THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY ACURA GRAND PRIX OF LONG BEACH

So it was nice to have my niece down from Canada to take in the 2025 Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach live with me. (I always thought that the sibling in the family who would be first to go racing with me was her brother, but this worked out splendidly, as Sarah is a curious and attentive person.)

Here are some of the impressions we shared about this, the fiftieth running of an event that remains much as it began, with, this year, twenty-seven Indy Cars roaring around between concrete walls in an attempt to take home a trophy.

First, ninety-seven bucks just to get in the door, and with no seat as part of the equation, is a lot of money. Worth it? Probably, for the experience. Insider tip, though—it would be a more restful event if you snag a seat. Those were all sold out when I went to buy one on Friday, though. As for me, I was on a press pass, so there was the option of going into the media center and taking it easy for a few minutes while Sarah people-watched outside.

Anyway, on whatever credential you pass through the gates, once inside the circuit, you see the teeming crowd, including people with checkered-flag regalia from head to foot. You hear the roar of the engines as the cars lap the 11-turn circuit. You get to tour the lifestyle expo, perhaps signing up for AAA or arranging to have new windows installed in your place. Interesting. 

There’s more than that inside the Long Beach Convention Center, though. There are the paddocks for various series running on the weekend. Not the Indy Cars, though. Their garage area is outside, and it costs an extra fee to walk through there. These up-charges , including an assigned grandstand seat, could thus easily make this a $150-a-person day.

Sarah and I were there for the full experience, and we accumulated almost 20,000 steps as we toured all around, including the food truck court on the outside of the track behind the front stretch grandstands. One impression we got: Nobody seems to object too much to the price of a tall boy can of beer, because almost everybody had one. The price: $18. Definitely event-level numbers. For those unaware, those are about $3.50 in the grocery store, I am told.

So these adventures took up most of the morning Sunday after our relatively early 10 am arrival. Then race time approached. What would we see, and from where? Well now, that’s a good question. If you’re trying to see the actual cars racing on the actual track, you have to hunt for a good spot, and even then, you’ll be jealous of the 6’5” person (likely a man) standing with an eagle-eyed view over everyone else’s head. People are lined up two-to six-deep all around the 1.968-mile track. Here’s a hint for you if you’re going to go next year: Turns 6-7-8 are good spots, with some famous passes happening in past events at Turn 8. (I’m thinking of a pass in the Trans Am support series race maybe fifteen years ago.) Plus, that’s kind of away from where most people gather, so you aren’t so crowded out quite so much.

Another good spot is Turn 9 into 10 and 10 into the hairpin (11) that leads back onto the front stretch. The advantage in this area Is that there’s a visible giant screen that shows you what’s happening elsewhere on track and gives you the crawl of the positions and how far each driver is behind the leader. If you’re not near a scoring monitor, you have to construct your own narrative. Will you get it right? Probably for the leaders, but not for the field, likely.

But lamenting the lack of a coherent story of the race presumes that you’re there for the racing action, rather than the spectacle. Most people who were wandering around seem like it’s a see-and-be-seen day. The sun and the beautiful views of the Queen Mary and the Pacific Ocean are all a part of the show. The roar of single-seater Indy Cars whizzing by every so often is just part of the ambiance.

So what happened on track on April 13th? More than you might think, because while the Indy Car race is the big show, there’s lots more on-track action than that. That includes Stadium Super Trucks, Historic Grand Prix cars, IMSA Sportscars, SRO GT America cars, and Formula D drifting. 

Does it matter who wins any of these events? Yes and no. Just to pick two where victory might not be so important: the Super Trucks traverse the circuit and navigate a series of jumps. What’s a Super Truck? A highly complexly engineered Baja Buggy, to most eyes. They practically fly over the jumps. And the Historic cars represented an era of Long Beach long past, their event called, on the official documents, an “Exhibition.” More like a fantastic trip down memory lane. There were more than twenty of them from a 1969 Eagle (earlier of date than the GP itself) to a 1976 March 761 to a 2005 Lola 05/00. I watched their race (or whatever we’re calling it) on Sunday morning from turn 8, and they were actually doing some dicing as they came off the long back stretch. 

The real point, here, of course, is to exercise these cars on track while recalling what it was like when all the cars were like this—tiny, with exposed drivers’ heads and very little in the way of forethought given to what happens when they crash. These cars managed to look all of beautiful, tiny, and fragile next to the contemporary Indy Cars, which have much more consideration given to head restraint, extremities protection, and shielding from flying debris via a windscreen. The contemporary cars are considerably larger as a result, and their tires are wider and so more grippy. Kind of makes one long for the good old days, when racers, at least in the imagination, were more gladiators than masters of engineering strategy. The historic cars, not driven at ten-tenths as the contemporary Indy Cars were on Sunday, lapped at about 78 mph average speed, so not slow by any means.

So standing in Turns 8 and others, did we register what was happening in the main event? Not entirely. I did see Kyle Kirkwood emerge as the race leader and Alex Palou somehow end up directly behind him, followed by Christian Lundgaard to round out the podium. Did I realize that there were actually nine official lead changes and that people as varied as Sting Ray Robb, Scott Dixon, and Marcus Armstrong led at least one lap? Not until I checked the spec sheets provided by Indy Car after the event. I only really understood the whole story after watching the race replayed on TV on Grand Prix evening after I got home from the LBC, and that’s kind of the point. You get thrilling glimpses of very fast and loud machines at the event itself. The big picture emerges only afterwards.

This would be less true at an oval race, or on a less-crowded road course (say, Mid-Ohio), but as with every professional sporting event, a large part of having been there is having been there. The totality of the experience matters less than one’s impressions of it.

Other details of the big race, for you purists out there, include that the average race speed was 100.395 mph, that Kyffin Simpson set fast lap at 103.981 mph on lap 32 (not a lap he led), and that there were six total leaders. A lap, by the way, took just past 68 seconds, which is why the official time of the race, an hour and forty-five minutes for ninety laps, was so short. That and the fact that there were no cautions. This marked the third event of the season, with only one yellow between them, but I learned that only when someone said it in the post-race press conference.

So, based on first-timer Sarah’s Grand Prix experience, what should you do when, for instance, next year’s Long Beach event rolls around? I asked my niece this, and she said, “It was worth it. I can say I went to a Grand Prix,” and of course I schooled her in the fact that other than Indy itself, Long Beach is the race to be at. She also mentioned the various elements I’ve named above, including “all the great stuff in the lifestyle expo.” She’s not a race fan, and this event probably didn’t make her one, but the noise, the spectacle, and the feeling that you’ve done something important lingered with her long after the smell of racing fuel had left the air.