1911 Indy 500 – Ray Harroun's Bullet Nose

Lore & Background

The position was necessary because the early cars had no way for the driver to see behind or far ahead over the long straightaways. It was also, by any modern standard, absurdly dangerous, and the flagger sat exposed with no protection whatsoever. Ray Harroun, a mechanic and driver from the Indianapolis area, entered a Marmon with a radically different philosophy. The car's nose was tapered to a sharp point, reducing drag and giving it the 'Bullet Nose' moniker that stuck in every newspaper from that day forward. More importantly, Harroun argued that the flagger's weight and drag cost valuable speed, and that a simple mirror mounted on the car's body could let the driver see what was behind. The Marmon Motor Car Company backed him. The racing establishment did not. Harroun's Marmon was not the most powerful car on the grid, but it was the most aerodynamic, and the absence of the flagger's weight and wind resistance gave it a measurable edge on the long backstretch. He led from the front and never relinquished it, crossing the line to a crowd that had come to see a spectacle and left having witnessed a paradigm shift. The flagger was gone forever, and the rear-view mirror was born.

In Their Own Story

The May sun hung low over the brick oval, baking the white line and turning the air above the track into a shimmering mirage. In the pit lane, the cars were a forest of radiators and exposed cylinders, and the smell of gasoline and hot iron hung thick enough to taste. A kid in a straw hat stood in the backstretch crowd, craning his neck to get a look at the Marmon with the pointed snout that nobody else had. 'No flagger,' the kid muttered to his father. 'They cut the flagger.' His father shook his head. 'They'll be in the dirt by lap ten without a man to wave him a flag.'

They weren't. By the second lap the Bullet Nose was already a dark blur on the backstretch, Harroun's hands steady on the wheel, his eyes flicking to that small round mirror bolted to the bodywork. The crowd's roar rolled in waves, and the kid in the straw hat pressed his face against the iron fence, watching the pointed nose slice through the heat haze like a needle through cloth. By the time the checkered flag came, the father had stopped shaking his head. He just stood there, hat in hand, watching a mechanic from the neighborhood drive a car that looked like it had been designed by the future.

Reader's Guide

The third Indianapolis 500. The air above the four-mile oval shimmers like water, and the pit lane is a cacophony of pistons, shouting crew chiefs, and the sharp tang of castor oil. Twenty-three cars line up on the white line, each one a different philosophy of speed made flesh. Most of them carry a flagger perched on a little platform behind the driver, a boy with a red flag and a prayer. One of them doesn't. Ray Harroun's Marmon sits at the front, its nose tapered to a point that catches the sun and throws a hard glare into the grandstands. The crowd murmurs. A few laugh. The flag falls, and twenty-three engines scream to life, and the Bullet Nose is already pulling ahead, the pointed snout slicing the air with a confidence the other cars simply don't have. Lap after lap, the gap widens. The flaggers on the other cars wave and holler, but Harroun doesn't need them. He glances at his mirror, sees the field stretching out behind him like a string of beads, and settles into a rhythm. The backstretch roars. The turns are a blur of white and red. The crowd's noise becomes a single sustained note, almost musical, almost unbearable. He crosses the line first. No one on the grid comes close. The kid in the straw hat in the backstretch crowd takes off his hat and holds it over his heart, and the father next to him stops arguing with the future. The flagger is gone. The mirror stays. And the pointed nose of the Bullet Nose becomes the most photographed shape in the history of the Speedway, a silhouette that says, simply: the next era has already arrived, and it doesn't need a boy on the back to tell it where to go.

Did You Know?

• The Bullet Nose was the first Indy 500 entry to run without a flagger, replacing the practice with a small rear-view mirror mounted on the car's bodywork.
• The car's pointed, aerodynamic nose design earned it the 'Bullet Nose' nickname in the press, a name that stuck in motorsport lore for over a century.