Before a single car raced the Brickyard, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway held a balloon race, and in 1910 the Wright brothers staged America's first licensed aviation meet over the bricks.
A Pirep featured story · KEYE Eagle Creek Airpark, Indianapolis, IN
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway's first official competition was not a car race. In June 1909, before any automobile had raced the oval, the Speedway held a balloon race; co-founder Carl Fisher flew in it himself and wrote in the Star afterward how startled farmers fired guns at his balloon along the route until it landed in Tennessee.
A year later, from June 13 to 18, 1910, the Speedway staged the first licensed aviation meet in America, which was also the first public demonstration of airplanes in Indiana. The Wright brothers brought their exhibition team; of eleven entries the Wrights owned six, and only the Wright machines ever left the ground. Orville opened the meet himself, sliding down the wooden launch monorail (Wright flyers had no wheels) and tracing the outline of the track for two laps at 125 feet.
The star was Walter Brookins, the Wrights' 21-year-old prodigy, who had been flying for all of three months. On the first day he took a machine of balloon silk stretched over spruce, forty feet of wingspan, to 4,384.5 feet, a world altitude record, beating the mark the Frenchman Louis Paulhan had set just five months earlier. Word of it drew 19,000 people by midweek. Fisher himself rode with Orville Wright and admitted afterward that he had gripped the frame so hard he was surprised he left no dents. An Overland automobile fitted with an eight-foot propeller, the Wind Wagon, raced the airplanes around the bricks. Two of the Wright pilots that week, Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone, would die in crashes before the year was out; that was the price of flying in 1910.
Fisher wanted more. He tried to convince Glenn Curtiss to move his entire airplane business to the Speedway, dreaming of the track as America's aviation capital. The cars won that argument, and the first 500 ran in 1911. But the air kept coming back; in 2016 the Red Bull Air Races flew a course over the same infield. From KEYE Eagle Creek, a few miles north, the oval is unmistakable from the air, and worth a thought as you look down: the first machines ever cheered at the Brickyard had wings.