Motorsports Hall of Fame of America launches the Joseph Freeman Collection on 23 October, with 15,000 images live from a million-photo archive

One of the biggest private motorsport photo hoards in the world has started going public. On 23 October 2026 the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, which sits in the Ticket and Tours building at Daytona International Speedway in Florida, announced the launch of the Joseph Freeman Collection, an archive of more than one million historic motorsports photographs along with artefacts, memorabilia, rare books and programmes.

What is in it, and who shot it

The first unveiling is more than 15,000 curated images, reachable from mshf.com and hosted on a PhotoShelter archive, with new pictures added daily. The collection spans over a century of racing, starting in the 1890s, and the material is not only digital files. The museum lists slides and negatives, prints, drawings, illustrations and some rare stereoscopic slides.

Coverage runs across Indy cars, sprint cars, midgets, Formula 1, sports cars, stock cars, motorcycles, off-road, powerboats and land speed. The work comes from nearly three dozen photographers, and the release names Walter Chernokal, Bob Harmeyer, Harlen Hunter, David Knox, Steve Swope, Dennis Torres and Paul Webb among them.

Joseph "Joe" Freeman is an automotive historian, writer, publisher, vintage racer and race car collector who owns Racemaker Press in Boston. In the release he said he was thrilled to see the collection come to life at the Hall of Fame and excited for enthusiasts, historians and researchers to discover the stories it preserves. MSHFA president Daren Lucas called bringing it to life a deeply rewarding undertaking.

It took 13 months from handshake to homepage

The museum announced the acquisition of the Joseph S. Freeman Archive on 23 September 2025, and that release said the first 10,000 images would be uploaded by September 2026. The launch arrived a month later than that with more than 15,000 images instead, which is a rare case of a digitisation promise being beaten rather than quietly dropped. The 2025 release carried a quote from then president George Levy, the 2026 one from Lucas.

The host museum itself has history. It was founded by Larry G. Ciancio, held its first induction in 1989, was originally based in Novi, Michigan, and moved to Daytona Beach in 2016. It says it greets more than 150,000 guests a year.

The licensing bit, which is our business

Neither release sets out usage terms, print prices or a rate card, and the archive front page we opened did not show them either. The contact given for the launch is Daren Lucas at the museum. So if you run a club newsletter, a concours programme or a history page on Instagram, the sequence is the boring one that keeps you safe: write to the archive, get the permission in writing, agree the exact use, and credit the photographer by name and not just the collection. In an archive this old, many of the shooters cannot speak for themselves any more, which makes the credit line matter more, not less.

For an Indian reader the direct overlap is narrow, since the disciplines listed are largely American plus Formula 1 and land speed. The useful part is the method. Indian motoring history is sitting in similar shape in family albums, in press archives and in museum stores, and the Freeman project shows what it takes to make that usable: a buyer with a budget, a cataloguing plan, and a named contact who can issue a licence. We commission and credit, and when we borrow, we pay.

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