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" Why write a book about the dawn of the Indy 500? The explosion of technology in the late-19th and early-20th centuriesthe more or less simultaneous arrival of electricity, telephones, airplanes, movies and of course automobileshas always fascinated me. It was a unique period in history, absolutely dizzying. It made people giddy and scared and more than a little sick in the head; it drove them to smoke and drink and seek psychotherapy. The Indy 500 was a kind of a secular holiday invented to celebrate this surge of so-called progress. It was all about speed and this other new thing called organized sportsbut in the parking lot in 1911 there were several thousand hitching posts for horses. I was intrigued by an event that so accurately symbolized this confusing era.   Blood and Smoke is full of vivid and funny anecdotes about the first Indy 500. How did you find so many details about a 100-year-old race? I had many sources, starting with thousands of newspaper clips, many from obscure, long-dead newspapers that have not yet been digitalized. I paged through ancient car weeklies that the New York Public Library keeps in a warehouse in New Jersey. I found feature stories about the brand-new sport of auto racing in magazines like Collier&amp;#039;s (where, for example, I read about a driver who threw nuts and bolts at competitors who tried to get by him). In another old magazine I stumbled upon an ad in which Helen Keller endorsed the Marmon automobile! And I did interviews[like] with Dick Harroun, the 94-year-old son of the first Indy&amp;#039;s official winner.   It helped greatly that the activity described by these sources was colorful to the point of insanity. Drivers had no seatbelts, hard helmets or roll bars. Their tires blewno, explodedfrequently, and the cars all leaked oil. That led to wrecks in which drivers and riding mechanics would be crushed when their cars &amp;quot;turned turtle&amp;quot;seriously injured, at the very least, when they flew from their seats and sailed into walls, trees or seas of startled spectators.   &amp;quot;This chariot may kill me,&amp;quot; Barney Oldfield, the leading driver of the day, once said, &amp;quot;but they will say afterward that I was going like hell when she took me over the brink!&amp;quot; The oldtime drivers went out of their way to be interesting, not that they had to try very hard. They hadn&amp;#039;t yet discovered, as today&amp;#039;s athletes have, that it is cooler to be terse and bland.  Why don&amp;#039;t we know who won that first race? The Speedway did not have the means to keep track of the timing and running order in a race that would last close to seven hours. It did have something known as the Warner Electrical Timing Device, or sometimes the Horograph, but this was an impossibly complicated system that simply didn&amp;#039;t work. How complicated was it? Wires stretched across the track connected to a sewing-machine-size box containing four roller-skate-size wheels that printed times on long strips of unspooling paper. In order to match the right car to those times, the Speedway employed a human spotter for each of the 40 starters, and these men were supposed to shout out the number of their assigned car each time it crossed the wire. Judges tried to write down the order of numbers as they heard them, but with 40 spotters shouting all at once, and not every car on the same lap, chaos quickly ensued.   I&amp;#039;m actually making the system sound simpler than it wasthere was a whole set of spotters who dropped marbles down chutes, in a futile attempt to keep track of each car&amp;#039;s laps, and the wires stretched across the track snapped frequently, necessitating emergency repairs. Anyway, about halfway through the race, an accident happened that sent a car spinning toward the judges stand, causing the officials to flee for their lives. By that time confusion already reigned, but for at least 10 minutes, and by some accounts as much as an hour, no one was officially watching the competition.  You say that judges took two days to decide who won the race and that Speedway authorities then ordered the records destroyed. So who really won: Ray Harroun, the declared winner, or the second-place finisher, Ralph Mulford? I can&amp;#039;t spoil the book for anyone by telling the answer here! But then I don&amp;#039;t really tell it in the book, either. I try to give enough good information so that the reader can make his or her own decision.  How did that first race change American car culture? The first Indy 500, which drew about 90,000 fans, failed in only one wayit did not help Indianapolis open a clear lead over Detroit as an automobile manufacturing center. Otherwise, though, it did for the horse what the Kennedy inauguration did for the hat: It made it officially obsolete, much to the delight of auto manufacturers, who entered their (sort-of) stock cars in the race as a way of advertising them to the public. In 1911, a largely rural state like Indiana still had far fewer cars on the road than, say, New York. But if you were still calling cars a fad after the first Indy 500, or throwing stones at them, or lobbying, as some people had, for laws that said they had to be preceded by a pedestrian carrying a lantern, then you weren&amp;#039;t just an animal lover or a conservative personyou were a plain fool. How has the race itself changed since 1911? The race has evolved in almost every way imaginable. It is a much safer event these days, even though the average speed of the winning car has increased from 74.6 mph to something like 160 mph. The crowds have grown to more than 300,000, making it the single best-attended event in all of sports. And though alcohol has been [imbibed] since that first year, the fans are, in at least one way, better behaved: They don&amp;#039;t respond to an accident by stampeding onto the track so they can get a closer look at injured drivers, and perhaps pluck a button or yank an epaulet off a corpseas they did at that first Indy.  Indy&amp;#039;s popularity has waned in recent years, and in your book you ask whether the race today is post-heyday or pre-comeback. Which do you think it is?  I vote for pre-comeback. There&amp;#039;s a lot of untapped potential in the Indianapolis 500, assuming the race is managed well in the future. In my opinion that would mean not trying to make too much sense of the event. The 500 was initially a kind of glorious accident, a last-ditch attempt to save a 2-year-old Speedway that was drawing fewer and fewer people to watch two- and three-day meetings filled with shorter races. Carl Fisher, the founding president of the Speedway, guessed that people would prefer one long and glorious race, and he was right about that.   Even in its heyday of 20 or 30 years ago, it was never about the championship of the IndyCar circuit, which few people have really ever cared about anyway. I would be for staying out of the race&amp;#039;s way, keeping it as a celebration of the start of summer, a day that is all about sunshine, beer, pork tenderloin sandwiches, hope and speed. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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