Board Track Motorcycle Racing and the Motordrome Era
In the first years of the twentieth century, companies like Harley-Davidson and Indian began producing motorcycles for the general public. It is hard to imagine that many riders waited very long before turning those new machines against each other. As soon as there were two motorcycles on the road, there was going to be racing.
The earliest organized motorcycle contests did not begin on purpose-built speedways. Riders raced on horse tracks, beaches, dirt ovals, endurance routes and bicycle velodromes before the wooden board-track era fully took shape. A ten-lap race at Agriculture Park in Los Angeles in 1901 is often cited as an early organized motorcycle racing milestone, and the Federation of American Motorcyclists followed in 1903 as the sport moved toward more formal sanctioning. Those early venues were good enough for the relatively slow machines of the first decade, but the motorcycles improved quickly. Once speeds began climbing toward 75, 90 and eventually 100 mph, promoters needed something more dramatic than a converted horse track.
The result was the motordrome: a steep, banked wooden racing surface built to make speed visible. For a few explosive years, early motorcycle racing history was written on wooden planks, in front of packed grandstands, by riders on stripped factory machines with very little between them and disaster.
Before the Boards
Motorcycle racing grew out of several older sporting worlds at once. Bicycle racing had already proven that banked velodromes could draw crowds. Horse tracks offered convenient ovals in towns that already supported racing. Beaches gave early speed men long, hard, open surfaces. Dirt tracks and endurance runs tested riders and machines in ways that looked more like real-world motorcycle use. The board track borrowed from all of these, but it exaggerated the one thing spectators wanted most: speed.
There is not one clean date for the first motordrome because it depends on what counts as a motordrome. If the question is the first organized motorcycle race, the answer belongs in the opening years of the century. If the question is the first wooden oval built with motorcycle racing in mind, the 1908 Clifton track in New Jersey belongs in the discussion. If the question is the first clearly purpose-built motorcycle board tracks, Los Angeles and Springfield in 1909 are central. If the question is the first fully scaled, mile-long wooden speedway, Playa del Rey in 1910 is the landmark.
That ambiguity matters because the motordrome did not appear out of nowhere. It was the result of bicycle-track builders, motorcycle manufacturers, racers and promoters all chasing the same thing at the same time: a venue where motorcycles could run flat out and spectators could see the whole show.
Jack Prince and the Rise of the Motordrome
The name that appears again and again in early board-track history is Jack Prince. Prince had been deeply involved in bicycle racing and wooden track construction before motorcycles became the attraction. His genius was not simply building a track from boards. It was understanding that the banking itself could make a motorcycle race faster, closer and more marketable.
Early designs still looked like enlarged bicycle velodromes. The 1909 Los Angeles Coliseum Motordrome was a small oval, with relatively mild banking on the straights and much steeper banking in the turns. Springfield, Massachusetts had its own early motordrome the same year, tied closely to the Indian world through Hendee and Hedstrom. By 1910, the Los Angeles Motordrome at Playa del Rey had taken the idea to a much larger scale.
Playa del Rey is the track most people think of when they imagine the first great American motordrome. It was a mile-long wooden speedway, built when lumber was still cheap enough that promoters could consider such a project at all. Contemporary accounts and later histories describe a staggering quantity of material, including millions of square feet of lumber and tons of nails. It was not just a racetrack. It was a monument to speed, carpentry and optimism.
How a Board Track Was Built
The basic board-track idea was simple, but the scale was hard to believe. Rough-cut lumber, commonly 2x4s and sometimes 2x2s, formed the racing surface. The boards were laid to create a continuous wooden oval, and on many tracks the planks were set on edge so the narrow face became the running surface. The amount of lumber required for even a short track was enormous. For a mile-long track, the number of board feet was staggering.
The corners were banked so riders could keep speed through the turns. Early tracks might combine milder straightaway banking with steeper turns. Later short “saucer” tracks often pushed the banking dramatically higher, with many reported in the 50- to 60-degree range. The original board-track accounts often describe banking that began around 25 degrees and rose toward 60 degrees on the outside of the turn. The exact numbers varied from track to track, and period figures should be treated as reported values rather than survey-grade measurements, but the general truth is clear: these tracks were built to let a rider stay on the throttle.
That design came with a price. Wood moved, weathered, splintered and burned. Wrecks tore into the surface. Oil soaked into the boards. Nails loosened. There were no modern preservatives that could make a wooden speedway last indefinitely, and promoters faced constant repair costs. Many tracks were expected to need major resurfacing within a handful of years. In practice, a lot of them were simply abandoned or torn down when the money stopped making sense.
Short Saucers and Big Board Speedways
It is easy to picture all board tracks as mile-long wooden ovals, but the motordrome world was more varied than that. Some of the most notorious motorcycle tracks were short, steep saucers of a quarter-mile or a third-mile. Others were larger one-mile, mile-and-a-quarter, mile-and-a-half or two-mile board speedways that also hosted automobiles. The original article listed a broad range of these venues, and that variety is worth preserving because it shows how quickly the wooden-track idea spread.
The list below keeps the original track material while cleaning obvious spelling, spacing and capitalization issues. Lengths and dates should be read as reported historical values, not as engineering drawings.
| Track / Location | Reported length | Reported years |
|---|---|---|
| Playa del Rey, CA | 1.0 mile | 1910–1913 |
| Elmhurst, CA | 0.5 mile | 1911–1913 |
| Chicago, IL (Maywood) | 2.0 miles | 1915–1917 |
| Des Moines, IA | 1.0 mile | 1915–1917 |
| Omaha, NE | 1.25 miles | 1915–1917 |
| Brooklyn, NY (Sheepshead Bay) | 2.0 miles | 1915–1919 |
| Uniontown, PA | 1.125 miles | 1916–1922 |
| Cincinnati, OH | 2.0 miles | 1916–1919 |
| Tacoma, WA | 2.0 miles | 1915–1921 |
| Beverly Hills, CA | 1.25 miles | 1920–1924 |
| Fresno, CA | 1.0 mile | 1920–1927 |
| San Carlos, CA | 1.25 miles | 1921–1922 |
| Cotati, CA | 1.25 miles | 1921–1922 |
| Kansas City, MO | 1.25 miles | 1922–1924 |
| Altoona, PA | 1.25 miles | 1923–1931 |
| Charlotte, NC | 1.25 miles | 1924–1927 |
| Culver City, CA | 1.25 miles | 1924–1927 |
| Salem, NH (Rockingham) | 1.25 miles | 1925–1927 |
| Laurel, MD | 1.125 miles | 1925–1926 |
| Miami, FL (Fulford-by-the-Sea) | 1.25 miles | 1926–1927 |
| Amatol, NJ (Atlantic City) | 1.5 miles | 1926–1928 |
| Woodbridge, NJ | 0.5 mile | 1929–1931 |
| Akron, OH | 0.5 mile | Dates not listed |
| Bridgeville, PA | 0.5 mile | Dates not listed |
That list also shows why “board track” and “motordrome” are sometimes used loosely. A short, steep saucer built primarily around motorcycles was one version of the idea. A large board speedway that hosted both automobiles and motorcycles was another. Both belonged to the same larger moment, when wooden racing surfaces seemed like the future of speed.
Factory Racing as Advertising
There is no doubt that board-track racing was an incredibly exciting event to witness. The motorcycles were capable of speeds over 100 mph, and the races brought together many of the marques of the day. Indian, Excelsior and Harley-Davidson are the names most people remember now, but the boards also drew attention from builders such as Flying Merkel, Thor, Yale, Jefferson and others. A factory win on the boards was not just a sporting result. It was advertising.
Indian and Excelsior were especially important in the earliest years of the technical duel. Indian’s eight-valve racers became some of the most advanced competition motorcycles of the period, and Excelsior made headlines when Lee Humiston exceeded 100 mph on a closed-course track at Playa del Rey in 1912. Those records mattered because buyers read about them. Racing success suggested that a company knew how to build power, reliability and speed.
Harley-Davidson’s relationship to the motordrome was more cautious at first. Board-track racing was expensive, dangerous and not always easy to connect to ordinary street motorcycles. Arthur Davidson reportedly viewed the worst board-track publicity as poor advertising. Still, the company eventually hired Bill Ottaway in 1913 and made a serious factory racing push the following year. By the time Harley-Davidson’s racing program fully gathered momentum, the short, spectacular golden age of the motordrome was already beginning to darken, but the riders who came through that program became some of the best-known names in American motorcycle competition.
That later factory-racing world is the natural bridge from the early boards to machines like the Harley-Davidson DAH factory racer and the Harley-Davidson CAC speedway racer. The motorcycles changed, the surfaces changed, and the rules changed, but the basic idea stayed the same: racing could sell engineering.
The Riders Who Made Their Names on the Boards
The boards produced some of America’s earliest motorcycle racing stars. Jim Davis, Otto Walker, Albert “Shrimp” Burns and Ray Weishaar belong in any discussion of the era. So do Jake DeRosier, Lee Humiston, Ralph Hepburn, Fred Ludlow, Maldwyn Jones, Don Johns and Leslie “Red” Parkhurst. These men were not just weekend racers. Many were factory men whose public reputations were tied directly to the machines they rode.
Racing on the boards required a strange mix of nerve and calculation. The rider had to hold speed on a surface that was often steep enough to look like a wall. He had to trust the tires, the track, the engine and every other rider around him. On the short saucers, there was almost no time to recover from a mistake. On the big speedways, the speeds were high enough that even a small failure could turn into a catastrophe.
The fans came to see that risk. Promoters understood the entertainment value of danger and built race programs around spectacle. Some venues added night racing. Others mixed motorcycle racing with automobile events or other attractions. The motordrome was part sport, part theater and part industrial demonstration.
The Machines: No Brakes, High Gearing and Total-Loss Oil
The motorcycles themselves became more specialized as the tracks became faster. Early board-track racers were not ordinary road machines with a number plate added. They were stripped for speed, lightness and minimum wind resistance. Road equipment that did not help the bike go faster was usually left off. Brakes were often absent. Clutches could be absent. Some racing engines were tuned and geared so aggressively that the motorcycle had to be towed or push-started before it could come alive.
One period Indian board-track racer is often described with the kind of details that make the whole sport easier to understand: rigid frame, turn-down handlebars, Bosch magneto, Hedstrom carburetor, no brakes, no clutch, manual oil feed, a carburetor effectively run wide open and gearing so tall that starting it required outside help. That was not transportation. That was a speed instrument.
The best machines pushed engine technology forward. Indian’s 1911 Big-Base 8-Valve racer, with its overhead-valve, four-valves-per-cylinder layout, was far ahead of most street motorcycles of the day. Other makers experimented with overhead-valve and multi-valve designs. Flying Merkel continued developing powerful twins, chain and belt drive arrangements, larger tires and its distinctive suspension ideas. The board tracks rewarded top-end speed, and factories built accordingly.
But the weak link was often not the rider or the engine. It was everything around them. Tires were narrow and heavily stressed. Suspension was primitive or nonexistent. Total-loss lubrication meant oil could end up on the boards and in the racing line. The wooden surface could splinter. The banking gave riders speed but little margin. When the system worked, it looked magnificent. When any part of it failed, the results could be brutal.
Why They Called Them Murderdromes
Nothing adds to the excitement of racing like danger, and board-track racing had plenty to spare. The standard rider’s uniform was little more than a leather helmet, wool sweater, leather gaiters, pants, gloves and boots. Even if a rider walked away from a crash, he might come away full of splinters from the wooden surface. In a bad crash, there was not much to protect him from the track, the machine, the fence, the crowd or another rider.
The spectators were not immune from the danger. Grandstands were often placed high around the track so fans could look down on the action. That made for a great view, but it also meant a rider who left the racing surface could end up in the crowd. Modern catch fencing, runoff and spectator separation were not part of the motordrome world. The people selling tickets had learned how to create spectacle faster than they had learned how to contain it.
The nickname “murderdrome” did not come from later nostalgia. It came from the public reaction to real crashes, real deaths and newspaper coverage that made the danger impossible to ignore. The most infamous American disaster happened at the Vailsburg Motordrome in Newark, New Jersey, on September 8, 1912. Eddie Hasha lost control, and the wreck killed Hasha and fellow rider Johnny Albright along with spectators. Immediate reports counted four spectators dead and many injured, while later newspaper tallies counted additional victims who died from injuries. That is why the death toll is sometimes given differently in later retellings.
The Ludlow or Lagoon Motordrome disaster in Kentucky in 1913 compounded the damage to the sport’s reputation. Rider Odin Johnson crashed into a lighting pole, fuel and electricity became part of the accident, and multiple spectators were killed. Like Newark, the exact toll varies depending on whether later deaths from injuries are counted, but the larger lesson was obvious. These were not isolated rider accidents. They were failures of venue design, crowd placement, lighting, fuel control and basic containment.
Death, Fame and the Harley-Davidson Wrecking Crew
The board-track years produced heroes, but they also produced a long list of casualties. Albert “Shrimp” Burns died after a crash in Toledo, Ohio, in 1921. Ray Weishaar died after a crash in Los Angeles in 1924. Eddie Brinck was killed at Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1927. Those names still matter because they were not anonymous racers. They were stars, factory men and public faces of the sport.
Weishaar is also tied to one of Harley-Davidson’s most enduring pieces of racing folklore. He was part of the Harley-Davidson factory racing team that became known as the Wrecking Crew, and he was often photographed with the team’s pig mascot. That pig helped give rise to the lasting “hog” nickname associated with Harley-Davidson motorcycles and riders. It is one of those racing stories that moved far beyond the track and into the language of motorcycling itself.
The Wrecking Crew name fit the period. Harley-Davidson’s riders, including men such as Weishaar, Hepburn, Burns, Parkhurst, Ludlow, Walker and Jones, helped establish the company’s competition identity at a time when racing success meant newspaper coverage and showroom credibility. The irony is that Harley-Davidson’s strongest racing identity grew in part from a form of racing the company had once viewed with deep caution.
Why Board-Track Racing Faded
By the late 1920s, board-track racing was rapidly approaching its end in the United States. The Great Depression did not help, but the sport was already under pressure before the economy collapsed. The real decline came from several forces working together.
First, the death toll and press coverage had changed the public meaning of the sport. The same danger that once sold tickets also made city officials, sanctioning bodies, manufacturers and some spectators uneasy. Second, the tracks were expensive to build and maintain. Wood rotted, warped, burned and splintered. A promoter could spend a fortune just keeping the racing surface alive. Third, the motorcycles had become so specialized that the connection to ordinary riding was harder to sell. A machine with no brakes, little control equipment and all-out gearing thrilled the crowd, but it did not necessarily prove much about a road motorcycle.
Dirt-track racing offered a more sustainable path. Dirt tracks were cheaper, more familiar and easier to connect to the kind of motorcycle competition that survived for decades. Endurance runs, hill climbs and dirt events also let manufacturers prove strength and reliability in ways that looked more useful to the average rider. The shift did not happen overnight, but the direction was clear. The boards had given American motorcycle racing a spectacular stage, and then they became too costly and too dangerous to remain the center of the sport.
That transition is why later events such as the Jack Pine Endurance Run became such an important part of American motorcycle competition. The future belonged less to the wooden saucer and more to racing formats that could survive beyond the first burst of novelty.
The Motordrome Idea After the Wooden Boards
The American wooden-board era largely faded by the late 1920s and early 1930s, but the motordrome idea did not disappear everywhere. Overseas, steep-banked tracks continued in different forms, especially in concrete. Melbourne’s Motordrome and Sydney’s Maroubra Speedway were not wooden board tracks in the classic American sense, but they show how the same speedway idea traveled: steep banking, enclosed spectacle, motorcycles and other racing machines running in front of large crowds.
That distinction matters. Board-track motorcycle racing was a specific wooden-track phenomenon, but the motordrome was also an idea about how to display speed. It joined engineering, danger, advertising and entertainment into one place. The wooden tracks were temporary, but the concept of the banked spectator speedway lasted far longer.
What the Board-Track Era Left Behind
The board-track era was short, expensive and dangerous, but it left a deep mark on motorcycle history. It helped create national motorcycle racing stars. It pushed manufacturers to build specialized racing machines. It turned factory competition into advertising theater. It gave Harley-Davidson, Indian, Excelsior and their rivals a stage where mechanical speed could be sold to the public as proof of engineering strength.
It also left a warning. The motordrome showed what could happen when speed advanced faster than tires, brakes, track design, crowd protection and rules. The old photographs still look thrilling because the riders appear to be defying gravity on walls of wood. They also look dangerous because they were dangerous. That tension is why board-track motorcycle racing remains one of the most fascinating chapters in vintage racing history.
The murderdrome nickname may be the most dramatic thing people remember, but it is not the whole story. The boards were also part of the rise of American motorsport, the growth of factory racing, and the creation of motorcycle heroes whose names still echo through the history of the sport.
