Racing Trivia
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49 free Racing trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Racing trivia questions with answers. Racing trivia is usually one thing or another: a motorsport quiz or a horse racing quiz. This one covers the whole idea of going faster than everyone else. There are questions on Formula One, NASCAR, the Indianapolis 500, Le Mans, Monaco, MotoGP, the Isle of Man TT, the Dakar, drag racing and the land speed record; on the Kentucky Derby, the Grand National, the Melbourne Cup, Secretariat, Red Rum and the bareback chaos of the Palio di Siena; and on the Tour de France, the Boston Marathon, the America's Cup, the Iditarod, greyhounds, pigeons, camels with robot jockeys, chariot factions in Constantinople and the cheese that rolls down a hill in Gloucestershire. Most questions have a story attached: why the Indy winner drinks milk, why Porsche put the ignition key on the left, who walked across the track at Le Mans, and how a 100-1 shot won the National because everyone else fell over. Roughly a third are easy, and the rest climb toward genuinely hard. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the events, machines and animals involved, and each question carries its source.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Indianapolis 500 winner traditionally drinks what in victory lane?
Milk
Milk. Louis Meyer asked for buttermilk after a 1930s win because his mother swore by it on hot days, and dairy companies later paid to make a bottle of milk part of every Victory Lane.
Q 02Why is the Indianapolis Motor Speedway nicknamed the Brickyard?
It was paved with 3.2 million bricks
It was paved with 3.2 million bricks in 1909. All but a yard-wide strip at the start-finish line now lies under asphalt, and since 1996 winners have knelt to kiss it.
Q 03Which three races make up the unofficial Triple Crown of Motorsport?
Indy 500, Monaco GP, Le Mans
Indy 500, Monaco GP, Le Mans: only Graham Hill has won all three, and Fernando Alonso skipped Monaco in 2017 to try for the Indianapolis leg.
Q 04The 24 Hours of Le Mans is won by the car that does what?
Covers the greatest distance
Covers the greatest distance. In 1966 Ford staged a side-by-side finish, and the win went to the car that had started farther back, because it had covered more ground.
Q 05Which carmaker puts its ignition left of the steering wheel, a habit it traces to Le Mans running starts?
Porsche
Porsche. With the key on the left, a driver who had just sprinted across the track could fire the engine with one hand while the other found first gear.
Q 06Which carmaker quit motor racing for three decades after 1955, when its car flew into the Le Mans crowd?
Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz. Pierre Levegh's car killed him and more than 80 spectators; the team pulled its other cars out during the night and left racing when the season ended.
Q 07Who won six Monaco Grands Prix, five in a row from 1989 to 1993?
Ayrton Senna
Ayrton Senna. It could have been seven: in 1988 he crashed out alone while leading comfortably, then went home to his Monaco flat instead of returning to the pits.
Q 08The Monaco Grand Prix is the only round of Formula One excused from which rule?
The minimum race distance
The minimum race distance. Monaco's streets are so slow that its race is set at 260 km instead of 305, and even so the two-hour limit cut the wet 1997 race 16 laps short.
Q 09Which driver matched Michael Schumacher's record of seven Formula One titles in 2020?
Lewis Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton. He sealed the seventh title by winning the Turkish Grand Prix from sixth on the grid, on a rain-soaked new surface with almost no grip.
Q 10Which Formula One team went 21 years without a drivers' champion before five straight titles from 2000?
Ferrari
Ferrari. Michael Schumacher ended the wait a year after a broken leg had wrecked his 1999 title bid, then kept the crown until 2005.
Q 11Which team gave Formula One its first Black driver in 2007, having backed him since he was 13?
McLaren
McLaren. At ten the karting champion walked up to team boss Ron Dennis at an awards dinner and said he wanted to race his cars one day; three years later Dennis signed him up.
Q 12NASCAR traces its roots to drivers in which outlaw trade?
Moonshine running
Moonshine running. Bootleggers tuned ordinary-looking cars to outrun the law, then raced each other for pride; Junior Johnson, one of NASCAR's early stars, served a year in prison for keeping an illegal still.
Q 13What makes NASCAR's Daytona 500 unusual among the showpiece events of major sports?
It opens the season
Q 21Which Colorado mountain hosts the hill climb nicknamed 'the Race to the Clouds', finishing at 14,115 feet?
Pikes Peak
Pikes Peak. The road climbs 12.42 miles through 156 turns, and in 2018 an electric Volkswagen beat every petrol car's best to take the outright record, at just under eight minutes.
Q 22Peter Brock, the 'King of the Mountain', won which Australian touring car race nine times?
Bathurst 1000
Bathurst 1000. Brock raced as number 05 to promote Victoria's 0.05 drink-driving limit, and the winners' trophy was named for him in 2006, weeks after he died in a rally crash.
Q 23Why is the Kentucky Derby nicknamed the 'Run for the Roses'?
The winner is draped in roses
It opens the season, as it has since 1982. The first running, in 1959, ended in a photo finish so close that officials studied film for three days before naming the winner.
Q 14Which driver, nicknamed 'The King', won 200 NASCAR Cup races?
Richard Petty
Richard Petty. He won 27 of them in the 1967 season alone, and in 2006 voiced a veteran racer called 'The King' in Pixar's Cars.
Q 15Which driver was known as 'the Intimidator' and died on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500?
Dale Earnhardt
Dale Earnhardt. His death pushed NASCAR to make head-and-neck restraints compulsory and to line the walls of its ovals with energy-absorbing barriers.
Q 16Mario Andretti won the Formula One title in 1978 driving for which team?
Lotus
Lotus. Its 79 was the first Formula One car to make full use of ground effect, shaping the air beneath it to pull itself onto the track, and it won the team its last world titles.
Q 17In 2020 the Dakar Rally moved from South America to which country?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia. The rally had left Africa after security threats in Mauritania cancelled the 2008 race, and spent eleven editions in South America before the move.
Q 18Which class of dragster had its races cut from a quarter-mile to 1,000 feet in 2008?
Top Fuel
Top Fuel. The NHRA shortened its races, and those of Funny Cars, days after Scott Kalitta was killed when his car failed to stop at the end of a quarter-mile run.
Q 19ThrustSSC set the land speed record in 1997 by becoming the first car to do what?
Break the sound barrier
Break the sound barrier. RAF pilot Andy Green did it in Nevada's Black Rock Desert on 15 October 1997, fifty years and one day after Chuck Yeager first did it in the air.
Q 20A land speed record must be averaged over two opposite passes within how long?
One hour
One hour. The two runs in opposite directions cancel out any help from wind or slope, and the average must beat the old record by at least one percent to count.
The winner is draped in roses, a blanket of red blooms laid over the horse's shoulders. New York columnist Bill Corum coined the nickname in 1925 and later ran the racetrack himself.
Q 24The Kentucky Derby's founder, a grandson of explorer William Clark, built which racetrack?
Churchill Downs
Churchill Downs. Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. came home from the Epsom Derby in England wanting a track like it, and built one on land from his mother's family, the Churchills, whose name it took.
Q 25Which race, nicknamed 'the Test of the Champion', is traditionally the final leg of America's Triple Crown?
Belmont Stakes
Belmont Stakes. Between 1979 and 2014, thirteen horses won the first two legs, and not one of them added the third.
Q 26Which Grand National fence is named after a captain who fell there?
Becher's Brook
Becher's Brook. Captain Martin Becher was thrown from his horse Conrad in the first official National and crouched in the water while the rest of the field jumped over him.
Q 27Which 100-1 outsider won the 1967 Grand National after a pile-up at the 23rd fence?
Foinavon
Foinavon. He was so far behind that jockey John Buckingham had time to steer wide of the pile-up, and the fence where it happened has carried the horse's name since 1984.
Q 28Which horse, trained on a Southport beach, won the Grand National in 1973, 1974 and 1977?
Red Rum
Red Rum. He arrived with an incurable bone disease in his foot, and galloping through the sea water is said to have kept him sound; he never fell in 100 races.
Q 29The Melbourne Cup, 'the race that stops a nation', is run at 3pm on which day?
The first Tuesday of November
The first Tuesday of November. Melbourne gets a public holiday for it, so much of the city really does stop; the first winner, Archer in 1861, earned a gold watch on top of the prize money.
Q 30Which mare won the Melbourne Cup three years running, in 2003, 2004 and 2005?
Makybe Diva
Makybe Diva. Her owner, a tuna fisherman, built the name from the first two letters of five employees' names, and announced her retirement at the trophy presentation for the third win.