"It is October of 1910. The Philadelphia A's and their manager Connie Mack are basking in the glory of having defeated the Chicago Cubs four games to one in the seventh World Series. Martin Sheridan has just set a world's record in the discus of 142 feet, 2 inches. And Barney Oldfield, who had established a world's automobile speed record of 131.724 mph in March, is preparing to meet Jack Johnson, heavyweight boxing champion of the world since 1908, in the fledgling sport of motor racing."

Fast forward to June of 2006, when a crowd of 140,000 fills the Dover International Speedway for a series of NASCAR races, including the Neighborhood Excellence 400, part of the Nextel Cup national series. Given that Dover, capital of the State of Delaware, has a total population of 34,000, this is an impressive crowd indeed. Despite gasoline prices hovering between $2.85 and $3.10 a gallon in the mid-Atlantic region, thousands of devoted NASCAR fans have journeyed to Delaware in their gas guzzling motor homes to reside (and party) for the weekend on the 750 acres that surround the Speedway and to watch so-called "stock cars" circle the Monster Mile oval on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon.

With that as background, I was pleased to learn of the strong response from the SAH membership to the call in the last Journal for individuals who might be interested in forming a Motor Sport Section within the Society. Past-President Joe Freeman has been communicating with those prospective founding members, and he plans to present a formal proposal to establish such a section at the October meeting of the SAH Board in Hershey.

I suspect the majority of members responding to the call have an historical interest in the technical or competitive aspects of auto racing, and that is laudable, especially given its emergence as the most popular spectator sport in the United States. There is much to study, analyze, and record, including the engineering developments that were first pioneered in racing cars and then found their way into mass-produced vehicles, the land speed records set by cars racing for a mile against the clock, the emergence of Formula One racing, and the creation of formal league competition, to name just a few of the possible topics. Nonetheless, I think that it is important that we also investigate and consider the social, cultural, economic, ecological, and political aspects of auto racing.

While auto racing began as a demonstration of the mechanical superiority of one marque or automotive company over another and thus was a powerful marketing ploy, it soon became imbued with socio-cultural aspects that continue down to today. The quote that began this column is from an article that I wrote back in the late 1970s entitled "The Great White Hope on Wheels," which was originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review. As the title of that article implies, the 1910 Oldfield-Johnson match races pitted the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world against the white speed champion, and many at that time saw those races as a motorized battle for racial supremacy. Similarly, social and economic factors impinged on the contemporaneous road races held in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, the subject of Michael J. Seneca's 2004 Cugnot Award winning book The Fairmount Park Motor Races, 1908-1911. In that case, despite great popularity with automotive aficionados and financial success, the races generated enough neighborhood hostility that the Philadelphia City Council felt compelled politically to shut them down after three years.

More recently, even the increasingly popular NASCAR racing series (Nextel Cup, Busch, and Craftsman Truck) have not found themselves above controversy. Like other professional sports in the United States, allegations of heavy-handed governance have been brought against its management, and questions have been raised about who is granted and, more significantly, denied press passes and interviews with the owners, drivers, and pit crews. While such controversy seems to have little impact on the fan base, its mere existence indicates that auto racing involves more than simply combining the technical and personal attributes of car and driver in order to best the others in the field.

In addition, this year will mark the end of the "All-American" aspect of NASCAR racing. In 2007, Toyota will join the ranks of companies sponsoring cars in the premier Nextel Cup competition, when teams begin to race its Camry model on the NASCAR circuit. As such, it will become the first Japanese company to do so and, arguably, the first non-American marque to compete in the Nextel series. While no one questions that the Toyota Camry is "American-assembled" (in Georgetown, Kentucky) and thereby meets NASCAR rules in that regard, its forthcoming debut has caused quite a stir as team owners and drivers debate what fan reaction will be to having a "foreign" nameplate on the tracks. My guess is that they have little to worry about, given that the Camry has been the best selling car model in the United States for eight of the last nine years. However, the mere fact that the question has been raised once again argues for taking the widest view possible regarding the history of auto racing as we drop the starter's flag on the SAH's first special-interest section.

- Mike Berger, SAH President