During his work on his 1930 movie Hell's Angels, Howard Hughes employed Glenn Odekirk to maintain the fleet of over 100 aircraft used in the production.

Design studies began in 1934 with an exacting scale model (over two feet in length) that was tested in the California Institute of Technology wind tunnel, revealing a speed potential of 365 mph (587 km/h).

"[5] Many groundbreaking technologies were developed during construction, including individually machined flush rivets that left the aluminium skin of the aircraft extremely smooth.

A month later, on 13 September at Martin Field near Santa Ana, California, Hughes broke the landplane speed record clocking 352.39 mph (567.12 km/h) averaged over four timed passes.

Exhausting the fuel supply, he crash-landed in a beet field south of Santa Ana without serious damage to either himself or the aircraft.

[7] Aviation writer William Wraga asserts that the H-1 Racer inspired later radial engine fighters such as the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, without offering any arguments for that being the case other than "Hughes showed them how it should be done.

[10] The Hughes H-1 Racer is featured in the 1940 RKO Radio Pictures movie Men Against the Sky, playing the role of a prototype "McLean Aircraft" high-speed pursuit craft.

[12] Due to the ongoing construction project at the NASM, the Hughes Racer is being kept on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA.

An hour after taking off, the aircraft crashed just north of the Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park, killing Wright.

Other non-flying replicas are displayed at the Thomas T. Beam Engineering Complex at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas[18] (donated by the Howard Hughes Corporation in 1988) and the Santa Maria Museum of Flight.