Racing in South Bend: The Speed Record

Racing · The speed record

South Bend's speed was built by its own hands twice over. In the 1930s the city's speed at Indianapolis wore a Studebaker badge: the factory's test drivers carried South Bend-built cars into the 500, and one of them, Luther Johnson, was born on these streets. A decade later fourteen local men — drivers among them — built a high-banked quarter-mile of their own west of town, and South Bend Motor Speedway opened in 1946 to eight thousand people and became one of the midget-racing capitals of the postwar Midwest. The city's other oval, inside the amusement park on the river, held exactly one NASCAR race, in 1952, and the record of who won it is not what local retelling says. Two of the biggest names in modern American stock-car racing, Ryan Newman and David Stremme, were both born in this city in 1977, and Newman can say his grandfather helped build the speedway. Around those poles the record runs whole: a national Soap Box Derby champion in 1960, a county kart track that hosts national championships, a drag strip the city famously never had, one documented death at a local track, and a river whose racing, tested, is human-powered. This section holds all of it at the size the record supports.