Erwin Bergdoll’s Championship Benz Racecar
After three attempts in 1908, 1909, and 1910, Erwin Bergdoll finally won the prestigious Fairmount Park Motor Race in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1911. His record speed and time for the race still stand, in part, because the race, with the notoriety of today’s Grand Prix, Daytona 500, and Indianapolis 500, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators in America’s largest public city park was discontinued.
Erwin’s car was a powerful 150 HP Benz, imported from Germany, a forerunner to the infamous 200 HP Lightning or Blitzen Benz race cars that captured so much attention a few years later.
Left, Erwin in Milwaukee in 1912. Center, racing his Benz up the hill at Falls Road - Neill Drive in Philadelphia’s 1911 Fairmount Park Motor Race. Right, at home with his championship Benz. Bergdoll family photos.
Erwin’s racing career ended prior to him and his brother, Grover, running from the 1917 - 1918 war draft. He stored his championship Benz in his machine shop along with Grover’s Wright Brothers airplane, and for years they were left unattended. The Benz was last seen publicly in a newspaper photograph on October 8, 1933. Its final disposition has been the subject of speculation for years but its whereabouts, if it survived, is unknown.
The trophy cup awarded to Erwin for winning the 1911 race is unaccounted for and missing from the family. It’s believed (by members of the Bergdoll family) that the 1911 trophy cup was severed from the Bergdoll family’s possession in the early 1960s at about the same time a 1910 Point Breeze (South Philadelphia) motor race winner’s cup awarded to Erwin was also severed from family possession, circumstances unknown. The 1910 trophy cup, made of silver and displaying Erwin’s name, later ended up at the Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The AACA has confirmed that the Point Breeze trophy cup was donated to the organization in 1971 by a third party (not the Bergdolls) and it has nothing in writing that might help determine when and how the third party obtained the silver cup from the Bergdolls.
Read more about the Benz and the incredible Fairmount Park Motor Race of 1908 - 1911 in The Bergdoll Boys.