Road racing and sports cars took a long time to really catch on in the United States. Not so in Europe. Eighty to 100 years ago, however, cross-Atlantic communications were slower and more limited than today. Few Americans likely realized what they were missing out on as their own domestic sports car industry, along with road racing itself, faced extirpation.
In a different world, James Scripps Booth (who apparently did not hyphenate his name personally but did hyphenate the name of his companies in honor of his ancestry) found the money to tool up series production of the Scripps-Booth Vitesse and breathed new life into the sports car niche by providing a small, powerful, well-built car to compete conceptually with the larger Stutz and Mercer offerings.
Booth was a fascinating character, scion of a wealthy publishing family, an accomplished artist, and a talented, self-taught automotive engineer since his teen years in the early 1900s. He is worthy of an article himself, but suffice it to say that his time spent living and studying art in France had
