Danny Ongais (May 21, 1942 – February 26, 2022)

Ongais was the only native Hawaiian to compete in the Indianapolis
500. He also competed professionally in motorcycle, sports car,
CART, IndyCar, Formula One, and drag racing.

Ongais died from congestive heart failure in Anaheim Hills, California,
on February 26, His death was announced by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

On February 21, 1948, the National Association for Stock Car
Racing, —or NASCAR, as it will come to be widely known—is
officially incorporated. NASCAR racing will go on to become
one of America’s most popular spectator sports, as well as a
multi-billion-dollar industry.

The driving force behind the establishment of NASCAR was
William “Bill” France Sr. (1909-1992), a mechanic and auto-
repair shop owner from Washington, D.C., who in the mid-
1930s moved to Daytona Beach, Florida.

William Henry Getty France
(September 26, 1909 – June 7, 1992)

A launch pad fire during Apollo program tests at Cape Canaveral,
Florida, killed astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White
II, and Roger B. Chaffee. An investigation indicated that a faulty
electrical wire inside the Apollo 1 command module was the
probable cause of the fire. The astronauts, the first Americans
to die in a spacecraft, had been participating in a simulation of
the Apollo 1 launch scheduled for the following month.

On December 14, 1909, workers placed the last of the 3.2 million
10-pound bricks that pave the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana (a town surrounded by the city of Indianapolis).
Since then, most of that brick has been buried under asphalt, but
one yard remains exposed at the start-finish line (below). Kissing
those bricks after a successful race remains a tradition among Indy
drivers.

On August 19, 1909, 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.

In that first five-mile race, 12,000 spectators watched Austrian
engineer Louis Schwitzer win with an average speed of 57.4 miles
per hour. The track’s surface of crushed rock and tar proved a
disaster, breaking up in a number of places and causing the deaths
of two drivers, two mechanics and two spectators.

The surface was soon replaced with 3.2 million paving bricks, laid
in a bed of sand and fixed with mortar. Dubbed “The Brickyard,”
the speedway reopened in December 1909.

Ray Harroun wheels his No. 32 Marmon Wasp racecar to
victory in the inaugural Indy 500.