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Delaware Track an Example of Engineering Efficiency p. One Mile Course Usual Thing in America One Million Dollars Expended on New Plant Steeplechase Races Postponed This Year. WILMINGTON, Del., June 22. There are bigger tracks in America than the new one at Delaware Park over which the best thoroughbreds of the strongest stables of the East will be racing for about 2,000 a day for twenty-five days beginning June 26 half a dozen of them. The one at magnificent Belmont Park, the grandest racing place in the world, is one mile and a half around and the vast grandstand of steel and masonry and cement that looks out on it seats 17,000 and shelters 25,000 more in rough weather. Aqueducts track is one mile and a quarter around. The courses at Arlington and Washington Parks, Chicago; at Blue Bonnets, Montreal; at Hialeah Park, Miami, and at Saratoga, each is one mile and a furlong around. But there is no better example of engineering than the mile course of the Delaware Steeplechase and Race Association. And it is so placed in relation to the grandstand that every foot of it is visible to the naked eye. The Havre de Grace course, which Edward Burke, Delaware Parks general manager, built single-handed and has managed so successfully for a quarter of a century has nothing on it and the Havre de Grace course is conceded to be the finest in Maryland. PREFER LARGER TRACKS. Horsemen, generally, prefer the bigger tracks because the turns of them are easier and the racing over them is apt to be truer. But the mile track is essentially the American track and it was because of their appreciation of the popular prejudice for it that the directors of Delaware Park elected to construct that kind. The officers of this organization are Charles W; Baker, Jr., president; J. Simpson Dean, vice-president; Alfred E. Bissell, secretary and treasurer; and E. L. Hobbs, assistant secretary and treasurer. Ex-officio these officers are di-. rectors with William du Pont, Henry B. du , Pont, Harold S. Schutt, Donald P. Ross, George T. Weymouth and Edward Burke. I These sporting folk, representative citizens of Delaware, with about eighty others, are banded together to promote horse racing without expectation of profit or desire for it to improve the breed of horses and entertain the people of a populous and highly prosperous area of which Wilmington has Continued on thirty-eighth page- DELAWARE TRACK EXAMPLE OF ENGINEERING EFFICIENCY Continued from first page. definitely become the racing center now that Pennsylvania has thumbed down the sport. The construction of Delaware Park has committed them to the extent of about a million dollars already. They had hoped to make half, or, at the worst, three-quarters of that sum answer. But they found as the work advanced that they had not thought of many things they should have considered and that they had done many things that had to be done again. Nor is the end in sight They faced and are still facing problems such as inevitably confront the constructors of such places. WANT PROOF. If the Delaware Park directors find in the course of this first meeting that they havent built a big enough grandstand thpy will have one that is big enough for the second. Most persons familiar with all the angles of racing are convinced that a bigger stand will be necessary, but it remains to be demonstrated who is right. The stand they have put up at Delaware Park surmounts an elevation considerably above the track and it will seat 7,500. In rough weather 2,000 to 2;500 more may find shelter beneath it. It is admirably placed and the slanting space in front will accommodate 6,000 to 7,000 standers. As a general thing men and women everywhere prefer to stand to watch their racing. They are too keenly alive to climb stairs and sit down. Only at Arlington Park, Chicago, where the space in front of the grandstand is terraced, have standers such a perspective as Delaware Park will offer. There are a couple of steeplechase courses to the construction of which William du Pont, whose first interest is cross-country racing, devoted a lot of thought and time. But there will not be any steeplechasing at Delaware Park this year. The "leppers" will have to wait on the development of an-adequate sod.
