by Tom Anderson
It’s one thing to watch big-league auto racing on TV; it’s an entirely different thing to experience the sport’s attention-grabbing sights, sounds and smells in person. For the past 33 years, the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach has brought some of the world’s fastest cars and drivers to the streets of the seaside city.
The main entrance to the temporary track is located at Ocean and Long Beach boulevards. Once you present your ticket you enter a beautiful plaza area with a huge fountain ringed by new cars and trucks from race sponsor Toyota. But the plaza is actually a bridge right above part of the track, and the roar of engines passing underneath draws race fans to the edges, hoping to catch a glimpse of the racers as they streak by.
A walk down some stairs and deeper into the infield will get you under the bridge, where the howl of engines echoing off the undersides of the bridge is literally deafening. Wander further into the infield and you come upon the Lifestyle Expo, which takes up virtually all of the Long Beach Sports Arena and Convention Center.
Everything from racing schools to banks and from branches of the armed forces to Sony’s Playstation division were present, trying to woo the assembled masses.
Meeting the gladiators
Also inside were the pits for Speed GT and the Champ Car Atlantic Series, the latter being the sort of AA-league for the marquis Champ Car World Series. Unlike the Atlantics, however, a general admission ticket was all that was needed to go inside the Speed GT paddock and marvel at the various Corvettes, Porsches, Vipers and of course the factory-backed Cadillac CTS-Vs. (Yes, Cadillac actually has a racing team.)
Speaking of Team Cadillac, all three of its all star drivers took part in the series autograph session, which had a surprisingly long line of fans for a series that doesn’t spend the better part of Sunday afternoons turning left. In addition to having the series’ two most recent champions (Andy Pilgrim in 2005 and Lawson Aschenbach in ’06), Team Cadillac was fielding a third car this weekend for defending race winner (and, in the interest of full editorial disclosure, one of my racing heroes) Ron Fellows who, as a driver for the factory-backed Corvette Racing squad in the American Le Mans Series, has won just about everything there is to win in professional road racing. However, the Canadian decided to cut back his driving schedule this year, and I asked him how his new part-time schedule was going. He promptly replied that he thought he was actually busier now, as he is still going to all of the ALMS races he won’t be driving in as a consultant and “ambassador” for Corvette. Anyway, I thanked him and each of the other drivers I managed to get an auto-graph from. Seriously, if you love close, hard racing, you have cable or satellite and you get Speed Channel, you owe it to yourself to watch these guys in action (if you haven’t already).
By now it was time for lunch, and outside there were plenty of eating options to choose from. There were also souvenir trailers. Lots of souvenir trailers. Anyhow, the bridge over the short straightaway between turns 9 and 10 led to the American Le Mans Series pad-dock, so I decided to do some exploring and see these exotic machines at rest. However, it was getting close to race time, and one by one the cars were either driven or rolled to the pre-grid. As race time drew closer still, the cars drove out a gate next to the bridge and made their way to the frontstretch on Shoreline Drive, while the crews hauled their toolboxes, tires, spare parts and other sup-plies to pit road.
With that, I worked my way back toward one of the big pedestrian bridges over the frontstretch, and found a grand-stand seat just a short way past the start/finish line. After some brief pre-race ceremonies, the field set off behind the pace car for a couple of slow warm-up laps. At the end of the second pace lap, the pace car pulled into the pits, the green flag waved and the race was on.
Unlike most racing series, where all the vehicles sound more-or-less identical, the cars of the American Le Mans Series sound as diverse as they look and perform: The pure-racecar howl of the Porsche and Acura prototypes’ 3.4 liter V8s, the ground-shaking rumble of the production-based Corvette and Panoz GT racers’ all-American V8s, the unmistakable bark of the Porsche GT3’s rear-mounted flat-six, and the eerily-soft growl of the Audi R10 proto-type’s V12 turbodiesel all combine to create a piston-pumping symphony as the faster and lighter P1 and P2 class prototypes try to sneak their way past the heavier, production-based GT1 and GT2 entries.
Incidentally, the ALMS is just the latest series to stage a race on the streets of Long Beach, a city whose signature event and resulting rebirth might never have come about if it weren’t for the radical idea of one immigrant businessman.
A boost for the Beach
Downtown Long Beach is today a cosmopolitan, tourist-friendly seaside metropolis, with no shortage of nice hotels, restaurants, stores and other attractions to take in. But that certainly wasn’t the case in the mid 1970s. Sure, Long Beach had the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose in those days, and was the setting of the original “Gone in 60 Seconds,” but it also had a glut of seedy hotels, theaters that specialized in X-rated films and other disreputable businesses.
Looking to clean up the town’s image and drum up some business, British ex-pat-turned-travel-agent Chris Pook pro-posed an auto race through the closed-off streets south of Ocean Boulevard, a sort of American answer to the Monaco Grand Prix. Rather than dismiss the Englishman’s idea as pure nonsense, the city father’s gave Pook and his consortium, the Grand Prix Association of Long Beach, a chance in 1975, and the concept quickly garnered the attention of the people in charge of the Formula One World Championship, the premiere international auto racing series.
Formula One raced the Long Beach Grand Prix from 1976 to 1983, when the titanic financial strains on Pook and his partners prompted them to move to the cheaper, U.S.-based Championship Auto Racing Teams beginning in 1984. That series’ successor, the Champ Car World Series, continues to contest the main race to this day. The series’ owners also bought the Grand Prix Association in 2005.
Anyway, back to the present. After an hour or so in the grand-stands, I decided to locate another vantage point. Wandering through the infield I found a long stretch of grass between the backstretch and a parking garage. Although it was open to general admission ticket holders, there were only about six of us altogether, stationed down by turn 9 as the drivers jumped on the brakes to make the corner, many cars spewing flames as unburned fuel collect-ed in the exhaust as each sharp change in engine note from downshifting echoed off the surrounding skyscrapers.
Finally, the race was over, and the cars made one last slow lap of the course en route to the pits or victory lane, depending on where they finished in their respective class. With that, I made my way past the stage where Taking Back Sunday would soon begin performing, out to Ocean Boulevard and up to the First Street stop of the Metro Blue Line for the journey home.
As they say, all good things must come to an end, even things that have something for just about everyone. But this high horsepower block party will be back for its 34th edition next year, and there’s a good chance I will be back for my second visit. I hope to see you there.
