SVRA: Brickyard Invitational - Return of the Indigo Twins

Saturday, 18 June 2016
Mark Dill (words and pics) Charles Test (19) and Brian Blain (20) during Friday's oval exhibition runs. (photo: RIS Don Andersen).
One of the darlings of early 20th century Indianapolis was the National Motor Vehicle Company, a bustling factory in the Hoosier capital's burgeoning automotive industry. The city rivaled Detroit for automobile production at the time and National, along with Nordyke & Marmon, Cole and Marion, was among its leading manufacturers. Arthur C. Newby and Charles Test were founding fathers of the successful enterprise that employed hundreds of workers. Newby was also one of the four founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909. By 1910 Test was gone but Newby led the way and demonstrated the quality and reliability of the company's product through auto racing. His star drivers in 1910 were a pair of very close friends, Johnny Aitken and his younger teammate, Tom Kincaid.

Aitken and Kincaid were top drivers of the era. Both had won several major American Automobile Association (AAA) races and the local newspapers embraced them as hometown heroes. Always eager to ballyhoo home teams to sell their papers – there were three major dailies in Indianapolis at the time – the two men were nicknamed, "The Indigo Twins." The moniker reflected not only the closeness and cooperation of the teammates but also National's team colors: midnight blue.
The fact that Aitken, two years older than Kincaid, was a mentor and even a kind of "big brother" to his 23-year-old teammate, gave all the more reason for the label. In May 1910 at the first Memorial Day weekend of racing at the newly paved Indianapolis Motor Speedway – already dubbed "The Brickyard" by locals – both Aitken and Kincaid picked off victories. It was a three-day weekend race meet chockfull of short sprint races – in that regard similar to this weekend's Brickyard Invitational. Aitken won two contests of 10miles while Kincaid picked off the Friday feature, the 100-mile Prest-O-Lite Trophy.
Brian Blain (foreground) and Charles Test channel the original "Indigo Twins" with period apparel.
Fast-forward 106 years and a new set of "Indigo Twins" has arrived at the Brickyard with hugely relevant ties to both National and the Speedway's early days. Enter Brian Blain and Charles Test, the great-grandson and namesake of Art Newby's business partner mentioned above.
In this case Brian is the mentor and Charles is relatively new to the vintage racing game. Blain, the founding director of the Blain Motorsports Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the preservation of racing history and especially important racecars demonstrating advances in technology, started vintage racing in 1983. He is a regular competitor with the SVRA and with a collection of over 20 cars he gets a vast range of driving experiences. At the recent Sonoma Historic Motorsports festival he not only had his 1911 National "40" on the track but also a 1969 Lola T-163 Can-Am racer.
"It's fun to experience different cars of vastly different design technologies," Brian says. "But I also notice similarities that are surprising. For example, the braking points for the National and some more modern cars can be very similar. The National has much lower horsepower but the brakes are almost non-existent so I have get on them at about the same point as with a car going maybe 80mph faster."