Why Is Indianapolis Motor Speedway Called the Brickyard? The Story of the Bricks, 1909 to 1961

Indianapolis Motor Speedway is called the Brickyard because in the fall of 1909, after a disastrous first race meet on a surface of crushed stone and tar, the owners paved the entire 2.5-mile oval with about 3.2 million paving bricks. Locals were calling it the Brickyard before the last brick was even down. The bricks stayed the racing surface for decades, were paved over a section at a time, and the last of them disappeared under asphalt in October 1961, except for one 3-foot strip at the start/finish line. That strip is the famous “yard of bricks,” and it’s the reason the nickname never went away.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is better, and it involves a balloon race, a lot of tar, five deaths in three days and a gold brick that isn’t really gold.

I’m Dash. I’ve never been much of a stick-and-ball guy, but I’ll read anything about early racing, and the founding of Indy is one of the best stories in the whole sport. Here’s how it went.

Four Investors and a Farm West of Town

In December 1908, four Indianapolis businessmen, Carl G. Fisher, James A. Allison, Arthur C. Newby and Frank H. Wheeler, bought the Pressley farm west of the city: 328 acres for $72,000. Their names are printed right on the bottom of the Otis Lithograph poster above, under the word “Management.” The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Company was incorporated on March 20, 1909.

Fisher was the promoter of the group. He’d raced bicycles as a young man, opened what’s believed to be the first car dealership in the country, and once floated a Stoddard-Dayton over downtown hanging from a balloon as a publicity stunt. His pitch was that American carmakers needed a place to test and prove their cars, and that people would pay to watch them do it.

The track they built was a 2.5-mile rectangle with four turns, and the surface was the problem from the start. It was layers of gravel and limestone, a coating of a tar product called taroid, and crushed stone on top.

A Balloon Race, Then Motorcycles, Then Trouble

The first event at the Speedway wasn’t a car race at all. On June 5, 1909, nine gas balloons lifted off from the infield in front of a reported 40,000 people. The winner, a balloon called Universal City, landed in Alabama more than a day later.

Motorcycles came next, on August 14, and the meet was cut short because riders were worried about the surface. That should have been the warning.

The first car races ran August 19 through 21, 1909. Louis Schwitzer won the very first one, a 5-mile race. Louis Chevrolet, then driving for Buick, won a 10-mile event and was leading the 250-mile Prest-O-Lite Trophy race when a stone smashed his goggles; his teammate Bob Burman won it instead. If you want to know more about Chevrolet’s time on that Buick team, I wrote up his whole racing career separately.

The track came apart. Drivers came back to the pits coated in tar, oil and dust, and the turns rutted and broke up. On the first day, William Bourque and his riding mechanic, Harry Halcomb, were killed. Three more people died in the 300-mile race on the final day, and officials stopped it early. Five people dead in three days, at a track that was supposed to show off how good cars had gotten.

Paving It With 3.2 Million Bricks

Fisher and his partners looked at brick and concrete and tested bricks for traction. Less than a month after the races, crews started repaving. Five Indiana companies supplied about 3.2 million bricks, each weighing about 10 pounds. They were laid on a bed of sand and the gaps were filled with mortar. The partners also put up a concrete wall around the track, 33 inches high.

The last brick was a “gold” one, actually gold-plated brass, set in place by Indiana Governor Thomas R. Marshall at a ceremony. And before the job was done, people around town had already started calling the place the Brickyard.

The new surface worked. When drivers came back for speed trials in December 1909, they reached about 112 mph. In 1910 the track ran 66 races spread across three holiday weekends.

The First 500 and the Bricks in Their Prime

Holiday weekends full of short races didn’t draw the crowds the owners wanted, so for 1911 they bet everything on one big race: 500 miles, on Memorial Day, for a big purse. Somewhere around 80,000 people came, by most counts. Ray Harroun won it in the Marmon Wasp, No. 32, at 74.602 mph. He drove without a riding mechanic and used a rearview mirror instead.

The photo at the top of this post is from the next year, 1912, and it’s one of my favorite Indy pictures. That’s starter Fred Wagner waving the flag at Joe Dawson in his National. Ralph DePalma led 196 laps that day in a Mercedes, then a connecting rod broke near the end. DePalma and his riding mechanic, Rupert Jeffkins, got out and pushed the car toward the finish while the crowd cheered. Dawson, with mechanic Harry Martin aboard, led only the last two laps and won at 78.719 mph.

In 1913 the Europeans showed up in force. Jules Goux won in a Peugeot by 13 minutes and 8 seconds, still the biggest winning margin in the history of the race, and he famously drank champagne during his pit stops. Burman led 41 laps before his car caught fire. The next year René Thomas won in a Delage, and European drivers took five of the top six spots. Barney Oldfield finished fifth in a Stutz, the best of the Americans.

In 1916, Oldfield became the first driver to lap the Brickyard at more than 100 mph, driving a front-wheel-drive Christie. The bricks were holding up fine. The cars were the ones getting faster.

Asphalt, a War and a Field Full of Weeds

By the early 1930s speeds were climbing and so was the death toll. Between 1931 and 1935, 15 people were killed at the track. Asphalt went down over the bricks in parts of the track as part of the safety work, and the walls were changed too.

Eddie Rickenbacker, the WWI fighter ace and former driver, had bought the Speedway in 1927. When the U.S. entered World War II, the 500 was cancelled and the track sat. By the end of the war the old bricks were cracked and grass and weeds were coming up between them. Indiana businessman Tony Hulman bought the place in November 1945 and had it fixed up in a hurry.

The first 500 after the war ran on May 30, 1946. George Robson won it from 15th on the grid, driving for Joel Thorne, and beat Jimmy Jackson by more than 44 seconds. That race was also the first time James Melton sang “Back Home Again in Indiana” before the start, a tradition that still runs today. Robson didn’t get long to enjoy it. He was killed in a crash at Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta that September.

The Yard of Bricks

In October 1961, the last of the brick sections were paved over. Only a 3-foot-wide line of original bricks was left exposed at the start/finish line. That strip is the yard of bricks, and it’s the reason a track that’s been asphalt for more than 60 years is still called the Brickyard. NASCAR’s race there was even named the Brickyard 400 when it started in 1994.

When I see that strip on TV, I think about a work crew in the fall of 1909 hauling 10-pound bricks by the millions to fix a track that had just killed five people. The name sounds romantic now. It started as a fix for a mess.

FAQ

Why is Indianapolis Motor Speedway called the Brickyard?

Because the whole track was paved with about 3.2 million bricks in late 1909, after the original crushed-stone and tar surface fell apart during the first car races. The nickname stuck even after the bricks were paved over.

Are there still bricks at Indianapolis?

Yes, one strip. Since October 1961 the only exposed original bricks are a 3-foot-wide line at the start/finish line, called the yard of bricks.

When was Indianapolis Motor Speedway paved with bricks?

Work started less than a month after the August 1909 races and was done by the end of that year. Speed trials on the new bricks ran in December 1909.

Who won the first race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway?

Louis Schwitzer won the first car race, a 5-mile event, on August 19, 1909. The first Indianapolis 500 was won by Ray Harroun in 1911.

How many bricks were used at Indianapolis Motor Speedway?

About 3.2 million, each roughly 10 pounds, supplied by five Indiana brick makers.

If you like this era, the future of motorsports piece on the site is a fun one to read right after, just to see how far it’s come.

Sources

• Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Wikipedia
• Carl G. Fisher, Wikipedia
• 1911 Indianapolis 500, Wikipedia
• 1912 Indianapolis 500, Wikipedia
• 1913 Indianapolis 500, Wikipedia
• 1914 Indianapolis 500, Wikipedia
• 1946 Indianapolis 500, Wikipedia
• George Robson, Wikipedia
• Barney Oldfield, Wikipedia

Featured image: Fred Wagner flags Joe Dawson, 1912 Indianapolis 500. 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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