Racing history in the making! 100 laps of blistering speed, thrills you’ll never forget! Don’t let your friends tell you what you missed! Famous drivers -- Wilburn, Dinsmore, DeCamp, Crone, Booker, Webb, Woodford, Engle, Schlosser, Salay. Famous cars -- sleek, well-groomed pieces of the finest machinery. . . faster on a half-mile track than any others on earth. Sunday, June 2. Funk’s New Dayton Speedway. . . . [Broadside advertising poster].

Dayton, OH: Frank Funk, Dayton Speedway, 1940. One printed broadside poster, sized 9.5 x 12.5 in., printed in red & blue on thick white cardstock, w/ large photo illustration of drivers & race cars (very slight shelfwear, minor dustsoiling, slight creasing to couple corners), still NF exemplar, with correction neatly printed on broadside indicating changed time of 3:00 PM from 2:30 PM, and date stamp of 1940. First edition of this very scarce promotional broadside announcing the thrilling opening of the 100 lap Dayton Speedway half-mile races in June, 1940. The Dayton Speedway was originally opened for its first official race on June 3, 1934, and would later be purchased by Frank Funk in 1937 who quickly began converting the 5/8th-mile oval into a half-mile, high-banked oval, and was rumored to have buried old trolley cars to fill in the banking which was finished at the end of 1939. He added an “oil substance” to make the track as hard as pavement, but on really hot days would end up getting soft and coating the cars and drivers. Funk had already built the first half-mile oval in the United States in Winchester, IN. The race in June, 1940 featured over 10,000 spectators, and featured Woody Woodford of Los Angeles, CA, Henry Schlosser of Cincinnati, OH, Jimmy Wilburn of Los Angeles, CA, Johnny DeCamp of Richmond, IN, “Duke” Dinsmore from Dayton, OH, Elbert Booker of Detroit, OH, Mike Salay of South Bend, IN, Johnnie Crone from Marysville, IN, and many others. The road to the Indianapolis 500 was paved by drivers racing on the Dayton Speedway, the Winchester Speedway, along with the Milwaukee Mile. See: Greg Billing, Dayton Speedway gone, not forogtten. The historic half-mile, high-banked oval that brought some of racing’s greatest drivers to Dayton, Dayton Daily News, June 14, 2014; Steven N. Levinson, Labor Day Weekend 1952. A weekend I’ll Never Forget, Autoracing1, Sept. 2, 2002.