View up unpaved road showing square farmhouse with several cars parked on road and in driveway. Handwritten on photograph front: "John Miller farm near Utica, Mich., sales farm service.” Detroit Public Library.
View of Henry Bourne Joy driving 1906 Packard car. Typed on back: "Henry B. Joy in early 1906 Packard roadster. Mr. Joy bought his first Packard after he saw one in New York chasing after a fire engine, ended up buying into the company, and later ran it. He became a leader of the good roads movement, and spark-plugged the development on the Lincoln Highway." Handwritten on back: "Biography--Joy, Henry B. (Packard 1906).”Detroit Public Library.
From Menno Duerksen, “Testing the Product: The Packard Proving Grounds,” in Beverly Rae Kimes. Ed., Packard: a History of the Motor Car and the Company (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Publishing, 2nd General Edition, 1978), pp. 682-695.
p.684.
Just weeks before, he had charged his Miller Special round Indy for a lap at 124.018 mph—a record in the 500 that would endure nine years. Now on June 14, 1928, Leon Duray took the same car to another 2 ½ mile oval – in Michagan. The track was paved, though the facility was as yet incomplete. Its lack of a guard rail on the banked turns might have daunted racing drivers. It did not Leon Duray. He took the Miller out and set a world closed-course record at 148.7 mph, which gladdened both Duray and the Miller racing people—and allowed the owner of the new facility to claim it as the “World’s fastest Speedway.
The track was at Utica, some twenty miles to the north of Detroit. Its owner was the Packard Motor Car Company.
Packard, of course, had not built the oval to entice the Indianapolis 500 to Utica. [ Interestingly, however, the commercial possibilities of the track were not overlooked by Packard. “Speedway racing and other outdoor events” were noted in board minutes of 1927 as possible future programs for the facility and during the same month Leon Duray was making. His. Record at the track, an appropriation of $150,000 was authorized for preparing he speedway for racing. By December 1928, however, a proposed race was postponed “in view of the heavy development work ahead” – and the idea was dropped thereafter, doubtless another casualty of the Wall Street crash and its aftermath.] Setting a record there, however, made news – and allowed promotional mention of the track’s principal purpose. It was but a part of the new Packard Proving Grounds, designed to test the performance and stamina, even the souls, of Packard motorcars coming off the assembly lines at Detroit.
The proving grounds idea was a relatively new one to America. In the early days of the industry, public avenues and roads had sufficed for such testing as there was. Crank it up and send it for a spin of a few miles on streets around the factory – that was about the extent of it for cars fresh off the line. Prototypes were usually tested further – for thousands of miles, sometimes, to Chicago, New York, wherever.
Gradually, limited facilities were built near their plants by some manufacturers, he Dodge Brothers, for example, coming up with a test hill and a small board track around 1915. But it was Henry Joy who that same year had a better idea. He walked into a Packard Board of Directors meeting and announced, “I’ve just bought a field” – which explained would be used for construction of extensive testing facilities. Eyebrows shot up. Why?, everyone said. Why buy land when one had the whole country in which to test cars? Joy mentioned that it could also be used for another notion that intrigued. Him – aviation and getting his company involved in that nascent industry.
Still, the board was unconvinced, so the land was sold, eventually becoming Selfridge Field, a U.S. Army Air Force base – and the proving grounds idea lay dormant for nearly another decade, until steadily mounting traffic congestion, speed laws and outraged cries from the citizenry dictated a little fresh rethinking. In 1924 General Motors opened its gigantic proving grounds at Milford, thirty miles west of Detroit, and soon thereafter the Packard Motor Car Company concluded as well that Henry Joy had been right all along.
Alvan Macauley, now Packard president, found the necessary land near Utica – no longer could it be had in the sprawling industrial center around Detroit – the eventual 640 acres bisected by a highway,
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