15 Ways the Indy 500 Changed How You Drive
Though it's one of the biggest races in the world, the Indianapolis 500
has always been as much skunkworks as sporting event. We look back on
the automotive innovations that started at Indy and found their way into
your car.
GETTY
BY EARL SWIFT
MAY 28, 2017
This story was originally published in 2011—Ed.
From the start, it was envisioned as part sporting event, part
skunkworks: Indianapolis millionaire Carl Fisher sought to build a
proving ground for new cars and ideas, where automotive reliability,
speed and strength would be tested. A century later, the Indianapolis
500 has been true to Fisher's dream, and your everyday ride—from the drivetrain to the road and rubber on which it rolls—owes much to the race.
"It's made American cars perform a lot better," says Indy legend A.J.
Foyt. "We put it way over the line at Indianapolis, so if it works
there, it'll work on the highway."
"At Indy, we are the NASA of the production-car world, and that's
clearly why manufacturers are involved—it's such a good testbed," says
Mario Andretti, the 1969 winner.
Famed Indy driver and car builder Dan Gurney offers a different analogy. "Racing is like warfare," he says. "It accelerates the evolution of ideas."
Here's a look at some of the advances sparked by the battle in the
Brickyard.
1. Rearview Mirror
Driver Ray Harroun stirred controversy at 1911's inaugural 500 by
entering the only single-seater in the field, a stinger-tailed Marmon
Wasp. His fellow drivers, each of whom had a "mechanician" riding
shotgun, knew that by motoring solo, Harroun would have an edge in
weight and aerodynamics. They complained that without a spotter beside
him, Harroun would be blind to racers closing in from behind and thus be
a danger to all. His solution: a rectangular mirror mounted to the cowl
on four steel dowels. Harroun won the race, and by the mid-teens the device—marketed as a "mirrorscope" or "cop-spotter"—was a popular aftermarket accessory. Incidentally, Harroun's mirror was a bust: It
vibrated so fiercely during the race that he couldn't see a thing in it.
2. Tire Tech
Early racers rode on tires of rubber and fabric, usually heavy cotton.
If that sounds like a delicate arrangement, well, it was: The fabric
made for weak sidewalls and also generated a lot of internal friction
and thus heat; tire pressures could double in a couple of laps, and one
turn too many could bring on a blowout.
That changed in the mid-teens, when tires with cords of twisted thread,
not woven fabric, debuted at Indy. Formed by crisscrossing plies and
sandwiched with rubber, the cords made for a looser but stronger weave
and ran far cooler.
In 1925, Firestone introduced the balloon tire at Indy. It offered a
wider tread for better traction, as well as lower inflation pressure (30
psi versus the 50 psi common at the time), which smoothed the speedway's
bumps, improving stability and handling. Indy lap times dropped, and
"softer" tires quickly made their way into the consumer auto market.
"Racing had always been the test laboratory, because the demands of the
track were far more extreme than anything on the street," says Al
Speyer, executive director of Firestone Racing. "Indy was always the cornerstone."
The wide, low-profile tires found on many sports cars today originated
at Indy in the 1960s, when Goodyear and Firestone had mobile labs at the
race. Average lap speeds rose by 15 to 20 mph that decade, so tiremakers
sought a new product with greater lateral muscle in the turns. That
yielded shorter, stronger sidewalls and a wider footprint, attributes
also adopted in consumer tires. Even now, Indy tire research influences
rubber on the road as companies seek tread compounds that boost
traction, resist wear and fight the heat buildup that Speyer calls "the
enemy."
3. Magnesium Wheels
Racer and engineer Ted Halibrand spent World War II working with Douglas Aircraft. When the shooting stopped, he put his expertise to use in auto racing, crafting the first of what would become his trademark
magnesium-alloy wheels. The 500's winner rode on Halibrands in 1946 and
every year thereafter through 1963. Usually alloyed with aluminum and
zinc, the wheels eventually made the jump to hot rods and muscle
cars—and into motorhead vernacular as "mags." The low-profile rims found
on many sports cars today can be traced to the original Halibrands.
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4. Lightweight Engine Parts
Having quit his namesake car firm, Louis Chevrolet founded the Frontenac
Motor Co., which never offered a viable production car, but developed a
string of wildly successful Indy racers with "Fronty" aluminum
crankcases and other hardware. A ground-up Frontenac design won the 1921
race, and in 1923, driver L.L. Corum finished fifth in a Model T—a Model T!—equipped with a lightweight Fronty cylinder head. Chevrolet and
engineer C.W. Van Ranst also used a lot of aluminum in engines Frontenac
built for commercial clients such as Stutz. By the mid-'30s, hot rodders
were routinely modding their engines with aluminum parts. Indy thus
hosted early efforts to increase speed by trimming vehicle weight, and
helped invent the high-performance auto aftermarket.
5. Superchargers and Turbochargers
Supercharger technology predates the automobile by more than a
generation (it evolved from blowers used to stoke blast furnaces), but
it didn't catch on with auto enthusiasts until Mercedes sent a team of supercharged cars to Indy in 1923. The German cars were also-rans, but
the underlying idea—that pumping air into an engine's intake manifold
boosts power—inspired Fred Duesenberg to develop a centrifugal
supercharger for the 1924 race. A blown Duesey won that year, and the
devices moved quickly into the mainstream. By the time superchargers
were offered on the iconic Cord 812, in 1937, Indy race teams had honed
the devices considerably.
Meanwhile, a variation on the technology was found in ships, airplanes
and locomotives: turbochargers that pumped air into the combustion
chamber like superchargers but were powered by exhaust gases, not the crankshaft. The technology debuted at Indy in the Cummins Diesel
Special of 1952, a crazy-fast car that was both made and undone by its
turbo: The low-hanging air intake sucked up tire debris and clogged
during the race, causing the engine to overheat. Later race teams
"improved them a lot," legendary car builder A.J. Watson says. Detroit
pursued turbos with surprising speed, offering the first production turbocharged gas engines in the 1962 Olds Cutlass Jetfire and Chevy
Corvair Monza Spyder.
6. Intercoolers
By the mid-'20s, race engineers recognized that superchargers were vexed
by an unwanted byproduct, one that they would share with turbos: Air
warmed as it was compressed and shoved into the intake manifold, and in
the process lost density—thus compromising the very point of having a
blower. The solution was a heat exchanger bolted between the charger and
the engine. The first, in 1926 or 1927, was reputedly the brainchild of
Frank Lockhart, an engineer and driver in Harry Miller's shop. The idea
didn't take to the street until the '70s, when Porsche's early Turbo
Carreras were augmented by intercoolers. Today, they're commonly found
on supercharged and turbocharged passenger cars.
7. Front-Wheel Drive
After winning at Indy in 1922, driver Jimmy Murphy placed an order for a front-wheel-drive car, figuring he'd post better times if he were
pulled, rather than pushed, through the turns. Legendary engineer Harry
Miller, whose cars and engines won the 500 a dozen times, responded with
a design that enjoyed success at Indy for years. A transverse-mounted transmission eliminated a driveshaft and heavy rear differential,
lopping as much as 150 pounds from the car's weight. It also enabled the
driver to sit on the floor pan, lowering the center of gravity. Murphy
died in a wreck in 1924, before driving the car, but Dave Lewis piloted
the Miller to second place at Indy in 1925, prompting other teams and automakers to adopt the configuration. In 1929, two American passenger cars—the St. Louis–built Ruxton and the Cord L-29—went into limited production with front-wheel drive. In the 80-odd years since, it has
come to dominate the world's passenger cars.
8. Alternative Fuels
Indy teams studied alternatives to gasoline long before any inkling of
an energy crisis. Driver Leon Duray experimented with methanol in Indy
racers in or about 1927, midway through a career that saw him win the
500 pole twice and start six of his eight races in the top five. A methanol-fueled Miller set the longest-standing (for nine years) Indy
lap record of 124.02 mph in 1928. In 1965, a year after gasoline
increased the severity of a fiery seven-car Indy crash, the racers switched—permanently—to less volatile alcohol fuels.
9. Elevated Curves
In 1911, when most roads were built for horse traffic, Indy became
perhaps the first American motorway with banked curves. Averaging 9
degrees, 12 minutes, they helped early racers achieve high speeds—and
may have encouraged highway engineers. When a panel of them designed the Lincoln Highway's "Ideal Section" in the early 1920s, it decreed that
curves be likewise banked and have a minimum radius of 1000 feet—safe
for cars going 35 mph. As Indycars became faster in the 1930s, a string
of deadly wrecks led officials to widen the Brickyard's curves and
redesign their retaining walls to return errant cars to the track. In
1955, similar thinking spawned a standard of the modern American
highway: the Jersey barrier.
10. Seatbelts
Many early fatalities occurred when drivers were ejected from vehicles,
but it wasn't until 1922 that Barney Oldfield ordered a harness for his
Indycar from a parachute manufacturer—and reputedly became the first
driver to buy seatbelts. (Oldfield, also the first to achieve a mile a
minute on an oval track, and inspiration for the traffic-cop
inquiry—"Who do you think you are, Barney Oldfield?"—had evidently grown cautious; he didn't race at Indy in 1922 but rather drove the pace car.) Automakers caught the safety bug much later. Nash offered
factory-installed seatbelts in 1949, and the Big Four made front-seat
belts standard in 1964.
11. Four-Wheel Disc Brakes
Another gift from racing genius Harry Miller, four-wheel disc brakes
first appeared on his four-wheel-drive Miller Specials of the late '30s.
The midengine cars weren't very fast, but they sure could stop. Discs
caught on among other teams in the late '40s. They were first offered to American motorists on Crosley's tiny passenger cars of 1949. "The race
created the disc brake, 100 percent," says Mario Andretti, who ran the
500 29 times and won it in 1969
12. High-Performance Diesels
Diesels were known for brute strength, long life and black smoke, but
hardly for speed, when Clessie L. Cummins convinced speedway officials
to let him enter the race with an experimental car in 1931. Dropped
into a custom Duesenberg chassis, the four-cylinder Cummins didn't break
any records, but it ran the entire race without a pitstop and took
13th—and did it five years before Mercedes marketed the first diesel passenger car. Cummins steadily improved his diesels and had a
breakthrough for the 1952 race, when he commissioned car builder Frank
Kurtis to craft a low, sleek chassis around a 6.6-liter turbocharged
truck motor laid on its side. Driver Freddie Agabashian shocked the
racing world by riding the Cummins Diesel Special to the pole. Mercedes
and Peugeot began offering the first turbodiesels to the masses in 1978.
13. Hard Driving Surfaces
Indy offered an early and painful demonstration of the fact that roads
built for horses would not meet the demands of fast-spinning rubber
tires. The track's original surface was a variation on bituminous
macadam: gray gravel laid atop a clay base and covered in a thick
slathering of pitch, which itself was layered under 2 inches of finer
gravel and pitch and then covered with white stone. The track's designer promised that once smoothed by steamroller, this concoction would be
hardier, safer and faster than other American courses. But the surface
came undone in the opening minutes of the speedway's August 1909
inaugural weekend. As Charles Leerhsen writes in his entertaining book,
Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem and the Birth of the
Indy 500 (Simon & Schuster, 2011), track debris "could rip a man's face
to bloody ribbons, crack or work its way around the edges of his
goggles, and invade his eyes, blinding him to slow-moving or broken-down vehicles ahead." Deep ruts led to rollovers. Five people died: a driver,
two riding mechanics and two spectators. In the fall of 1909, Fisher and
his partners rebuilt the Indy track with 3.2 million bricks. The
Brickyard was born. That same year, 92 percent of America's 2.2 million
miles of public roads were dirt; concrete pavement accounted for 9
miles. Today, our paved roads span 2.7 million miles; the interstate
system alone required nearly 300 million cubic yards of concrete.
14. Four-Wheel Drive
This now-common consumer-car setup saw an early application at the
speedway. In 1934, a 4WD Harry Miller car led the race for several laps.
In the late '30s, Miller designed another line of 4WD racers, the Gulf Specials, which attracted a lot of ink but proved no more sure-footed
than racers with two-wheel drives—and slower than many of them. That
didn't stop others from championing the form: In 1946, a twin-engine
Fageol managed plenty of speed before it ran into a wall, and in 1963,
Andy Granatelli entered an all-wheel-drive car with Bobby Unser at the
wheel, to middling effect.
15. Aerodynamics
Indy cars have been platforms for streamlining theory since the first
race: Ray Harroun's 1911 Marmon Wasp was so named because its tail
tapered to a point, an early (and farsighted) stab at trimming drag.
In the early '70s, when most American cars were aerodynamic battering
rams, Indy teams borrowed from aviation to boost speeds and trim fuel consumption, deploying inverted wings and ground-effects skirts on race
cars. The whale's tails and spoilers in vogue among modern tuners can
trace their lineage to Indy teams' efforts to increase downforce and
cheat the breeze.
In 1971, driving legend and team owner Dan Gurney added a thin bracket
of sheet metal to the trailing edge of his Indy car's rear wing—and was shocked to find that it dramatically boosted the car's traction and
speed in the turns.
Today, a variation on the Gurney flap can be found on a slew of modern passenger cars from BMWs to Toyotas: It's the little lip at the trailing
edge of the trunklid. Never mind that rear-end downforce isn't critical
on either a luxury ride or a front-drive econobox. "Whether it's there
as a styling item or it really works," Gurney says, "well, that's the
way the industry goes."
POPULAR MECHANICS
With a suite of aerodynamic features, the Chaparral 2K debuted in 1979
and won six times in 27 Indy series starts in just three seasons. Johnny Rutherford drove a 2K to victory in the 1980 Indy 500.
From: Popular Mechanics
http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a9942702/15-ways-the-indy-500-changed-how-you-drive/
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