Florida Historical Quarterly Volume 45 Number 3 Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol 45, Article 5 Number 3 1966 Florida's Golden Age of Racing Alice Strickland Part of the American Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Article is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Florida Historical Quarterly by an authorized editor of STARS. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Recommended Citation Strickland, Alice (1966) "Florida's Golden Age of Racing," Florida Historical Quarterly: Vol. 45 : No. 3 , Article 5. Available at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol45/iss3/5 Strickland: Florida's Golden Age of Racing FLORIDA’S GOLDEN AGE OF RACING by ALICE STRICKLAND NE HONOR of being “the first man to sit behind the controls of a self-propelled road vehicle,” goes to a French army engineer, Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, who in the 1760s designed a monstrous steam carriage to transport artillery. Cugnot’s vehicle was so massive and unwieldy that it knocked over the wall of a courtyard while being tested, and on another occasion turned over on the streets of Paris. Its top speed was from two to six miles per hour. 1 From the steam-misted and gasoline-fumed past of the horse- less carriage it is impossible to find out when the first automobile enthusiast challenged another to an exciting race. However, on July 22, 1894 - more than a hundred years after Cugnot’s mon- ster frightened the wits out of Parisians - the “first group of racing automobiles ever to leave a starting line, departed the Porte Maillot in Paris for Rouen.” There were nineteen cars in that historic race that covered almost seventy-nine miles.