As Formula 1 fans, IndyCar fans, and now even NASCAR fans know, street races are usually a passing fad. For every Monaco Grand Prix or Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg that becomes an iconic staple of its calendar, there are countless Valencia Street Circuits, Dallas Grands Prix, Grands Prix of Baltimore and Grands Prix of Houston that only make it a few years, with a few Vietnam and Boston Grands Prix that never happen at all thrown in for good measure.
For the ease of getting to a track in the middle of a city and the spectacle of watching race cars on public roads, promoters must go through a logistical crucible. Not only must they devise a layout that is safe and creates exciting racing, they have to do it out of pre-existing stretches of tarmac and get permission from municipal authorities to close down those roads for nearly a month. They must negotiate the twin bureaucracies of sanctioning bodies and city governments and create a motorsports event out of the tiny overlap in that Venn diagram.
Let alone the fact that the non-racing infrastructure needs to support the increased traffic of tens of thousands of race fans and industry members descending on a roughly two-mile stretch of tarmac, without the noise or inconvenience turning the public against the event. The cutthroat world of local politics means that the tide of public opinion can turn on a dime, bringing new officials into office who are ready and able to trim motorsports right out of the city budget. So the fact that this Sunday (April 16) will mark the 48th running of the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach in California (the land of NIMBYism) of all places, is remarkable on its own.
Still more remarkable, this seemingly-random IndyCar street race has outlived NASCAR’s Auto Club Speedway. That’s not because Southern California is open-wheel crazy. IndyCar’s own events at the speedway in Fontana – some the fastest and most competitive closed-course auto races in the world, failed to catch on. Yet Long Beach survived. It’s North America’s longest-running street race, American auto racing’s most historic event that doesn’t have ‘500,’ ‘24’ or ‘12’ in the title. It was the crown jewel of Champ Car, the only race to survive reunification without missing a beat, and the NTT IndyCar Series’ biggest race with right turns.
It’s a European-style Grand Prix with distinctly American flavor, all under the Southern California sunshine….
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