1,000 Greatest Drivers: Johnny Aitken
The winningest driver in Indianapolis Motor Speedway history.
You likely haven’t heard of Aitken since he never won the Indy 500, but he was definitely one of the best drivers in Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the pre-World War I years. Even most hardcore fans probably couldn’t name any Indy 500 winners from the 1910s except for (at most) Ray Harroun, Jules Goux, and Ralph DePalma, but I think Aitken in his heyday was a match for any of them, even if his record in the Indy 500 itself wasn’t that great. (I of course have all the Indy 500 winners memorized, snort snort.) In addition to setting a record 15 wins at IMS (although admittedly only two of them came in races over 50 miles in length), he also was the first ever lap leader at the track as well as an early winner of the American Grand Prize. (That’s what the USGP used to be called when I guess American nationalism and/or xenophobia meant that we felt obliged to translate French phrases like that into English.) Although Aitken only made two starts in the Indy 500, he did win the pole for the 1916 event, which was reduced to 300 miles. Most people who know about this seem to think this had something to do with the onset of World War I, but it did not. Then-Speedway owner Carl Fisher decided to reduce the distance to 300 miles because he claimed that that was what the fans wanted. However, in my research tonight, I noticed that several months after the race, IMS decided to poll ticketholders on what length of race and size of purse they would prefer:
My interpretation of this article is that the real reason Fisher reduced the length of the race from 500 miles to 300 miles that year was because he wanted to use the reduced race distance to justify reducing the purse from $50,000 to $30,000 until he became convinced that fan backlash might hurt his ticket sales. Cheap bastard.
