F1
America's Original Oceanfront Grand Prix
Miami currently holds the crown as F1’s American beachside blast, but it’s hardly the first. Back in the day, the mighty Long Beach Grand Prix was a SoCal legend.
America’s love affair with Formula 1 has always been a little championship points in the 1950s, and the initial U.S. Grand Prix at Sebring and Riverside—to more recent episodes, such as its early-2000s fling with the Brickyard, F1 in the U.S. has vacillated between burning passion and unsuccessful weirdness.
We are, of course, currently swooning through an amorous spell intense enough to support three enormous events—in Austin, Las Vegas and here in Miami—with each capitalizing on a distinct identity. And here in Miami that means carving out a niche as F1’s coast with the most, delivering sizzling style and racing action in equal measure. It’s a winning marketing conceit—and one the sport has lived in a previous life, when the U.S. was in the midst of an earlier infatuation with the world’s biggest motorsport series.
Let’s drift back to the mid-’70s. Back then, F1 was enjoying a surge of popularity thanks to the exploits of drivers such as Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi and the smoldering, ill-fated François Cevert (the French driver sadly died in a crash in 1973). American interest in the sport began to outgrow its traditional, and arguably more staid, U.S. Grand Prix home at Watkins Glen in upstate New York.
Three thousand miles away, on the Pacific coast in Southern California, an F1-obsessed British expatriate was thinking about capitalizing on that sentiment.
Chris Pook dreamed of bringing a Monaco-style race to Long Beach.
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Born in England, Chris Pook arrived in the U.S. in 1963, armed with a sales and marketing degree from University College London and a desire to make his fortune. Almost a decade later and with a career as a travel agent behind him, Pook had a Eureka moment. Sitting in his office in Long Beach, with a view of the legendary Queen Mary cruise ship, watching the Indy 500 on TV, he imagined jolting the moribund former Navy town out of its faded existence with a Monaco-style race around the waterfront streets.
Pook began to assemble a plan and a coterie of like-minded dreamers, including a bit of racing royalty in the form of Dan Gurney—who at that point had transitioned from a successful career as an F1, NASCAR and Indy driver to a team owner—and then pitched the idea to local authorities. By 1973, Pook had succeeded in convincing the Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau, the Long Beach City Council, the Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Long Beach Associates to host a Formula 1 race.
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A test event, held in September 1975, saw Formula 5000 cars (an open-wheel format that ran from 1968 to 1982) take to the streets. After driver Brian Redman won in Carl Haas and Jim Hall’s Lola-Chevy, the circuit and the people behind it were deemed adequate to host grand prix racing. A year later, F1 arrived in Long Beach and one of the sport’s most iconic events was born.
The inaugural U.S. Grand Prix West in 1976 exceeded all expectations. Featuring tight corners, steep hills and long straights—including one along the imposing Ocean Boulevard—the 2-mile layout proved to be not only technically challenging but also action packed. Crashes in qualifying gave way to multiple incidents at the start. And the already heightened drama increased when James Hunt was squeezed into the wall as he attempted to overtake Patrick Depailler—leading the flamboyant Hunt to step onto the track and shake his fist at his rival every time he passed and later to invade the post-race press conference to confront the French driver. A litany of other crashes dotted a tight midfield battle but out front, Ferrari’s pole-sitting Swiss driver Clay Regazzoni was imperious, winning the race with 40 seconds in hand over teammate Niki Lauda.
The first race established Long Beach as a must-see event, but while the racing was exciting and ticket sales were solid, the Long Beach Grand Prix Corporation was struggling behind the scenes to meet the demands being made by F1’s rising star impresario, Bernie Ecclestone.
Racing for Lotus-Ford, Mario Andretti claimed victory at Long Beach in '77.
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“Bernard was building Formula 1,” Pook would later recall in Gordon Kirby’s book, Chris Pook & the History of the Long Beach “They were transitioning from the days when the race circuits used to pay starting money to the race drivers and the car owners, to where Bernie was able to package all the drivers up and the teams up and then go to the organizers or the venues and get fees, demand for money and transportation.”
That new approach put a financial strain on the event. “In 1976, I think the first Grand Prix cost us $575,000 or something in that area. Having almost gone broke after the 1976 race, we were working our rear ends off with the place being packed,” Pook says in the book. “We’d have like 97,000 people in the joint on Sunday, and 85 or 86 on Saturday, and 65, 70 on Friday. We were finding ourselves only making about $100,000 to $200,000 profit.”
With the race teetering on the brink of being unviable, and with creditors snapping at Pook’s heels, the race needed a massive lift—and it arrived in the shape of some home heroics in the 1977 edition.
Andretti's L.B. victory remains the only win for an American on home soil.
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In a tight qualifying session, Lotus-Ford’s American driver, Mario Andretti, scored a front-row spot next to pole sitter Lauda in his Ferrari. At the race start it was Wolf-Ford’s Jody Scheckter who got away best and he shot ahead of Andretti, who got the jump on Lauda. The Austrian attempted to overtake Andretti on Lap 4 but only succeeded in locking up and flat-spotting his tires.
Andretti closed up to Scheckter but armed with a less “draggy” car, the South African was able to pull enough distance on the straights to fend off attacks in the slower corners—until Lap 58. Scheckter swept past the pits, furiously indicating to his pit crew that he had a slow puncture. Andretti closed in and though Scheckter braved it out for another 18 laps, with three laps to go Andretti outbraked the Wolf driver into the Queen’s Hairpin to take the lead and the win, sending the U.S. crowd into a frenzy.
“It is one of the nicest moments of my career, even more satisfying than winning Indianapolis and really gratifying to have so many people pulling for me,” Andretti said afterward. It remains the only grand prix win for an American driver on home soil.
“Mario’s victory really changed the whole image of the race,” recalled Pook’s partner, Jim Michaelian, then the financial officer for the race and later president and CEO of the Grand Prix Association of Long Beach. “We made the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, and the race was all over the local and national news.”
The following years saw wins for Ferrari’s Carlos Reutemann, a bold and brilliant victory for the swashbuckling Gilles Villeneuve in 1979 and, tragically, a career-ending crash for inaugural winner Regazzoni in the 1980 race, but after Andretti’s win perhaps the next most celebrated race at Long Beach was also the last, in 1983.
Up against far stronger turbo-charged rivals, McLaren’s John Watson and Niki Lauda were struggling in a naturally aspirated McLaren. To make matters worse, the team couldn’t get its Michelin tires to work on the circuit’s partially concrete surface in qualifying. On Saturday, Northern Irishman Watson finished a lowly 22nd, just ahead of a furious Lauda.
In 1983, John Watson marched from 22nd to 1st place, at the Long Beach G.P.
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On Sunday, however, things changed. With the turbocharged cars forced to turn down the power for the long haul of the race, and with full fuel tanks aiding tire warm-up on the McLaren, Watson suddenly found his MP4/1 had come alive and he began to scythe through the field. About two-thirds of the way into the race, he came up to the back of race leader Jacques Lafitte, breezed past the Williams driver, and with Lauda in attendance, cruised to an unlikely 1-2 triumph. Watson’s incredible march—from 22nd to victory—is still the biggest grid to win spread in F1 history.
But while Watson had pulled off one scarcely believable recovery, Pook and his associates couldn’t match the achievement. “All of a sudden, we got up to 1983 and we were paying $1.75 million [to host the race],” Pook told Gordon Kirby. “And these are the days before major corporate sponsorship, before you had all this corporate hospitality and things, and ticket prices were very, very reasonable— you could go to a baseball game for five bucks. One bad day, one bad weekend, and we would’ve been toast. So we basically agreed with Bernard [Ecclestone] to disagree.”
The result was the end of Formula 1 in Long Beach. By 1984, the CART IndyCar Series—which sprang to life after Gurney called for team owners to break from USAC and form their own championship—was ready to take over the show. Forty years later its modern successor, the NTT IndyCar Series, still races around the streets of Long Beach, but for many, iconic names like Queen’s Hairpin, Le Gasomet, Ocean Boulevard and Shoreline Drive will always be redolent of F1’s other great U.S. seaside race.
