Vanderbilt Cup

The crowd presses close as French driver Arthur Duray rounds a turn in his De Dietrich during the 1906
Vanderbilt Cup race.

Before there was the Indianapolis 500 there was the Vanderbilt Cup.  It was America’s first great auto race, and took its name from its founder, William Kissam Vanderbilt, Jr. (1878-1944).  Willie K, as he was known, was one of America’s richest men, and he was enamored of the new technology of automobiles.  Vanderbilt could afford the best cars in the world--and he knew that none of them were made in the United States.  He sponsored the Vanderbilt Cup races, Vanderbilt said, because “I felt the United States was far behind other nations in the automotive industry, and I wanted the country to catch up.  I wanted to bring foreign drivers and their cars over here in the hope that America would wake up.”

The Vanderbilt Cup was run over courses laid out on the public roads of Long Island, New York, and therein laid its greatest problem.  Crowd control was nearly impossible.  People arrived the night before the race, stayed up all night, often drinking heavily, and by morning were in no mood to sit quietly and watch.  They packed the edges of the road and occasionally wandered across the path of the speeding cars.  Sometimes the crowd would block the road entirely, parting only at the shout of “Car coming!”  Vendors sold long, thin sticks with feathers on the end, with which spectators tried to touch drivers as they roared past. Race attendance (always just an estimate—there was no way to get an accurate count) went from 50,000 in 1904, to 100,000 in 1905, to 250,000 in 1906.  In the latter year a spectator was killed and two were injured.  There was no race in 1907.

Willie K. and his friends built a new, private concrete road called the Long Island Motor Parkway and made it part of a revised course in 1908.  They also hired a brigade of Spanish-American War veterans to keep order, but it would have taken most of the US Army to corral the 200,000 spectators.  After George Robertson’s winning Locomobile and Herb Lytle’s second-place Isotta crossed the finish line, the crowd surged across the course and the race was halted.

1909 and 1910 brought new rules that designated stock based cars rather than pure racing models.  Few European cars appeared and American Harry Grant won both races in his Alco.  That brought the curtain down on the Long Island Vanderbilt Cups.  The race moved to other places—Savannah, Milwaukee, Santa Monica, San Francisco.  By the time the last Vanderbilt was run in 1915 interest had shifted to the big, brick-paved oval at Indianapolis.  As the late auto historian Beverly Rae Kimes said of the Long Island races, “American shall never see their thunderous like again.”

More information on the Vanderbilt Cups can be found at www.vanderbiltcupraces.com