Will Higgins: The Speedway’s Attic

Every city has an official version of itself. Indianapolis has the Indianapolis Motor Speedway — monument, mythology, Greatest Spectacle in Racing. This is not that. The Speedway’s Attic is unofficial. It is unsanctioned. The stories here are hard to believe. But believe them. They are true, all of them. Drawing on original research into newspaper archives, oral histories, and the margins of the official record, Will Higgins, an award-winning journalist, assembles the stories that didn’t make the monument: the “hillbilly machine gunner” who charged race fans 25 cents to see Mrs. Adolph Hitler’s underpants; the French race driver who drank six pints of wine mid-race — and won; the race fan who mooned fifty thousand people and then personally delivered the photographic evidence on his paper route the next morning. The Speedway’s Attic brings this research into physical form through objects, photographs, illustration, and text. The result is less a sports history than a portrait of American appetite — for speed, spectacle, and spectacle’s underbelly. These stories are funny, and some are damning, and a few are quietly moving. Together they map what a city chooses to remember, what it lets fade, and what keeps surfacing anyway. About the artist Will Higgins (b. 1956) was first a history major then a tennis pro then repo man. Later, as a journalist, he covered KKK rallies in the rural Midwest, war in Iraq, a terrible run of homicides in Gary, Ind. but also things like a woman finding on her back stoop what she believed (wrongly, it turned out) was a two-headed ant and contemplating how best to monetize it. Higgins is the founder of the Museum of Fabulosity, the American Association of Linear Bocce and the American Society of Presidential Urine Collectors. Photo: Casey Cronin, Speedway’s Attic, 2026.