David Bruce-Brown #2

David Bruce-Brown Biography

Born in 1887 to wealthy merchant parents, he attended the Allen-Stephenson School in New York City, and then the Harstrom School in Norwalk, Connecticut, a prep school for Yale. This only served to prove that the young man was not cut out for academic pursuits.

He instead showed an interest in auto racing, wrecking his mother’s Oldsmobile in 1906. It is possible that he caught the bug from his half-brother, George McKesson Brown, who that year purchased a Benz racing car and engaged a German driver, Karl Klaus Luttgen, to drive it in the Vanderbilt Cup race on Long Island. The 21-year old schoolboy bluffed his way into the 1908 Speed Trials at Daytona first as a mechanic then as a driver who went out and won the event. Emanuele Cedrino – manager of Fiat’s New York operations took the young man under his wing where he was jokingly known as Cedrino’s millionaire mechanic.