Narragansett Park Speedway

Narragansett Park Speedway was the site of two different 1 mile ovals. The first was a flat 1 mile horse track, and the second was a 1 mile paved, high banked oval. The location was Cranston, Rhode Island. Banking of the paved oval was approximately 20 degrees, and it was almost certainly the first true Super Speedway in North America.

New: 2006-01-21  Last Updated: 2020-01-11

Table of Contents

• Track Facts
• Historical Note
• Track Office
• Track Maps and Imagery
• Search for Web Pages
• Search for News
• Search for Images
• Getting There

Track Facts

Historical Note

Narragansett Trotting Park was the site of the first oval race in the United States on September 7th, 1896. Races were held on the flat dirt oval until 1913. In the meantime, the horse track folded and the site was taken over by the state for use as the Rhode Island State Fairground.

The paved oval was built in 1915. The Super Speedway configuration was extremely novel, as paving and banking were both entirely new concepts in oval track racing. The track was sanctioned by AAA, with a first race on September 18, 1915, which was won by Eddie Rickenbacker. The track operated through 1924. The site is now a housing subdivision.

References

Don Radbruch, Dirt Track Auto Racing, 1919-1941: A Pictoral History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004 , ISBN 0786417250 , pp. 211-213. Order from Powell's Books

Gordon Eliot White, Lost Race Tracks: Treasures of Automobile Racing. Hudson, Wisconsin: Iconographix, 2006 , ISBN 1583880844 , pp. 103.

Track Office

Narragansett Park
Fiat Avenue
Cranston, RI 02910

Track Maps and Imagery

The footprint is based on a map fragment from 1900 showing the original flat trotter track. It is not certain that the subsequent superspeedway was built on the same footprint.

According to Radbruch, the back stretch corresponded to Fiat Avenue in Cranston.

For information on how these aerial images work, Click Here.

• Google Map Imagery

Search for Web Pages

Search for News

You may also wish to try using the Yahoo! Search as it may produce current news items.

Search for Images

Getting There

Address:
using Google Maps.

Copyright/License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

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