Collecting, Preserving and Sharing History
The International Motor Racing Research Center collects, shares and preserves the history of motorsports. Spanning continents, eras and race series, the Center’s collection embodies the speed, drama and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world. The Center welcomes serious researchers and the casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on our shelves and walls, and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events.
The Center’s collection documents the history of racing in the more than 4000 books or 250 different motorsports magazines and newspapers titles; club and sanctioning body records; race results, programs and posters; papers of motorsports journalists and scholars; correspondence of race organizers; and still and moving images housed onsite and in our expanding offsite collections storage facilities. Its knowledgeable research and archives staff assists hundreds of scholars, journalists, authors, documentary film makers, drivers and race car owners from all over the globe with inquiries about motorsports history every year.
Funding for general operations comes through member support, corporate sponsorship, and grants from local foundations. The Center, a 501 (c)(3) charitable organization, also benefits from endowment and outright gifts. Fund-raising activities include an annual car raffle or sweepstakes and award dinner.
Our Mission:
To collect, preserve and share the global history of motorsports. Our extensive collection includes thousands of hours of film and video, hundreds of thousands of photographs, as well as thousands of cubic feet of periodicals, newsletters, rare books, race results, race programs, artwork, trophies and much, much more. We are dedicated to preserving and sharing these priceless artifacts that might otherwise be lost to future generations.
Our Vision:
To become the world’s leading professional archive of motorsports history and to share that history in innovative and inclusive ways that become not only recognized as best practice globally, but create sustainability by drawing in new generations of motor racing fans.