Richard Edmund Williams (March 19, 1933 – August 16, 2019)
LONDON (AP) — Richard Williams, a Canadian-British animator whose work on the bouncing cartoon bunny in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988) helped blur the boundaries between the animated world and our own, has died. His daughter, Natasha Sutton Williams, said the Oscar-winning artist died from cancer at his home in Bristol, England on Friday.
The first race was held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, now the home of the world’s most famous motor racing competition, the Indianapolis 500.
Built on 328 acres of farmland five miles northwest of Indianapolis, Indiana, the speedway was started by local businessmen as a testing facility for Indiana’s growing automobile industry. The idea was that occasional races at the track would pit cars from different manufacturers against each other and after seeing what these cars could do, spectators would presumably head down to the showroom of their choice to get a closer look.
The rectangular two-and-a-half-mile track linked four turns, each exactly 440 yards from start to finish, by two long and two short straight sections. In that first five-mile race on August 19, 1909, 12,000 spectators watched Austrian engineer Louis Schwitzer win with an average speed of 57.4 miles per hour.
Louis Schwitzer (1880 – 1967) winner of the inaugural race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.