MoRoarSport: Top 16 North American street circuits

5/04/2024

Top 16 North American street circuits

There was a time when to attend a motorsport race, you generally had to go out of the city. Indeed, after the Second World War, the old streets circuits were gradually abandoned. Only a few isolated cases remained, such as Monaco, Pau, Montjuich and Macao.

In North America, the situation was a little different. As early as 1975, a promoter, Chris Pook, had the idea of transposing the concept of a Grand Prix in a city like Monaco in California. He therefore created the Long Beach Grand Prix. This was an exception in America for a while, until Americans understood the genius of this idea. What's better than reaching out to the audience instead of waiting for them to come to you? Sponsors only ask for that after all. Thus the fashion for American downtown circuits was launched, whether in IMSA which initiated the trend with the Miami circuit, in F1 again with Las Vegas, Detroit then Dallas or in Indy which replaced F1 in Long Beach streets.

North American streets circuits, however, had the drawback of offering very poor quality surfacing for cars that were increasingly dependent on grip and aerodynamics, as well as concrete walls and fences that were unsightly and hindered visibility, and tortuous and technically uninteresting layouts made mostly of straights, 90° turns, chicanes and hairpins.

But despite this, the participants played the game with more or less good will (having understood the interest of the concept), with the exception of the F1 drivers, who were more demanding.

Many of these circuits undergo frequent modifications from one year to the next, some disappeared very quickly, others have been there for decades.

Here is a ranking of those temporary race tracks that covers several periods up to the present day. It's not exhaustive though...

1 - Long beach (F1 70's)