New Look Is Served a la CART
The Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach has had three lives.
Its first was as a Formula One race, from 1976 to 1983 when the drivers were Niki Lauda and Jody Scheckter and Mario Andretti and the Queen Mary was surrounded by lavish yachts from Saudi Arabia and Argentina and other homes of international racing teams.
The second was when Grand Prix founder Chris Pook switched to CART and Indy car teams for financial reasons in 1984. The drivers were Rick Mears, the Unser brothers, Danny Sullivan and Mario Andretti and the Long Beach parking lots were full of Winnebagos hauling fans from across the country.
The third starts today with the 29th annual “World’s Fastest Beach Party,” a 90-lap run around an 11-turn, 1.93-mile course that winds around the Long Beach Convention Center, along Shoreline Drive past the Aquarium of the Pacific and under the windows of the Hyatt Hotel.
It is a CART race, as it has been since 1984, but the CART of today is almost as different from last year’s as the first Indy car race was from Formula One.
To rescue what appeared to be a sinking ship filled with disgruntled teams, sponsors and manufacturers, Pook has transformed his series into a more youthful, vibrant organization that is headed in a new direction. From an American series, he has created a North American series.
From Canada, CART has three drivers (Paul Tracy, Alex Tagliani, Paul Carpentier) and three race sites (Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto).
From Mexico, there are four drivers (Adrian Fernandez, Michel Jourdain, Mario Dominguez, Rodolfo Lavin) and two race sites (Monterrey and Mexico City).
From the United States, there are two drivers (Jimmy Vasser and Ryan Hunter-Reay) and 10 race sites, six of which are city street courses such as Long Beach.
“It’s just good business to put on races in major urban areas,” said Pook. “Sponsors would rather have our races go where the people are than have them go looking for us.”
Another plus for street races, ignoring the fact that they are usually boring with little or no passing, is that they advertise themselves. Once construction of the course starts on city streets, it creates talk among citizens who might otherwise ignore advertisements about the race.
“Everybody knows we’re there when the first grandstands go up,” said Pook. “We like the atmosphere they create.”
Pook was fortunate to have Mario Andretti in the transition from F1 to CART, as the immensely popular Formula One champion won the Long Beach race first in an F1 Lola and later in a CART Lola.
For the transition from the CART of Honda, Toyota and Michael Andretti to the “new” CART, Pook has three drivers with 11 or more years with the organization -- the Canadian Tracy, the Mexican Fernandez and the American Vasser.
“I can’t emphasize enough our attention to the North American Free Trade Agreement,” said Pook. “The world of racing is no different from the big world; nearly everything done today is global. With our attention to our neighbors in Canada and Mexico, we are creating strong and lasting partners.”
Perhaps most important is a new attitude among the troops.
Jimmy McGee has been around Indy cars and what are now called champ cars for 44 years. He has 89 wins as a mechanic or team manager, including four Indianapolis 500s and nine national championships. He is now running Pat Patrick’s team with Spain’s Oriol Servia as driver.
“Two things have happened since Chris took over -- he got rid of the malcontents who were negative about everything in CART, and he brought in positive people who believe in helping one another,” said McGee. “Toward the end of last year, when some people knew they were leaving [for the Indy Racing League], all they did was badmouth everything we were doing.
“Walk through the garages here and you’ll find a completely different atmosphere, totally upbeat. The people in CART now realize that we need each other. There is a spirit of cooperation that is refreshing.”
The chassis are still Lolas and Reynards, but their power is dramatically different, and cheaper.
When Honda and Toyota were battling for bragging rights, the money each spent on engine development sent costs soaring. The price for an engine a year ago was $2.5 million. Now, with Ford Cosworth the only engine manufacturer in the series, the cost of the XFE turbocharged V-8 is closer to $1.4 million.
“The cost isn’t the only benefit,” said McGee. “Last year we could count on only about 300 miles from an engine. Now we are running them 1,200 miles. And they sound the same and are as fast or faster than the more expensive ones.”
Jourdain’s pole speed of 103.918 mph, set in Saturday’s second round of qualifying in Bobby Rahal’s Lola, is only 0.683 seconds -- a little more than a mile an hour -- slower than Gil de Ferran’s track record 104.969 set three years ago in one of Roger Penske’s Honda-powered cars.
It will be the second year in a row that Rahal has a car on the pole. Last year it was Vasser, who finished second to Michael Andretti.
Tracy, who won the first two races, will start on the front with Jourdain, the third time he has started in front.
When many of his big-name teams and drivers, such as Chip Ganassi’s Kenny Brack, Motorola’s Michael Andretti and Barry Green’s Dario Franchitti, jumped to the all-oval racing IRL, series champion Cristiano da Matta left for Formula One and Christian Fittipaldi for NASCAR, Pook went hunting.
He toured Europe and signed four recruits from the Formula 3000 series, champion Sebastien Bourdais, Mario Haberfeld, Joel Camathias and Tiago Monteiro, and three Formula One test drivers, Patrick Lemarie, Darren Manning and Alex Yoong.
He brought back 44-year-old Roberto Moreno from retirement and when it was time for the first race, Feb. 23 in the streets of St. Petersburg, Fla., he had the 19 starters he had promised -- a number the skeptics said he would never reach.
To furnish them cars and teams, he found new owners in Formula One and Indy 500 champion Emerson Fittipaldi, veteran Trans-Am champion Paul Gentilozzi, former CART driver Stefan Johansson and the duo of Formula One team owner Craig Pollock and Kevin Kalkhoven. He also resurrected former owners such as Dale Coyne and Eric Bachelart.
When finances became a problem for some teams, Pook and the CART board agreed to donate up to $30 million to prevent some from failing. Insiders say the sum is already more than that and the season is into only its third race.
The heart of the series, of course, is with the veteran team owners, notably Carl Haas and Paul Newman, Gerry Forsythe, Derrick Walker, Bobby Rahal and David Letterman, the Herdez group and driver-owner Fernandez.
Newman-Haas, faced with the loss of da Matta and Fittipaldi, grabbed the exciting Bruno Junquiera from the defecting Target Ganassi team and added the spectacular newcomer, Bourdais.
Forsythe’s Canadian-sponsored Player’s team brought in fellow Canadian Tracy from the departing Team Kool Green as teammate for Patrick Carpentier, creating a national motor racing unification. Tracy is from Ontario, Carpentier from Quebec.
When Vasser was left without a home after Rahal dropped him, he helped Johansson form the American Spirit team with the series’ only two American drivers, himself and rookie Hunter-Reay.
“It’s hard to understand what happened, or how it happened, but today CART is more like what we used to think of the IRL, and the IRL now looks like CART,” said Vasser.
To which McGee added, “Yeah, that means the IRL has all the headaches we used to have.”
What CART has that no other motor racing series has is the diversity of its tracks -- temporary street circuits, permanent road courses, short ovals and superspeedway ovals.
“The dynamics in the diversity of tracks makes our formula the best in the world,” said Vasser. “Now, all we have to do is get more people to believe in it, more people to watch it, in person and on TV.”
For Long Beach, it’s today at 1 p.m. if you’re at the track, and on Speed Channel if you’re at home.
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Formula One cars, the ones that helped make the Long Beach Grand Prix what it is, will return today for an exhibition race dubbed the Historic Grand Prix. Many will be the actual cars that raced from 1976 to 1983, including Mario Andretti’s world championship-winning 1978 Lotus, and the Ferrari 312 T4 that 1979 winner Gilles Villeneuve drove.
“The way the fans cheered the historic cars in practice and the way they milled around them in the Convention Center shows us that they are an exciting part of this year’s program, and of our past,” said Jim Michaelian, president and chief executive of the Grand Prix Assn.
“This will be a reminder for those who were here to see these beautiful cars from our early years. And for those who were not here during those years, this is a chance to experience those great moments.”