120 Years Ago The Most Important Sports Car Race In The World Looked More Like Modern Rally Racing

The Vanderbilt Cup of 1904 was the first major trophy in American auto racing, in fact the first of its kind in the world. This massive international affair was held on a 30.24-mile course on Long Island in New York, drawing some of the biggest names in racing at the time. William Kissam Vanderbilt, II put up a healthy prize for the winner, and cast a two and a half foot tall silver cup that everyone wanted to win. It was packed with all the pomp and circumstance of a modern sports car race, perhaps even a modern F1 Grand Prix, but it also had all the chaos and danger of a modern WRC rally.

Watch this archival footage of the inaugural event from 1904 and tell me you wouldn't want to be standing along the side of the road waiting for the 18 cars involved to trundle past. The speeds must have been breakneck for the era, as the vast majority of Americans were still travelling by horse or rail at the time. An estimated 50,000 people showed up to watch drivers from the USA, France, Germany and Italy run head-to-head.

The race called for ten laps of driving with two stops for safety inspection, repair, and fueling per lap. Each race car was required to be escorted slowly through the towns of Hicksville and Hempstead, Nassau County's population centers at the time, so as not to disturb the train schedules. After nearly 300 miles of racing, which took just shy of seven hours for the winner to traverse, it was over. American George Heath took the outright victory in his French-built Panhard just one minute and 26 seconds ahead of Frenchman Albert Clement, Jr. in his own Clement-Bayard.

The Vanderbilt Cup ran thirteen times over the next 33 years, moving to various race tracks once the streets of Nassau County were no longer deemed safe following the death of a spectator in 1906. The final Vanderbilt trophy was handed to Nazi Germany's Bernd Rosemeyer in 1937.