The Last Lap

Death arrived early at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Two years before the track hosted its first 500-mile event, five drivers and spectators were killed during inaugural races. Death has lingered around the oval ever since. Over the past century, fatalities have mounted and a total of seventy-three drivers, mechanics, and spectators have perished on the two-and-a-half-mile circuit.

The Last Lap chronicles one of the greatest Indy mysteries, the deaths of driver Pete Kreis and riding mechanic Bob Hahn in 1934. Piloting a front-drive race car in practice, Kreis crashed into the wall of Turn One, rode along the top of the retaining wall for seventy-five feet, and careened down an embankment at the south end of the oval. As the car smashed into a tree in the backyard of a nearby house, both men were killed.

The next year, an impromptu "coroner''s jury" of Indy drivers and Speedway experts held an intense review of the accident, and they