As we begin Championship car racing's second century it is worth looking back at the early Vanderbilt Cup races run on a thirty-mile open road course on New York's Long Island from 1904-'10 source: champcarworldseries.com - Gordon Kirby When the inaugural Vanderbilt Cup race took place on October 3, 1904, the World Series was a brand new baby, contested for the first time the year before. The first Indianapolis 500 was still seven years away and another dozen years would pass before the first Le Mans twenty-four hour race was run and five more before the inaugural Monaco Grand Prix. Neither the Daytona 500 nor the Super Bowl were even figments of anyone's imagination, laying more than half a century in the future. William K. Vanderbilt II was one of the country's richest men and he was captivated by the potential of this new-fangled thing called the automobile. Vanderbilt saw what was happening to auto racing and the fledgling automobile industry in Europe and wanted to create the same elevated level of interest here in the United States where racing had fallen behind Europe. Some early races had taken place in the closing years of the twentieth century in both Europe and the United States. The first motor race took place in France in 1894 and the first American race was run in Chicago in November of 1985. These early races were point-to-point events run on open roads. Through the turn of the century few races were run in America but racing thrived in Europe. France in particular, which was the center of the sport and the automobile industry in those formative days. But a series of disastrous races culminated in the 1903 Paris-Madrid race which was stopped at Bordeaux in France after eight people including two drivers were killed. That was the end of open road racing in Europe. They were replaced by races run on public roads, closed for the occasion. The Gordon Bennett Cup races had started in 1900 as an international team race with up to three cars nominated by each national automobile club. The first three Gordon Bennett events were open road races--Paris-Lyons in 1900, Paris-Bordeaux in '01 and Paris-Innsbruck in '02. But after the Paris-Madrid disaster the 1903 Gordon Bennett race was run on a closed circuit in Ireland and the 1904 and '05 races were run on similar closed road courses in Germany and France. The complete article at champcarworldseries.com
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