1920 AAA Championship Car season
auto racing season
The 1920 AAA Championship Car season consisted of 5 races, beginning in Beverly Hills, California on February 28 and concluding in Beverly Hills on November 25. The AAA National Champion and Indianapolis 500 champion was Gaston Chevrolet. The 1920 season later became a source of confusion and misinformation for historians when in 1926 the AAA published a revisionist history, naming another driver as the season's point champion.
During the final race of the season on November 25 the Beverly Hills event witnessed a tragedy, as that year's Indianapolis 500 winner and soon-to-be National Champion, Gaston Chevrolet, was killed, along with Eddie O'Donnell and his riding mechanic, Lyall Jolls.
Official schedule and results
^A Starters limited to first four finishers for each preliminary race
^B 183 in3 (3.00 L) maximum displacement.
^C Points allocated on the basis of advertised distance of 250 miles.
Controversy over official race schedule
The 5 race schedule has been confirmed as the correct and historically accurate schedule for the championship season of 1920. In the race day program for the final race at Beverly Hills was the points distribution for the championship contenders over the previous four races of the season. The championship was confirmed in the weeks leading up to the race by various newspapers around the country printing the four race championship standings leading to the final race.
Confusion about the season began in 1926 when, for "comparative reasons", Contest Board member Arthur Means reworked the schedule to include 10 races and changed the champion to Tommy Milton.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1920 AAA Championship Car season” as auto racing season. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as auto racing season. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q280601. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1920 and 1926.
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This entry incorporates text from “1920 AAA Championship Car season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.