O'Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis

In 1958, led by Tom Binford, Frank Dickie, Roger Ward and Howard Fieger, 15 Indianapolis area businessmen and racing professionals invested $5,000.00 each to fund the development of what would become O’Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis. The group purchased a 267-acre farm about seven miles from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and developed a multipurpose auto racing facility.

The original intention in creating O’Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis was to design a 15-turn, 2.5 mile road course. Nearly as an afterthought, and as an insurance measure against economic problems, the investment group decided to incorporate a quarter-mile drag strip into the long straightaway of the 2.5-mile long road course design.

Constructed with assistance from the NHRA, the drag strip was the first of the three courses to be completed, with the facility’s first event held on the strip in the fall of 1960. During the 1960 U. S. Nationals in Detroit, a handshake agreement between Binford and NHRA founder Wally Parks promised that the event would move to ORP in 1961. The historic three-year pact was signed and sealed under a tree in Detroit Dragway’s pits and ORP eventually became the home of the NHRA’s biggest annual event.