American Auto Racing
The Birth of American Auto Racing
by Mark G. Dill
In the prologue to his acclaimed 2004-published Against Death and Time, Brock Yates described his approach to telling the story of the horrific toll the year 1955 had had on racing with the deaths of Vukovich, Ascari, the eighty at Le Mans, and James Dean as a work of “faction.” Never mind that dictionaries don’t include Yates’ definition as one of the possible meanings for that word. It probably worked better at grabbing his readers’ immediate attention than had he referred to it as a work of historical fiction. Whichever term you prefer, the approach mixes imagined dialog and descriptions with facts and is populated with real and imagined people and the events that took place then. When a writer is adept at creating believable dialog, history comes to life again.
Happily Mark Dill proves to have the knack and be good at this form of writing. Even better, with these two books he demonstrates he’s as adept writing for youngsters as he is for adults. As you can see, he’s written two books with the same title, albeit with different subtitles. Each has its own ISBN for while they tell a similar story, they do so in quite different ways.
The book subtitled The Battle for the Soul of American Auto Racing is for more accomplished readers, as in late teen through adult. The Legend of the First Super Speedway is the juvenile version with every page featuring original full-color illustrations created just for this book by a North Carolina watercolorist named Mary Lynn Smith. Smith’s profile indicates she paints predominately plein air but, from her work illustrating this book, she’s clearly also capable capturing the energy and detail of mechanical beasts and their pilots.
The nearly 400-page “adult” version is very readable as it (ahem) races along telling of Barney Oldfield’s life and career as well as the people and events surrounding the construction and opening months of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and what transpired between October 1902 and May 1910. Dill’s “Author’s Notes” on the book’s concluding pages list all of the historical figures he has written into the story by categories such as drivers, journalists, auto industry executives, promoters, etcetera. Next he lists the books “that informed my opinions, expanded my knowledge, and proved particularly relevant to this effort.”
One historic detail did prove troublesome to Dill. Throughout the first third of the book, whenever Peerless engineer Lou Mooers was mentioned his surname was often misspelled as Moores. It’s easy to believe a computer’s word program’s “nanny” might have played a part in this but that’s the purpose and “worth” of careful and repeated proofreading.
Author Dill purposely chose to write his narratives as historical fiction for that approach offered him the freedom to portray various individuals as they likely had been rather than writing about them. As Willy T. Ribbs, who contributed the Foreword, expressed it, Dill portrays the characters with “the faults and foibles of the men who made what seemed impossible happen.” Dill does bring Barney Oldfield, Carl Fisher, Ray Harroun and others to life in a way that no other IMS or Indy 500 history has to date.
Observe the month of May and this year’s 108th running of the Indy 500 with a copy of the long form story for yourself and a copy (or copies) of the “just for the kiddos” version to share or give to those youngsters in your life who think old cars are “neat” or are attracted to motorsports.
Copyright 2024 Helen V Hutchings (speedreaders.info)
The Legend of the First Super Speedway
The Battle for the Soul of American Auto Racing
by Mark G. Dill
Book Baby, 2020
383 pages, 27 b/w images, softcover
List Price: $23.99
ISBN 13: 977 1 09833 516 8
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