Indianapolis, Capital of Performance Car Manufacture - 1910

Recently a fairly prominent motorsports journalist mentioned in an article that Indianapolis was once the American capital of automobile manufacturing. Not to be persnickety, but that just isn't true. The rise of Henry Ford's company along with such players as Cadillac, Dodge, Oldsmobile and others pretty much established Detroit as the top dog from the get-go.
 
What is true is that Indianapolis was a rival. There were other centers as well, such as Cleveland especially with the Winton Motor Carriage Company. In the years leading up to the advent of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the first Indianapolis 500 and on into the World War I years the Hoosier capital was home to some serious players. Among them were Marmon, National, American, Marion, Cole, Westscott, Empire and Stutz. Other names outside the city elsewhere in Indiana included Kokomo's Apperson and Studebaker in South Bend.
 
I won't tell you I understand exactly why what happened actually happened, but all of these great car companies slipped away. Well, actually some of the Marmon DNA survives today at Marmon-Herrington an aftermarket supplier of automotive/truck parts. But that's a tangent. The reality is these companies are long gone and only some of their products survive as curiosities and entries for concours d'elegance shows.
 
The reason?
 
Conventional wisdom has it that the Indianapolis companies collectively converged on a strategy of producing high performance products. Conversely, the companies of Detroit - once General Motors got past the experiments of Chairman William Crapo Durant and his once friend-turned-mortal-enemy Louis Chevrolet - almost universally focused on value and dependability. Henry Ford led that charge on producing dependable, affordable, no-frills utilitarian vehicles.
 
The above is a simplistic assessment but there is an essential truth to it from what I have gleaned in my readings and discussions with smart people that know the history. The real curiosity to me is why the companies of one city would embrace essentially the same strategy. In Detroit, it was value and dependability. In Indianapolis, it was performance. It makes me think this is an example of a cultural issue in an era where the exchange of ideas across hundreds of miles traveled far more slowly and with less impact than in our IT-rich world today.
 
Ford, the best example and the dominant player in the industry of time, resisted the urge to focus on fun performance cars in favor of a product addressing the sweet spot of the market - the everyday family who simply wanted transportation. Ford, the man, made mistakes as well, such as clinging too long to the meat-and-potatoes Model T.
 
As a result, Ford's company struggled with plummeting marketshare before son Edsel and a younger generation of managers came to the rescue with updated offerings. GM leapt ahead but Ford weathered the storm and enjoyed a return to profitability. This was in the face of the Great Depression, an event that tanked most American car companies and decimated the great marques of Indianapolis.
 
Among those who fell by the wayside was Indianapolis' Marion Motor Car Company, a business that produced some fine cars but struggled with the job of locating a market foothold. Early on their premiere engineer was none other than Harry Stutz. Stutz went on to found one of the most legendary of Hoosier car manufacturer brands - the Stutz. His prototype successfully completed the first Indianapolis 500, inspiring the upstart corporation to latch onto the slogan, "The car that made good in a day."
 
The image you find here is one of Stutz' Marion designs. If you click thru on First Super Speedway you can find a lot of cool stuff like this. Get started at the link below to an article discussing the great Indianapolis manufacturers, how they dominated the Atlanta speedway race weekend of spring 1910 and how they were odds-on favorites for the Brickyard's very first Memorial Day race meet of the same year.