Postcard From America: Long Beach Grand Prix

Very few motor sport events enjoy the stature and longevity of the Long Beach Grand Prix, which through 50 years has seen transformations through Formula 5000, Formula 1 and four distinct eras of IndyCar. The 2025 edition brought back former champions Mario Andretti and Al Unser Jr to celebrate that history, and now under the ownership of Penske Entertainment the popular event appears to be bigger and better than ever.

English expat Chris Pook envisioned a street race to promote Long Beach when it was a somewhat grimy port city. The concept gained credibility when legendary racer Dan Gurney, whose All American Racers firm built Eagle Formula 1 and Indycars in nearby Santa Ana, lent his support. The early years were run on a shoestring, but Andretti’s victory over Niki Lauda and Jody Scheckter in a classic 1977 race stabilised the event and allowed it to carry on as the US Grand Prix West through to 1983.

Despite sponsorship from Toyota (loyal backer from 1980-2018), the high cost of F1 forced Pook to recreate the LBGP as a round of the growing CART IndyCar series. With three wins in four years between 1984-87, Andretti helped maintain and grow the race’s appeal. Unser then took over as ‘King of the Beach’, winning six times between 1988-95. By the late ’90s, the Long Beach Grand Prix was firmly established as something more than a sporting event, the perfect blend of Southern California car culture and people-watching.

Long Beach has often been copied, but rarely emulated. It was the most prestigious and popular race for CART during IndyCar racing’s ‘split’ years; Gerald Forsythe and Kevin Kalkhoven acquired the rights to run the event as part of their efforts to keep Champ Car afloat. The Grand Prix again became a political tool in 2016-17 when Pook was part of a proposed plan to bring back Formula 1 that was rejected by the city council. The Penske group secured the future of the LBGP in its current guise, taking over ownership from Forsythe in late 2024.

Unser, Andretti and Brian Redman – winner of the 1975 F5000 Long Beach Grand Prix in which Tony Brise also starred – were fêted this year at an annual charity dinner hosted by the Road Racing Drivers Club to benefit its Safe is Fast online driver development programme. Emcee Bobby Rahal, the RRDC president, expertly coaxed a few previously untold stories from all three legends to cap a memorable evening. Now 84, Chris Pook was in the room; so was Patti Queen, the wife of another early LBGP executive who posed for victory podium photos with Redman in 1975 when the hired trophy girl went MIA.

“The perfect blend of California car culture and people-watching”

On the race track, Felipe Nasr and Nick Tandy claimed their third consecutive IMSA SportsCar Championship win for Porsche Penske Motorsport, while Kyle Kirkwood was relatively unchallenged to take IndyCar honours for the second time in three years. But the sun-splashed thousands sitting in the grandstands and walking the grounds don’t really care if they see a classic motor race.

The best track story of the weekend was Robert Wickens’ return to top-level racing. He drove a GT3-specification Corvette fitted with hand-controlled electronic braking technology developed by Bosch in the IMSA race. A simple switch activates the standard brake pedal for co-driver Tommy Milner, who had the car fielded by DXDT Racing running in the top five in class before late contact with another competitor dropped them down the order.

Over the past three years, Wickens won several races and the 2023 championship in IMSA’s TCR-specification series. The 36-year-old Canadian still dreams of another chance in Indycars, but his justifiable pride in making his first start in IMSA’s premier WeatherTech Championship was clear.

Wickens also serves as an engineering adviser and driver coach for Kirkwood and the Andretti Global IndyCar team, so all in all, he had a fine time in Long Beach.

Not that long ago, the notion of Tony Stewart as a Wally Trophy-winning NHRA Top Fuel drag racer was about as far-fetched as the long-time bachelor being a happily married father. Welcome to 2025, because Stewart celebrated his first Nitro drag racing triumph at the unique 4-Wide Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway with wife Leah Pruett – herself a 12-time race-winning Top Fuel pilot – and infant son Dominic.

Encouraged to meet by NHRA star Don Prudhomme in 2019, the chemistry between Pruett and Stewart was instant and they unexpectedly wound up spending the first four months of the Covid pandemic together in Arizona. Like his idol AJ Foyt, Stewart came up through short tracks and developed into a multifaceted racer who won an IRL-sanctioned IndyCar championship and multiple NASCAR Cup Series titles. Stewart quit NASCAR after the 2016 season, but he kept occasionally racing Sprint cars on dirt. He started driving alcohol-fuelled rail drag cars in 2022, and when Pruett became pregnant with their child, Stewart stepped into her Top Fuel car in early 2024.

At Las Vegas, Stewart’s 3.87sec, 317.42mph pass defeated four-time Top Fuel champion Antron Brown and two other competitors in the finals at one of two NHRA venues with a four-lane layout. Like Foyt, Stewart is racing well into his fifties and – over 1000ft anyway – he’s faster than ever. He’s also obviously at peace with domestic bliss.

Based in Indianapolis, John Oreovicz has been covering US racing for 30 years. He is author of the 2021 book Indy Split