This past weekend I made the annual pilgrimage to the Long Beach Grand Prix. This year was the event’s 48th running…whew!… that realization hit kind of hard when it dawned on me that this was the 48th Long Beach Grand Prix that I’ve attended! The inaugural Long Beach Grand Prix, in 1975 for F5000 cars, was the first race I ever attended (at the tender age of 9) and clearly the initial infection point for a lifelong, terminal disease.
While my interest in the LBGP has ebbed and flowed over the past 48 years, with the various transitions from F5000 to F1 to CART/Champcar/IRL/Indycar/et. al., I have to say that this year’s event was one of the very best in recent memory for the overall quality of racing, up and down the board.