Believed not to be the man who raced around 1909-1910 who was from New York, this Ray L Howard started racing in 1915. Howard suffered a big accident in 1919, which killed his riding mechanic Emilio Gaetano Jandelli and left Howard with a fractured skull, two broken legs and a broken arm, but Ray recovered to race again. Howard was a regular in board oval racing, especially at his local Sheepshead Bay circuit, where he would end up suffering the big accident when his car overturned. He largely drove his own Peugeot and came fourth in an AAA race there in April 1919. He died in 1957, when suffering a heart attack whilst driving on the US Interstate. He left the road near Butler, Indiana and crashed into a utility pole but he was likely already dead before his collision. However this tells only part of his life; Howard was best known as a pilot. He was one of three pilots who accompanied Sir Hubert Wilkins on his attempt to fly over the North Pole in 1926. Howard flew a Fokker plane and travelled to Holland in 1925 to pick the plane up. In the end, the Wilkins expedition was beset by problems and accidents and it was Richard E Byrd who went down in history in 1926 by becoming the first man to fly a plane over the North Pole. Howard was a friend of Eddie Rickenbacher who encouraged him to both race and fly. Howard stayed with Fokker and became a test pilot for them for over ten years, and became an early member of a parachute corps as a result. Howard was also an automobile engineer and a service sales engineer for the Dana Corporation in Auburn, Indiana. At the time of his death, he was living in Toledo, Ohio, in an engineering role for Dana's Ohio base. He also worked for the Wright Aeronautical Company.

Biography last updated 24 Jan 2019