Early Road Racing

The first big auto races were in Europe, starting with the great city-to-city events such as Paris to Bordeaux and the tragic Paris to Madrid race in 1903. The James Gordon Bennett Cup race emerged as the biggest race in the world in 1904, but was quickly usurped by the advent of the French Grand Prix in 1906. In the United States the Vanderbilt Cup and later, the Grand Prize emerged as major events, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators. Due to professional commitments, I am not including Vanderbilt Cup content on this site. But there was a lot of other great road racing going on in these early days and I will expand with more articles on these topics.