Being in Indianapolis was difficult for Clark Gable personally. The city had been the last stop on a war bond tour in 1942 for his second wife, actress Carole Lombard, before she was to fly back home to Los Angeles. Tragically, Lombard's plane never made it back. It crashed in Nevada killing everyone on board. Theirs had been a happy marriage, and it was a loss from which Gable never recovered. At the time of Tod im Nacken (1950) Gable had finally remarried, this time to Douglas Fairbanks' widow, Sylvia Ashley. During filming he seemed happier and healthier than he had in years according to friends. Even so, Gable remembered his beloved late wife while in Indianapolis. He quietly made a point to visit the downtown locations where Lombard had made her final public appearances before meeting her untimely death.
Because, Barbara Stanwyck was on hand at the Indianapolis Speedway on race day, there's a famous photograph of the legendary actress in Victory Lane, after the race, giving the actual 1950, Indy 500 winner, Johnnie Parsons, an enthusiastic (smack on the lips) congratulatory kiss.
At 20:26 in the film, a close-up shows the Sports Final section of the Bainsville daily paper. Under Barbara Stanwyck's photograph (as Regina Forbes) three pictures of "sports stars" are shown: Kathryn Grayson, Walter Pidgeon and Gene Kelly. This must have been an inside-joke as the film and the stars shown were all under contract with MGM.
A young Bill Hickman can be seen as one of the members of Clark Gable's pit crew. Hickman was famous as one of the top movie stunt drivers in Hollywood for many years, and his most notable on-camera role was as the middle-aged, bespectacled driver of the black Dodge Charger that is chased by Steve McQueen's green Ford Mustang in the film Bullitt (1968).