Was Louis Chevrolet a Race Car Driver? His Racing Career, 1905 to 1920

Yes. Louis Chevrolet was a race car driver before his name ever went on a car, and a very good one. Between his first win at Morris Park in 1905 and his last Indianapolis 500 start in 1920, he raced Fiats, Darracqs, Buicks, a Sunbeam and his own Frontenacs, set speed records on dirt and sand, ran the Indy 500 four times, and then built the cars that won Indianapolis in 1920 and 1921. He co-founded Chevrolet in 1911, but racing was always the thing he came back to.

I’m Jay, and most of what I write about here has a bowtie on it somewhere. I’ve spent a lot of afternoons swapping fuel pumps on small-block Chevys and squinting at Quadrajet numbers, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that the man on the badge was a working racer with scars to show for it. So here’s the short version of his racing career, with the dates checked against period sources.

From Bicycles to Morris Park

Louis-Joseph Chevrolet was born on December 25, 1878, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, the watchmaking town. His family moved to Beaune, France, in 1887, and he grew up fixing and racing bicycles. He worked in Paris, came to Montreal in 1900, and was in New York by 1901, where he worked as a mechanic, including for the French maker de Dion-Bouton.

New York in those years was the center of American motor racing, and a good mechanic who was not scared of speed did not stay in the shop for long. According to the career statistics compiled by ChevroletBrothers.com, his first win came on May 20, 1905, at Morris Park in the Bronx, where he beat Webb Jay and Charles Basle in a 3-mile race in a Fiat and set a 1-mile closed-course record of 52 4/5 seconds along the way. Over the next few weeks he beat Barney Oldfield at Hartford and again at Pittsburgh, which is a good way for an unknown Swiss mechanic to get himself noticed.

The Vanderbilt Cup and the Beach at Ormond

That fall he drove a Fiat in the 1905 Vanderbilt Cup on Long Island. It went badly. He wrecked in practice, and in the race itself he hit a pole on the seventh lap and broke the axle. That was pretty much how the Vanderbilt Cup treated everybody in those years.

In January 1906 he was on the sand at Ormond and Daytona, Florida, driving a 200-horsepower V8 Darracq. The New York Times reported him covering a mile in 30 3/5 seconds, which works out to roughly 117 mph. Think about that for a second. In 1906, on a beach, on skinny tires, with no roll bar and no belts.

The Buick Team, 1909 and 1910

The big break came when William C. Durant hired Louis, his younger brother Arthur, and Bob Burman to drive for Buick. Durant wanted race wins to sell cars, and the three of them delivered.

On June 19, 1909, Louis won the Cobe Cup road race at Crown Point, Indiana, a grind of about 396 miles. Two months later the brand-new Indianapolis Motor Speedway held its first car races, on a surface of crushed stone and tar that came apart under the cars. On August 19, Louis won a 10-mile race over Lewis Strang and Burman. In the 250-mile Prest-O-Lite Trophy race the same day, he was leading when a stone smashed his goggles, and Burman went on to win it for Buick. That surface, and the deaths it caused that week, is the reason the track was paved with more than three million bricks before the year was out.

The 1910 Vanderbilt Cup ended his Buick years on a grim note. His Marquette-Buick crashed near Hicksville, and his riding mechanic, Charles Miller, was killed. The deaths that day ended the Vanderbilt Cup on Long Island for good.

Chevrolet, the Company He Left

Durant had lost control of General Motors in 1910 and was looking for a new name to build a company around. On November 3, 1911, the Chevrolet Motor Car Company was incorporated in Detroit with Louis, Durant and a few partners. Arthur was in on it too, along with two investors, William Little and Dr. Edwin Campbell.

Louis and Durant did not agree on much after that. They clashed over the design of the car, and the usual telling is that Durant wanted something cheap enough to fight the Model T while Louis wanted to build a bigger, better car. In 1915 Louis sold his stake to Durant and walked away from the company that still carries his name. If you ever wanted proof that the man was a racer first and a businessman second, that’s it.

Frontenac and the Board Track Years

Louis went straight back to racing. With his brothers he started building race cars under the Frontenac name, and by 1916 they were on track. These were light, simple cars, and they ran well on the new board speedways that were going up all over the country.

Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn was one of those. It had been a horse track, was rebuilt as a board speedway in 1915, and ran car races until 1919. In the photo above, the field is starting a race there on August 18, 1917. Louis ran a series of match races against Ralph DePalma that day in Frontenac No. 54, and DePalma got the better of him. A month later, on September 22, 1917, Louis came back and won a 100-mile race at Sheepshead over DePalma’s Packard.

The Sunbeam photo at the top of this post is from Sheepshead Bay too. He drove that car in the Astor Cup there on September 30, 1916, and went out with a burned bearing. Louis and Gaston both raced Sunbeams that season before the Frontenacs were sorted out. On December 2, 1916, he gave Frontenac its first win at Uniontown, Pennsylvania, another board track, and on May 30, 1917, he won the 250-mile race at Cincinnati.

Board tracks were fast and frightening. Wikipedia’s history of them notes that of the 123 national championship races the AAA ran from 1920 through 1931, 82 were on boards. The cars got faster every year and the wood splintered, rotted and broke. By the early thirties they were gone.

The car below belonged to Pete DePaolo, Ralph DePalma’s nephew, photographed at a speedway’s opening meet in July 1925. That May he’d won the Indianapolis 500 at 101.13 mph, the first winner to average better than 100.

Louis Chevrolet at the Indy 500

Here’s the part that surprises people. Louis Chevrolet never won the Indy 500. He started it four times:

• 1915: drove a Cornelian and finished 20th.
• 1916: Frontenac, 12th.
• 1919: 7th, his best finish.
• 1920: 18th, out with a broken steering arm.

His cars did win it, twice. In 1920 his brother Gaston won the 500 in a Monroe built by the Frontenac shop, and he did it without a single tire change. Tommy Milton won in 1921 in a Frontenac. For two years running, the best car at Indianapolis came out of Louis Chevrolet’s shop.

The 1920 season ended in tragedy. Gaston was killed on November 25, 1920, in a crash at the Beverly Hills board track in California. He was named the national champion for 1920 after his death. Louis never raced at that level again.

After Racing

The Chevrolet brothers kept building. Their Frontenac cylinder heads for the Ford Model T, sold as “Fronty” heads, turned the cheapest car in America into a dirt-track weapon and stayed popular with racers for years. In 1927 Louis started an aircraft engine company, Chevrolair. It folded about three years later when the Depression hit, and it took most of what he had left with it.

By the 1930s Louis was back at Chevrolet, working as a mechanic in the company’s Detroit operation. He died in Detroit on June 6, 1941, and was buried in Indianapolis, in Holy Cross and Saint Joseph Cemetery, a few miles from the Speedway. He was inducted into the Auto Racing Hall of Fame in 1952, and a memorial bust of him was installed at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum in 1975.

I think about that every time I chase an overheating small block. The man whose name is on the valve covers spent his last working years doing the same kind of job.

FAQ

Was Louis Chevrolet a race car driver?

Yes. He raced from 1905 into 1920, winning on dirt tracks, road courses and board tracks, and started the Indianapolis 500 four times. He was racing before, during and after his time at the Chevrolet Motor Car Company.

Did Louis Chevrolet win the Indy 500?

No. His best finish was 7th in 1919. Cars he built won in 1920 with his brother Gaston driving and in 1921 with Tommy Milton.

Did Louis Chevrolet die poor?

He did not die wealthy. He sold his Chevrolet stock in 1915, his later companies mostly failed, and the Depression took the rest. He spent his final working years as a mechanic at Chevrolet.

What was Louis Chevrolet’s first race win?

According to ChevroletBrothers.com’s career record, it was a 3-mile race at Morris Park in New York on May 20, 1905, driving a Fiat.

Where is Louis Chevrolet buried?

Holy Cross and Saint Joseph Cemetery in Indianapolis.

If you’re more into the cars that wear his name than the ones he raced, start with our GM rear axle code decoder or the Chevelle upper control arm bushing guide.

Sources

• Louis Chevrolet career racing statistics, ChevroletBrothers.com
• Louis Chevrolet driver biography, Vanderbilt Cup Races
• Louis Chevrolet, Wikipedia
• Gaston Chevrolet, Wikipedia
• Board track racing, Wikipedia
• Sheepshead Bay Race Track, Wikipedia
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway history, Wikipedia
• Peter DePaolo, Wikipedia

Featured image: Louis Chevrolet in a Sunbeam at Sheepshead Bay, 1916. Bain News Service, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, no known restrictions on publication. Photos in this article come from the Library of Congress, are in the public domain or carry no known restrictions on publication, and are credited in each caption.

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