Roscoe Turner, the Thompson Trophy, and the Air Racing King Who Flew with a Lion

Roscoe Turner holds the only three-win record in the history of the Thompson Trophy, the marquee event of the National Air Races held in Cleveland throughout the 1930s. A self-made showman who flew with a live lion and eventually built his own racing aircraft, Turner transformed air racing from barnstorming spectacle into a serious proving ground for American aviation technology. His record has stood for nearly 90 years.

From a Mississippi Cotton Farm to the Cockpit

Turner was born on October 31, 1895, on a cotton farm in Corinth, Mississippi. He served in World War I, training as a balloon observer before earning his pilot’s wings - though the armistice ended the fighting before he saw combat. He mustered out of the Army with his wings, minimal funds, and no plan except to keep flying.

The postwar market for pilots without combat records or connections was barnstorming. Surplus Curtiss Jennies could be bought for a few hundred dollars, and ex-military pilots were loading them onto train cars and heading for the rural Midwest, charging a dollar a ride in farmers’ fields. The work was unforgiving - aging war-surplus machines, thin margins, and the understanding that they were being spent. Turner barnstormed through the early 1920s and was good at it. But he was watching the other pilots and thinking about something they weren’t.

The Uniform, the Mustache, and the Calculation

Turner understood that skill alone wasn’t what people were paying for. They were buying a few minutes of believing the man at the controls was someone extraordinary. So he went to a tailor.

He designed his own uniform from scratch: jodhpurs, tall riding boots, a fitted military tunic with epaulettes and wings on the chest. He found a barber who could teach him to wax a mustache properly, and he worked on it until the points were exact. He pressed the uniform before every appearance. When Turner walked across a ramp, people turned around. That was the calculation, and the calculation was correct.

The Lion Named Gilmore

As barnstorming thinned out in the mid-1920s, Turner moved simultaneously into early airline work, record attempts, and sponsored exhibition flying. The sponsor who changed everything was the Gilmore Oil Company, a California petroleum outfit looking for attention.

Turner went to the Gay’s Lion Farm in El Monte, California - a facility that supplied exotic animals to Hollywood productions - and acquired a 10-week-old African lion cub. He named the cub Gilmore, after the oil company. He commissioned a local harness maker to build the animal a properly fitted miniature parachute, complete with ripcord, and then flew across California with the lion in the cockpit.

The newspapers did not know what to do with this information. Everywhere Turner landed, Gilmore stepped out of the airplane. He was photographed in the parachute harness, photographed in the cockpit looking out the windscreen, and photographed on the ramp while reporters asked questions they couldn’t quite believe they were asking. The Gilmore Oil Company ended up on the front page of every newspaper that covered aviation, and more than a few that didn’t usually bother.

Cleveland and the Thompson Trophy

Cleveland in the 1930s was the center of the air racing world. The National Air Races came to that city every year from 1929 through the end of the decade, drawing quarter-million crowds along with military procurement officers and aircraft manufacturers’ engineers with notebooks and binoculars. The marquee event was the Thompson Trophy: a closed-course pylon race in which the highest average speed over a fixed number of laps won the prize.

The aircraft that ran for the Thompson were purpose-built for one thing. Fuselages polished to a mirror finish. Engines tuned far past manufacturer specifications. Cockpits so tight that large pilots needed help climbing in, with minimal instrumentation and, in some aircraft, no seatbelts. The pylon turns were flown at 50 feet above the field at speeds exceeding 230 mph. Fifty feet at that speed is not a safety margin. It is a statement about what you are willing to accept as the cost of competing.

The First Two Trophies: 1933 and 1934

Turner flew his first Thompson in 1932 in a borrowed Wedell-Williams racer, using the race to study the pylons, the sight lines, and throttle management through the turns. In 1933, he won - posting an average speed of 237 mph over the full race distance.

For context: the Boeing P-26 and the standard Army Air Corps fighters of the era could reach 200 mph under ideal conditions. Turner was outrunning the military in a privately funded aircraft. He won again in 1934. Back-to-back Thompson Trophies put his name in every aviation publication in the country and into serious conversations among military engineers and industrial contractors who were watching the races as carefully as they watched anything. The closed-course format was producing real-world aerodynamic data at speeds no wind tunnel could replicate: drag behavior, engine cooling at racing power, the response of machines pushed past their published limits.

Building the Meteor

Competitors like Benny Howard and Art Chester pushed the racing further through the mid-1930s - Howard with clean, fast designs of his own, Chester with pylon technique that was worth studying. Turner placed well and learned from everyone. Then he decided to build his own airplane.

He partnered with Matty Laird of the Laird Aircraft Company in Chicago. What they designed was the LTR-14 - Laird-Turner Racer - which Turner called the Meteor. The fuselage was a near-perfect teardrop, minimizing frontal area at every point. The wings were small, designed for speed first and handling second. The engine was a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior producing approximately 1,000 horsepower.

Building it took years. Cooling problems, structural concerns, and chronic underfunding forced repeated returns to the shop. Turner entered the Meteor in races it wasn’t ready to win, watched it fall short, and went back to work. By the time the airplane was right, he was in his early forties - old, by closed-course racing standards. He was also more prepared than he had ever been.

The Third Trophy: 1938

The 1938 National Air Races Thompson Trophy brought 11 aircraft to the line outside Cleveland. Turner and the Meteor had been covered by the aviation press for two years. The question in the infield was whether the investment was going to pay off.

Turner flew eight laps around the course. His average speed over the full race distance: 283 mph. He won his third Thompson Trophy.

No pilot before him had won three. No pilot after him has won three. In the complete history of the Thompson Trophy race, from its beginning through the final event before World War II ended closed-course racing for good, Roscoe Turner is the only man to win it three times. That record has stood for nearly 90 years and is not under threat.

The War Years and What the Racing Era Built

When the war came, Turner did not seek a combat assignment. He understood what he could actually contribute. He opened the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation in Indianapolis and ran a military flight training school throughout the Second World War - with standards that didn’t bend and a complete intolerance for the kind of casualness that gets young pilots killed.

The broader legacy of the racing era is underappreciated. The aerodynamic lessons from the closed-course pylon circuit - on drag reduction, high-speed stability, engine cooling, and propeller efficiency at sustained racing power - worked their way into the engineering programs that produced the P-40 Warhawk and eventually the P-51 Mustang. A direct line runs from the Wedell-Williams racers of the early 1930s to the aircraft that won the air war over Europe. That line runs through the men who flew those machines past their published limits and brought back data that no government program had yet gone to find.

The End of the Uniform

Turner remained a presence at airshows and aviation ceremonies for decades after the races ended. At airshows in the 1960s he was still in the jodhpurs, the boots, and the tunic. The mustache was gray, but the points were still waxed. He had built an identity out of the air itself, and he was not going to set it down because the races were over.

He died in Indianapolis in 1970, at age 74.

The Meteor is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. If you stand beneath it and look at the cockpit opening, think about climbing in - and then think about taking that machine around a Cleveland pylon course at 283 mph at 50 feet above the ground.

Then remember the lion.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy in 1933, 1934, and 1938 - the only three-time winner in the race’s history, a record that has stood for nearly 90 years
His distinctive custom uniform and waxed mustache were a deliberate business calculation, not showmanship for its own sake - he understood that the pilot had to be the story, not just the aircraft
Turner flew with a live African lion cub named Gilmore as part of a sponsored arrangement with the Gilmore Oil Company, generating national press coverage that funded his racing career
His 1938 Laird-Turner Meteor, built with Matty Laird and powered by a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior, achieved an average speed of 283 mph to secure his third and final Thompson Trophy
The technology and aerodynamic data generated by 1930s closed-course racing contributed directly to American fighter development, including the engineering lineage that produced the P-51 Mustang