The fascination of Miami street racing

I've always had a thing about street circuits, and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's because they seemed so exotic to a motorsport-mad kid growing up in a country in which we didn't have such things. And then, when we did finally get one, it was in Birmingham of all places.

My love of street and city circuits goes part of the way to explaining my interest in Formula E and why I've volunteered to report on some of the races for AUTOSPORT in this inaugural season. I put my hand up for Miami for various reasons, one of which was a fascination with the history of street racing in the Florida city.

The original Miami Grand Prix, a round of the old IMSA sportscar series, piqued my interest back in its maiden year in 1983 and again in 1984 for the simple reason that it marked the racing comeback of a certain Emerson Fittipaldi, a driver of whom I was sure we'd seen the last.

Early years of Miami as a motorsport venue captured the attention of Watkins © LAT

I followed it through its shift to a second downtown circuit in the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s, though it was only when the fixture briefly became a round CART championship in 1995 that I found more than a few paragraphs about the races in the pages of AUTOSPORT.

The '95 CART race, won by Jacques Villeneuve, was a precursor to the opening of the Homestead oval to the south of the city and looked as though it would be last hurrah for street racing in Miami.

Yet a race resurfaced only a few years later as an American Le Mans Series/Champ Car double-header, an event that I had the privilege to cover in its second and final edition in 2003. I say privileged because that was the year of the Champion Audi team's miracle single-stop victory with Johnny Herbert and JJ Lehto.

It is well-known that the Miami GP was the brainchild of the late Ralph Sanchez, a local property developer and amateur sportscar racer who combined the two to come up with the idea of a race in downtown Miami in the early 1980s.

He also garnered headlines for building the oval down the road in Homestead. What happened in between is certainly less well-documented and perhaps even confusing.

Miami hosted Fittipaldi's 1984 comeback, and he raced in one-off '95 CART event too © LAT

The stop-start history of street racing in Miami — and I'm not including the Tamiami parkland circuit that hosted CART races in 1985-'88 here — was something I was determined to understand fully by the time I left Miami and headed for this weekend's Sebring 12 Hours.

The original track of 1983-85 was around the city's old deep sea-fishing port, the re-development of which forced Sanchez to look north and led to the creation of a new circuit around Bicentennial Park just a few blocks away.

This track continued in the 1990s, included a year when Trans-Am headlined and then ended with the CART race. Interestingly, the track was reversed in direction for that final event.

Sanchez, who had sold his stake in Homestead to the International Speedway Corporation, helped conceive the revived event at a time he was in bed with ALMS boss Don Panoz, though he would withdraw from public life through illness before it became a reality.

Watkins calls witnessing the 2003 ALMS race in the city a 'privilege' © LAT

The double-header meeting wasn't a financial success and lasted but two years, which means motor racing was absent from the streets of Miami for nearly 12 years before last weekend's fifth round of the Formula E Championship.

So that means there have been four distinct tracks that have hosted motor racing in downtown Miami. The common link between all of them is Biscayne Boulevard. Sections of US Route 1 have formed part of all four circuits, including, not surprisingly, the startline on three of them.

The Formula E Spark-Renault SRT—01Es ran the 'wrong' way up the southbound section of this highway, just as Villeneuve, Bobby Rahal, Michael Andretti and co did 20 years ago.

Part of Biscayne Boulevard is now named Ralph Sanchez Way. It's a nice touch from the local authorities to recognise the importance of the man in its motorsport history.

Today's Miami street track is, we can say, in the same place as the 1986-'95 venue. It doesn't go through the park, now renamed Museum Park, but the loop around the American Airlines Arena, built to home the Miami Heat basketball team in the late 1990s, follows the route, at least roughly, of the former track.

The same goes for the original track and the 2002-'03 version. The area had undergone substantial redevelopment in the intervening years, but they were more or less in the same place and their courses overlapped as far as Biscayne Boulevard was concerned.

The founder of Miami street racing is honoured in the modern day

I'm going to let on that there is more selfish reason for my research into the Miami GP. You might well remember that I have a thing about going to new race tracks and keep a rolling tally of all the venues on which I have witnessed racing cars in action.

The term venue is key: I clearly couldn't count the Osterreichring, A1-Ring and now the Red Bull Ring as separate circuits any more than I could various track configurations at Silverstone.

So if I was to add another track to my list I had to make sure that there was no overlap between the 2002-'03 circuit and last weekend's ePrix track.

I've talked to those involved in the old races, the likes of long-time IMSA man Mark Raffauf and Tim Mayer (last weekend's track manager and a veteran of both the CART and the ALMS), and they have confirmed everything my research was suggesting.

That means I can, with clear conscience, add another circuit to my list. The Miami ePrix circuit takes my tally to 94 and, in case you were wondering, it was street or city track number 13 for me.