That’s what a lot of us diehard IndyCar fans did at the end of Sunday’s 80-lap Grand Prix of Long Beach, because the race went off without a hitch, there weren’t countless cautions for pieces of aero kit coming loose and littering the track and, perhaps most importantly of all, the weather in southern California was typically Californian: blue skies, sunshine and warm.
Second only to the Indianapolis 500, the Grand Prix of Long Beach, this year marking it’s forty-first year as an IndyCar Series event, is the race that every driver wants to win. When you take the chequered flag under the flag stand on Shoreline Drive, you join an elite group of IndyCar drivers, revered luminaries of the sport, drivers who have triumphed at Indianapolis, have won IndyCar Series championships, and have had success in other forms of racing.
Long Beach is where Al Unser Jr. dominated the nineties, where Mario and Michael Andretti both won. Other big-name winners? Danny Sullivan, Jimmy Vasser, Alex Zanardi, Juan Pablo Montoya and Helio Castroneves. Sebastien Bourdais won three times in a row, after Paul Tracy won two years running. Australia’s Will Power has won twice.
The streets of Southern California was exactly what IndyCar needed after the debacle of last weekend’s rain-interrupted NOLA Motorsports Park event, and, as per usual, the fast street circuit delivered. The weather was perfect, the racing was great, and there were people absolutely everywhere. Maybe it wasn't actually a record crowd, but the stands and infield seemed as busy this year as they have in recent memory.
To be honest, I wasn't sure what sort of a crowd would pack the grandstands on Sunday morning. I mean, there hasn’t been a whole lot of positivity to open the 2015 IndyCar Series, has there? After last weekend in Louisiana and the caution-plagued season opener on the streets of St Pete in Florida, you could be forgiven for thinking that IndyCar’s already-small fan base might’ve had enough.
Yet, for as many missteps as the series makes – and, believe you me, there are plenty – it seems that us fans, the ones who never deserted during the ugly open wheel war between CART and the IRL, are very forgiving, because we keep watching, keep buying merchandise, and keep on keeping on with a series that sometimes is downright and incredibly frustrating to follow.
At it’s best, though, IndyCar’s on-track product is top-notch. The last few years with the DW12 chassis has highlighted the amazing parity through at least two thirds of the field, and you could make a strong argument that the racing is better than what we’re seeing in Formula One at the moment. The sad part of that is that no one’s watching IndyCar. It’s scarcely mentioned in North America, outside of the Indianapolis 500 in May and, in, to a lesser extent, on the Long Beach weekend.
It’s great that a return to the familiar streets of the southern Californian port city heals a lot of what is wrong with IndyCar. There was just one caution in the race, and although Queensland-born New Zealander Scott Dixon (of Target Chip Ganassi Racing) was the class of the field all race, scoring a resounding maiden Grand Prix of Long Beach victory, there was good racing up and down the field.
IndyCar fans are hard markers, and, even so, the general consensus was that Long Beach had delivered another good race, controversy-free and, thank goodness, also mercifully free of pace car domination. Crucially, there more positive storylines than negative ones from the weekend, which is more than can be said about last weekend’s disaster. Seven days is a long time in IndyCar racing!
On from Long Beach we go, with another race next weekend at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Alabama. Chalk and cheese, Barber compared with Long Beach, but the event down in NASCAR heartland has been very successful in recent years, with a racy track and good attendance, so there’s every hope that, as we enter the rhythm of the season, we’ll have soon forgotten about the rocky start to 2015!
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