First Super Speedway

1905 Gordon Bennett Cup Teams

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By: Mark Dill

Below is a collection of articles about the great American driver Joe Dawson who won the second Indianapolis 500 Mile Race in 1912. Also check out this article on Joe from Vanderbilt Races.

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Earl Kiser Portrait

Earl Kiser was one of America's early professional auto racing drivers and a chief rival to his much more well-known contemporary, Barney Oldfield. Kiser succeeded Oldfield on Alexander Winton's Bullet II race car when Barney and Winton had a falling out. Kiser was also a colleague of Indianapolis Motor Speedway founder Carl Fisher.

This article orginally appeared in a June 1905 issue of Motor Age. It is a very nice summary providing the backgrounds of the drivers representing the various teams entered in the the 1905 James Gordon Bennett Cup auto race, held in France. The race, designed by the millionaire James Gordon Bennett Jr., defined teams as entries from manufacturers of a given nation. Typically, the most industrialized countries of the age filed entries with France, Germany and Italy the most respected competitors. Other entries - but not always - came from the United States and the United Kingdom, with Belgium and Austria (with Austrian-built Mercedes) as occasional participants.

In this particular race there were teams from France, Germany, Italy, America, Austria and Britain. The article is quite useful in that it provides background on drivers such as Joe Tracy (born in Wales), Bert Dingley and Herb Lytle (American Team); Leon Thery, Arthur Duray (born in United States) and Gustave Caillois (French Team); Wilhelm Werner, Camille Jenatzy (born in Belgium) and Baron Pierre De Caters (born in Belgium), (German Team); Charles Rolls, Mr. Bianchi and Clifford Earp (U.K. Team); Alexander Burton (born in America), Mr. Hieronymus and Mr. Braun (Austrian Team); Vincenzo Lancia and Alessandro Cagno (Italian Team). As an added bonus, check out this link on Gordon Bennett Cup drivers.

Over a page of the three PDF pages in this download is devoted to a discussion of the technical apects of the cars, always good in researching auto races.