On May 30, 1911, Ray Harroun drove his single-seater Marmon
Wasp to victory in the inaugural Indianapolis 500, now one of
the world’s most famous motor racing competitions.

The Indiana automobile dealer Carl Fisher first proposed building
a private auto testing facility in 1906, in order to address car manufacturers’ inability to test potential top speeds of new cars
due to the poorly developed state of the public roadways.

The result was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, built on 328
acres of farmland five miles northwest of downtown Indianapolis.

By the mid-1920s, the Indy 500 had become what it is today–a
high-paying event for the world’s most expensive cars.

Carl Graham Fisher
(January 12, 1874 – July 15, 1939)

Ray Harroun takes the checkered flag.

   Ray Harroun ( 1879 – 1968)

On May 30, 1911, Ray Harroun drove his single-seater Marmon
Wasp to victory in the inaugural Indianapolis 500, now one of
the world’s most famous motor racing competitions.

Ray Harroun (#32) was on the outside of row seven in the
28th starting position.

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. (WSET) — At 20,000 feet in the sky,
history was made as the first female pilot in the Air National
Guard flew an F-35A Lightning II plane on her inaugural flight.

It took three years of training for 1st Lt. Kelsey Flannery to
reach the achievement, but she had to jump through many
more hoops than just training before she could fly.

The process started when she interviewed in 2019 for the
134th Fighter Squadron, or the "Green Mountain Boys."
Out of hundreds of applicants, Flannery was a member of
the small group selected to continue in the squadron as a
new pilot.

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.