davy B said:
sorry if there has been a thread like this in the past...
from what I understand the board track races were outlawed in the early 1900s after an accident killed several people, and while the accident was a tragedy the premise of the sport is undeniably exciting! my question is why hasnt this sport been brought back? even if it didnt make a huge come-back I could see a ton of people getting excited over the prospect of a race being organized.
Conditions were different in that era--specifically the conditions of roads.
Back during that time, central city streets were made of laid brick. Secondary streets in cities were mostly gravel, and most country roads were left as plain dirt roads. Major "highways" were gravel as well. Materials like concrete and asphalt were well-known and they were used in particular locations that had to have a hard surface for vehicles to move on, but they were far too expensive to use for building entire streets with.
Car and motorcycle engines improved to the point that the engines could move the vehicles faster than you could safely drive on any roads, because the road surfaces weren't ever smooth enough to allow the high speeds. Concrete and asphalt couldn't be produced just anywhere, they had to be mined where the ingredient materials existed naturally and then transported over land to the site where they would be used--and this was the era of only two kinds of land transportation: trains and horse-drawn carts. The train tracks didn't go through every town and horse-drawn carts couldn't transport much heavy weight over unimproved roads very well.
So people got the idea of building wooden tracks for racing on. Back then wood was very cheap and plentiful over most of the USA, and the labor to make it into a track was fairly cheap as well. MOST of the continent had to be cleared of trees before it could be farmed, and back then there was still a lot of trees left most places. The wooden tracks were far smoother than dirt or gravel would have been, but still still far less cost than building tracks out of concrete or asphalt, since the wood was usually available locally. (-Or at the least, you could find wood a lot easier than you could find all the stuff to make concrete or asphalt...)
THAT was the reason that they used wooden tracks..... And that was the reason that people came to the races. These races were the ONLY place you could regularly see a vehicle traveling at 100+ MPH. Other than the salt flats, there just wasn't anywhere else to do it that was flat enough.
------
Note that during this time period, city sidewalks were usually made of wood also for basically the same reasons. The wooden sidewalks would stay smoother than dirt or gravel, but still cost much less than sidewalks made of asphalt or concrete.
You could run similar races today but using a genuine-wooden-track would be something of a waste. Asphalt would probably end up being way cheaper. Modern indoor bicycle velodromes are still made of wood, but only because it is cheaper than asphalt or concrete
IF it is indoors and sheltered from the weather.
