Barney Oldfield: The Man Who Taught America to Go Fast

 

(The Atlanta Journal. September 25, 1910)

Barney Oldfield was probably the most famous race car driver in America when most Americans didn’t own a car.

 

That was part of the fun of it.

 

Oldfield raced anything that moved and some things that probably shouldn’t have. He started with bicycles, moved on to motorcycles, then climbed into racing cars that were little more than giant engines bolted onto skinny wheels. 

 

He smoked cigars while he raced, got himself suspended more than once, and never seemed terribly concerned about what the people running the sport thought of him.

 

For twenty years, Barney made a pretty good living scaring the hell out of people.

 

As a teenager in Toledo, he worked odd jobs until he saved enough money to buy a bicycle. Bike racing was big business in the 1890s. There were tracks all over the country, newspapers covered the races, and expert riders could pick up prize money and sponsors. Oldfield turned out to be pretty good.

 

He was also pretty good at promoting himself.

 

He called himself the “Bicycle Racing Champion of Ohio” and sometimes raced with a bottle hanging around his neck that looked like it contained whiskey. He later said it was vinegar, which may have been true. Either way, everybody noticed the bottle.

That was Barney.

 

He understood early on that winning a race was good. Getting your name in the newspaper was better.

Barney Oldfield driving. (Philadelphia Inquier. October 14, 1903)

Barney tried boxing for a while before a case of typhoid fever put an end to that idea. He went back to bicycles, then motorcycles, and finally found his way into automobiles.

 

That’s where things got interesting.

 

In 1902, his old bicycle racing friend Tom Cooper introduced him to Henry Ford. Ford was a nobody then. Just another Detroit mechanic trying to build automobiles and find somebody willing to give him money.

 

Ford had built a racing machine called the 999.

 

It wasn’t much of a car. There was a frame, four wheels, a seat and an 18.9-liter engine sitting out front. It weighed about 2,700 pounds and produced around 80 horsepower. There wasn’t much between the driver and the engine, and there was even less between the driver and whatever he hit.

 

Ford needed somebody to race it.

 

Barney had almost no experience driving automobiles, but that didn’t stop anybody. He spent a week learning how to handle the thing and entered a race at Grosse Pointe, Michigan, on October 25, 1902.

 

His opponent was Alexander Winton, one of the biggest automobile manufacturers and racers in the country.

(San Francisco Chronicle. December 11, 1904)

Winton should have beaten him.

 

He didn’t.

 

Barney won. Ford got the publicity he needed, and within a year Henry Ford was in business making automobiles.

 

Barney was in business too. As a race car driver. And a pretty damn famous one.

 

He raced for Winton and later drove the Peerless Green Dragon. By 1904, he held records at one, nine, ten, twenty-five and fifty miles. Newspapers followed him around, and promoters learned that putting BARNEY OLDFIELD on a poster was a good way to get people through the gate.

 

A lot of the people buying those tickets had never seen an automobile race before. Some probably hadn’t seen many automobiles.

 

Then Barney showed up. With his cigar clenched in his teeth, throwing dust everywhere, and making enough noise to scare every horse within a couple miles.

 

People loved it.

 

Barney figured out something early automobile racing promoters were still learning. The car wasn’t enough. You needed somebody in it.

Barney Oldfield in an early race car. (Pittsburgh Weekly Gazzette. October 1, 1904)

Barney gave them somebody.

 

He dressed the part, talked plenty, and made sure reporters had something to write about. He raced on dirt tracks, board tracks, beaches, and wherever else somebody could put up grandstands and collect admission.

 

Some of the racing was legitimate. Some of it was closer to a carnival act.

 

Barney might lose the first heat, come back to win the second, then have some mysterious trouble with the car before winning the final. There was usually enough noise, smoke, and drama to keep everybody happy.

 

Nobody had paid to watch a scientific experiment. They paid to see Barney Oldfield.

 

By 1907, he was famous enough to appear on Broadway in The Vanderbilt Cup. Oldfield and Tom Cooper sat in racing cars on stage while scenery moved behind them and stagehands threw dirt around to make it look like the cars were moving.

 

It sounds pretty stupid now. It probably looked pretty stupid then. But people paid to see it.

 

Three years later, Barney got his hands on  the Blitzen Benz.

 

It had an engine bigger than 21 liters and made about 200 horsepower. It was long, skinny, and nasty looking, with narrow tires and lousy brakes. The driver sat out in the open with little protection if anything went wrong. And at the speeds Barney wanted to run, plenty could go wrong.

Barney behind the wheel. (St. Louis Globe-Democrat. August 29, 1904)

He took the Benz to Daytona Beach in March 1910.

 

The beach was flat, hard and long enough to let a man find out just how fast his car would go. On March 16, Barney ran the measured mile at 131.724 miles per hour.

 

Today, that isn’t much of a number. There are family cars that will run 130.

 

But this was 1910.

 

Most roads weren’t paved. Horses were still pulling wagons through American towns. Plenty of people had never ridden in an automobile, and a car doing 30 or 40 miles an hour could draw a crowd.

 

Barney was doing 131.

 

On a beach.

 

That made news.

 

It also made Barney Oldfield an even bigger attraction.

 

The problem was that Barney had never been very good at taking orders. The American Automobile Association controlled most of the important racing in the United States. If the AAA didn’t approve a race, drivers were supposed to stay away from it.

 

In 1910, somebody came up with the idea to put Oldfield in a match race against heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson.

 

It was a promoter’s dream.

 

Jack Johnson was one of the most famous men in America. Barney Oldfield wasn’t far behind. Put them in cars, sell tickets, and let the newspapers do the rest.

 

The AAA told Barney not to do it. Barney did it anyway.

 

So they suspended him.

 

That might have ruined another driver’s career, but Barney had been around long enough to know how to make trouble pay.

 

He went on the road.

 

He raced at fairs and local tracks, putting on exhibitions and match races wherever promoters could find enough people with a few dollars in their pockets. Being suspended helped. Now the public wasn’t just seeing Barney Oldfield. They were seeing the guy the AAA didn’t want them to see.

 

At one point, Barney even raced an airplane.

 

The pilot was Lincoln Beachey, another famous daredevil who made his living doing things sensible people wouldn’t do. Beachey flew overhead while Barney raced underneath him.

Barney was a spokesperson for Peerless. Omaha Daily Bee. August 21, 1904)

Car against airplane.

 

It proved little. But it was one hell of a way to spend an afternoon.

 

For all his fame, Barney never won the Indianapolis 500. He missed the first one in 1911 because of his suspension and later competed at Indianapolis several times. His best finish was fifth in the shortened 1916 race.

 

Indianapolis was becoming serious racing. The cars were getting better, the competition tougher, and the entire business more organized.

 

Barney could race there. But the fairgrounds were more his style. That was where people could get close enough to hear the engine, smell the oil, and see Barney fighting the car around the track.

 

By 1916, Barney had also been racing long enough to watch a lot of men get killed.

 

One was Bob Burman.

 

Burman was a friend and one of the best drivers of the period. He died in a road race at Corona, California, after crashing in 1916.

 

Barney had spent years making money off the idea that racing might kill him. Burman’s death seems to have made the joke a little less funny.

 

He got together with Harry Miller, one of the best race car builders in the country, and they built the Golden Submarine. It was an odd-looking car, but there was a reason for that.

 

Most racing cars left the driver sitting out in the open. The Golden Submarine put him inside a streamlined aluminum body. If the thing crashed, there was something between the driver and the ground.

 

It was safer. Or at least safer by 1917 standards, which wasn’t saying a lot.

 

The Golden Submarine was fast, too, and Barney raced it through 1917 and 1918.

 

Then he quit.

 

Barney retired from racing in 1918. He was under suspension again when he did it, which was probably the right way for him to leave the sport.

 

But he didn’t exactly disappear.

 

He appeared in movies, sold automobiles, promoted products and kept showing up around racing. He had spent too many years making himself famous to go home and shut up.

 

He even became interested in seat belts.

 

In the early 1920s, he reportedly experimented with a harness made from parachute equipment. This was coming from a man who had spent years driving cars that offered roughly the same protection as sitting on a bar stool in the middle of a train wreck.

 

Maybe he was getting older. Or maybe he’d simply seen enough dead race car drivers.

 

Barney died in 1946 at 68. That’s not especially old. But for Barney, it wasn’t bad.

 

By then, automobile racing had changed. The cars were faster and better built. Indianapolis had become one of the biggest races in the world. New drivers had come along and broken Barney’s records.

 

But they couldn’t really replace him. Barney had been there when nobody knew what a race car driver was supposed to be.

 

So he made one up.

 

He raced anything somebody would pay him to race and understood that the crowd wanted more than speed.

 

They wanted a story.

 

Barney gave them one. Maybe some of it was bullshit. Maybe some races weren’t as honest as everybody pretended. And maybe the cigar, the bragging, and the whole Barney Oldfield act were as carefully put together as the cars he drove.

 

It didn’t matter. 

 

For twenty years, people bought tickets. They came to watch him drive too fast, make too much noise, and maybe get himself killed.

 

Then he’d pack up the car, head to the next town and sell them the whole damn thing again.

Before you go...

If you’ve ever stayed up way too late watching a true crime documentary, gone down a rabbit hole reading about an unsolved murder, or found yourself saying, “How have I never heard this case before?”—you’re in the right place.

I dig into murders, disappearances, serial killers, cold cases, small-town mysteries, forgotten crimes, and the strange, unsettling stories that time almost erased. No sensationalized headlines. No made-up drama. Just well-researched stories built from newspaper archives, court records, police reports, and historical documents.

If you enjoy what you read and would like to help keep the lights on, consider buying me a Big Gulp.

Every little bit helps pay for old newspapers, research materials, public records, travel, and the countless hours spent piecing together stories that deserve to be remembered.

Buy Me a Big Gulp / NickVulich.com

If true crime is your thing, you might also enjoy these books...

Gruesome Iowa

Gruesome Illinois

Gruesome California

Gruesome Serial Killers