Long Beach Street Circuit

Race track

Long Beach, a Monaco Dream in California

A waterfront street circuit south of Los Angeles was home to Formula 1's United States Grand Prix West for eight seasons and helped to remake its city.

The Long Beach Grand Prix started with a travel agent's idea. Chris Pook, who had come from England, had seen Monaco and believed something like it could work in Southern California. He picked Long Beach, about 40 km south of the center of Los Angeles and then a struggling industrial port city, and laid out a course on streets near the harbor. The opening race, for Formula 5000 cars in September 1975, drew 30,000 people.

The circuit threads through the streets around the Long Beach Convention Center, which served as the paddock in the Formula 1 years, and across the former site of The Pike amusement zone. Its signature has always been Shoreline Drive, a long, gently curving straight lined with palm trees and ended by a sharp hairpin. The first layout measured 2.020 miles, with a hairpin at either end of that straight, and the start and the finish were not even in the same place.

Formula 1 came in 1976 with a new race called United States Grand Prix West, and Long Beach held eight championship rounds from 1976 to 1983. The track was hard on the cars, but the weather, the setting and the nearness of Hollywood quickly won it a following. Not one driver won there twice. The eight races went to Clay Regazzoni, Mario Andretti, Carlos Reutemann, Gilles Villeneuve, Nelson Piquet, Alan Jones, Niki Lauda and, in 1983, John Watson, who started 22nd and finished ahead of Lauda, who had started 23rd. Seldom has the back of the grid been so well rewarded.

Big crowds did not make the event pay. Pook stood to make a profit of perhaps $100,000 on a budget of six to seven million dollars, and he persuaded the city to switch to Indy cars from 1984. American open wheel racing has run there ever since, and the race is credited with sparking the revival of Long Beach, as rundown buildings gave way to hotels and attractions. Today it ranks among the longest running events in American open wheel racing, which suggests Pook's idea about Monaco was not so far fetched after all.

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