The event was masterminded by tour guide and motor sport entrepreneur Chris Pook, who first of all brought an F5000 street race to Long Beach for 1975, featuring Mario Andretti, Al Unser and Chris Amon before taking it up a gear with a world championship F1 meeting the next season.
Pook worried though that ‘just’ an F1 race on its own wouldn’t be enough to draw in a US audience so used to oval racing – and so started to call in the stars of the European circuit scene.
Associate Steve Earle, who also put on smaller scale historic events, began to lend a hand, as did Dan Gurney and Phil Hill, who were co-directors of the GP.
The line-up which was eventually secured was nothing short of stellar: as well as the two aforementioned US stars, Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Rene Dreyfus, Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme, Carrol Shelby, Richie Ginther, Innes Ireland and Maurice Trintignant all lined up for a weekend’s historic action Long Beach.
The garage was no less impressive: Fangio was manning his legendary Mercedes W196, whilst also running would be Moss’s Maserati 250F, a 1932 Bugatti Type 51, a 1932 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Monza, the Ferrari 375 used by Alberto Ascari at the 1952 Indy 500, a BRM P25 and a Cooper T51.
With practice sessions and then a demonstration race across the Friday and Saturday, fans were given plenty of time to take in the stars in their less-than-reasonably priced cars.