Old midget auto racers

By Jack Peters Since midget auto-racing has become a national 'sport throughout America, many stories have arisen as to its origin. Members Of the racing fraternity of the Atlantic coast claim that they began the. Those who follow the peewee game on the Pacific coast will swear to it that their section Of the country introduced midgets to the Speed fans just four years ago. While in one respect both are wrong, statistics and records show that those of the Golden Gate State are nearest to being right. Any old-time race fan, who was on the Pacific coast Venice, California, in , to be exact will answer the question " Where and when was the first midget auto-race held in the United States?

Yes, midget cars are the perfect embodiment of everything a racecar should be. Allow us to explain. As a close relative to sprint cars, midget cars are a long-running dirt track favorite across the country. But despite their long and storied history , many people are still unfamiliar with these small but mighty racing machines. Where did they come from? How long have they been around?

Midget cars , also speedcars in Australia, is a class of racing cars. The cars are very small with a very high power-to-weight ratio and typically use four cylinder engines. They originated in the United States in the s and are raced on most continents. There is a worldwide tour and national midget tours in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Some early major midget car manufacturers include Kurtis Kraft s to s and Solar —

For the past 10 minutes, nine small cars had circled in front of him during a qualifying race, bolting along at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour. The eldest, in fact, was still in middle school. Shipman is a volunteer flagman, is one of more than 70 racing clubs — many of whose members are drawn from the rural parts of the country — designed for the thousands of children, ages 5 to 17, who race quarter-midget cars. Quarter-midget racing — so called because the cars resemble scaled-down versions of the exponentially more powerful midget-style racers — is part of a vast tradition of American auto racing, one that includes everything from Nascar and IndyCar to the less regulated world of short-track racing , an infamously dangerous corner of the sport that often serves as a next step for ambitious young racers. While auto racing remains one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States — a long way behind the top three football, basketball and baseball but on par with tennis and ahead of golf, according to a Gallup poll — its relative standing has dropped in recent years.