Monday, July 24, 2006 | 7:16 a.m.
The Champ Cars roaring around the streets delighted a big crowd in San Jose, Calif., last year, causing officials to deem the race a success. Only later did the race finances spark a political scandal that still clouds the mayor's election.
A downtown street race in Denver in the early 1990s cost that city millions of dollars over two years and drove open-wheel racers away from the Mile High City for 11 years.
So, Las Vegas officials celebrating their good fortune for landing their own street race should know they can occasionally backfire.
But no matter how jarring the occasional bumps in the road, officials in the cities that host these street races love the events for their economic impact and the worldwide exposure. The cities and their landmarks become TV stars on race afternoons.
The 32-year-old race around the streets of Long Beach, Calif., is credited with being the catalyst for a remarkable downtown revitalization.
Las Vegas will become the sixth North American city to host an open-wheel race on its downtown streets. The City Council last week voted to enter into a five-year agreement with a Phoenix-based company to stage the Vegas Grand Prix.
The Easter Sunday race will open the 2007 Champ Car World Series season and be the centerpiece of a three-day "festival of speed." The cars will run on a 14-turn, 2.4-mile circuit that will encircle the Fremont Street Experience.
"The event has the potential to do great things for downtown and for Las Vegas in general," Mayor Oscar Goodman said.
Goodman hopes the Vegas Grand Prix will more closely follow the successful course the Long Beach Grand Prix has taken since its inception in 1975 and avoid the problems that overshadowed the inaugural San Jose Grand Prix and earlier Denver races. (While the same cars and drivers run in the races, all four - Long Beach, San Jose, Denver and Las Vegas - have different promoters.)
Despite drawing a three-day crowd estimated at 150,000 in San Jose, the luster of last year's race quickly tarnished when it was learned how race organizers in January were granted a $4 million subsidy by the city. According to published reports, it was later revealed that outgoing Mayor Ron Gonzales and Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez had known about the request for months before bringing it to the City Council for a last-minute vote.
The controversy may cost Chavez her bid for mayor.
But the enthusiasm for this weekend's second annual San Jose Grand Prix appears to be high among civic leaders who constantly are looking for ways to escape the long shadow cast by neighboring San Francisco.
"The bottom line of the race is the worldwide attention it attracts and the fact that something like this doesn't happen anywhere else in Northern California," said Rich Jensen, communications director for the San Jose Downtown Association. "There's an evolution going on; it's still a fledgling race, it's still early in the going but we hope that it's around for a lot of years and I think that's the general atmosphere here."
Business leaders estimated that the race has an annual economic impact of $50 million for San Jose, even though not all of them figured out how to capitalize on the first race.
"We're opening our arms to the race and we're ready to embrace it," Jensen said, "but we haven't been able to wrap our arms around it yet."
That couldn't be further from the case in Long Beach, where the area around that city's two-mile street circuit has been embraced by the local business community and undergone a stunning transformation over the years. In 1976, when the race served as a Formula One Grand Prix, the multimillion-dollar racecars sped down an Ocean Avenue lined with adult theaters and boarded-up flophouses.
Today, the adult bookstores and seedy liquor stores have been replaced by trendy sidewalk restaurants, coffee bars and high-rise hotels. The Long Beach Grand Prix attracts three-day crowds of 150,000 and is the marquee event of the 15-race Champ Car series.
Even the Long Beach Grand Prix struggled in its infancy and took years to become a bona fide success. Event president Jim Michaelian said Las Vegas should be able to avoid many of the growing pains that his race experienced.
"I'm not an expert on the details for the event there in Las Vegas, but I would think there are some huge built-in advantages to running an event in that particular town," he said. "I think with the support of the community and the various governmental agencies the festival-type atmosphere with the backdrop of the Las Vegas skyline there, there's no reason why one of these events can't be 'successful' very, very quickly."
Bradley Yonover, a co-owner with Dale Jensen of DBB Ventures, which is promoting the Vegas Grand Prix, expects the race weekend here to draw about 150,000 - seemingly the magic number for attendance for all the weekend street races in the West. He also estimates the race would generate an economic impact of $76.7 million for Las Vegas and an additional $3.8 million in state and local tax revenue.
Yonover agreed that it shouldn't take long for the race to catch on with tourists and locals alike.
"What was Long Beach before they began?" Yonover said of the Grand Prix's impact. "It was a fairly depressing industrial town that had a pretty high element of danger to it. Las Vegas, on the other hand, you couldn't ask for a better palette.
"I understand downtown has its issues, but I strongly believe that there really is an opportunity that an event like this will bring a lot of people downtown and will help to support those casino owners that are looking to put a new face on downtown."
Local city officials seemingly took a cue from the model established by the current incarnation of the Denver Grand Prix. After spending millions of dollars on the failed race in the early '90s, Denver leaders this time around insisted their only financial commitment to the race would be to bring the streets on the course up to city code.
Before agreeing to a contract with DDB Ventures, the Las Vegas City Council rejected a request by the group for the city to pony up between $1 million and $3 million for street improvements. The city agreed to make $500,000 worth of street improvements; race promoters will be responsible for additional improvements.
That was a good first step to avoiding some of the potholes that have sent other street races off course, according to Kevin Magner, a special events coordinator for Denver.
A huge city investment was one of the biggest reasons the original Denver race failed, said Magner, who is instrumental in planning the grand prix."
But that's not to say that race organizers and city officials will cruise through the inaugural race here without encountering some problems along the way.
"What I think they're going to have to do in the next year is really think through all of the angles that are going to come up," he said, especially traffic and parking.
"The first year, it may not be perfect - because they never are - but by the time we got to the second year, it was darn close, and it was a piece of cake by the third year."
archive
