1915: Ivan Cleans Up

Well, this is it: the last racing-themed post of Ivan's illustrious career behind the wheel... of a car, that is.  Some of the airplanes had steering wheels too, so I thought I'd be clear about that.  These newspaper articles make me happy, too.  When I started posting about Ivan's racing career, he was placing pretty consistently in third, and sometimes second.  Whenever he could tear a wheel off another car, he'd place first.  But, now he's really, truly winning, and in some cases he's winning pretty substantially.  Some of the references in the clips mention him lapping his opponents! 

This next clip contains a paragraph at the end that I really found funny.  You can almost hear the disgust exhibited by the author of the article.  Somebody beat this guy Wheaton, will ya?!  As with most of these articles, I've omitted the motorcycle races.

Here's another photo of the car we saw in the last post, and again, the team is all about the sponsor.  Havoline is a familiar name even today, and it was interesting to learn through a quick Wikipedia check, that this brand is traced back to the mid 1900s.  The Indian Refining Company purchased the Havemeyer Oil company in 1915, and was later purchased by the Texas Oil Company (better known as Texaco) in 1931.  The brand survived under Texaco until 2001 when Texaco merged with Chevron, which still uses the brand today on motor oils, other lubricants and antifreeze.

Somewhere in the post on death and destruction, I had researched the accident involving a Vite which crashed at the state fair.  From that research, I found a photo of a Vite car, which I can no longer seem to find.  The radiator looked very similar to the crash photo, and those both look very much like this car's radiator.  Until I get some more information to confirm or deny this, I'm going to guess that this is the Vite that he did so well in.  Notice the Chalmers logos in the garage doors.

I found one snippet regarding Mr. Gotier (no, Google, I did not mean Goiter) in the book American machinist, vol. 55, 1921.  "Frederick A. Gotier, formerly with the Buick and Cole organizations, has been selected to represent the New Bradford Motor corporation, distributor of Studebaker cars in Albany, N.Y."  I found nothing more about the race, or Mr. Gotier.

This is the most glowing praise of Ivan's racing career I've read to date. 

And here is the last newspaper clipping I have in the collection regarding Ivan's racing career.  I thought that there was much more, but the articles turned out to be mostly regarding his decision to learn flying.  The article covers the same race as above, but the last paragraph gives more coverage to the match race between Ivan and Mr. Gotier.  I'm going to do more searching of the local newspapers to see if I can find any more information about this race.  It's too much build up not to know what the outcome was.

So, we're essentially done with Ivan's auto racing.  He took one of his cars with him on his flying adventures, so we'll see that in later posts.  I have mixed emotions, actually.  I had slogged through some of the racing section, anxious to get on to the flying portion.  However, now that I've seen how big racing was to Ivan during these two years, I wish I had more articles to look through.  I have to say, it's very satisfying to know that he reached a zenith in his racing endeavors.

Next up will be articles and photos of Ivan's first flight, and his instruction begins in Palm Beach, Florida, with a gentleman named "The Honorable Frederick C. G. Eden". 

-kpw