Winner of the first Indianapolis 500
1879-1968
Appears in 1 documentary
Ray Harroun was a mechanical engineer first and a racing driver second, and it was the engineer’s mind that earned him a permanent place in automotive history. Born on January 12, 1879, in Spartansburg, Pennsylvania, he worked for the Nordyke Marmon Company of Indianapolis, where he both designed and drove cars.
On May 30, 1911, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway held the first Indianapolis 500. The two-and-a-half-mile oval had recently been paved with 3.2 million bricks, laid by hand, after its original crushed-stone surface disintegrated during deadly races two years earlier. Harroun drove a single-seat Marmon Wasp, painted yellow and black, and won the inaugural race with an average speed of about seventy-five miles per hour over nearly seven hours of driving.
His car was unusual in one crucial respect. Every other entry carried two men: a driver and a riding mechanic, whose jobs included watching for cars coming up from behind. Harroun raced alone. To compensate for the missing second set of eyes, he mounted a mirror above his dashboard so he could see the track behind him. Competitors complained it gave him an unfair advantage; Harroun said he had gotten the idea from a mirror he had once seen on a horse-drawn cab.
Whether or not Harroun invented the rearview mirror outright, and there are earlier claims, his very public use of one at the first Indianapolis 500 is the moment the device entered the popular imagination and, eventually, standard automobile design. Today every car on earth carries a version of the fix Harroun improvised to solve a racing problem.
Harroun retired from competitive driving almost immediately after his victory, having proven whatever he set out to prove, and returned to engineering, accumulating patents over his career. He died on January 19, 1968, in Anderson, Indiana. His name endures less for the trophy than for the small piece of glass that made solo racing possible and then quietly reshaped how the entire world drives.
The definitive story of the deadly early races and the first Indianapolis 500 that Harroun won in the Marmon Wasp.
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