Endurance Racing (motorsport) - Origins of Endurance Racing

Origins of Endurance Racing

Coppa Florio was an Italian car race started in 1900, and renamed in 1905 when Vincenzo Florio offered the initial 50 000 Lira and a cup designed by Polak of Paris. The Brescia race visited the route Brescia-Cremona-Mantova-Brescia. In 1908, the race used the Circuito di Bologna: Bologna-Castelfranco Emilia-Sant'Agata Bolognese-San Giovanni in Persiceto-Bologna. Since 1914 most of the Coppa Florio was co-organized with the Targa Florio near Palermo, Sicilia, running four or five laps, 108 km each.

The Targa Florio was an open road endurance automobile race founded in 1906- the track length of the last decades was limited to the 72 kilometres of the Circuito Piccolo delle Madonie, which was lapped 11 times.

The Mille Miglia was an open-road endurance race which took place in Italy 24 times from 1927 to 1957.

The first 24 hour race to take place on a closed course was at Brooklands, eleven days after its opening in 1907. This incurred the wrath of local residents and would lead to the Double Twelve race. This format meant the race took place for 12 hours each between 8am to 8pm and between it, the cars were locked up overnight to prevent maintenance work from being performed on them.

Read more about this topic:  Endurance Racing (motorsport)

Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins, endurance and/or racing:

    The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?”
    Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)

    Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.
    W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)

    Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.
    Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)