US GP Preview: Facts & Stats

The second leg of the North American double-header brings us to Indianapolis for the United States Grand Prix - a race that, down the years, has proven to be the most nomadic, statistically complicated and (recently) controversial on the F1 calendar.

This race has been held in no fewer than nine different locations - Sebring (1959), Riverside (1960), Watkins Glen (1961-80), Long Beach (1976-83), Las Vegas (1981-82), Detroit (1982-88), Dallas (1984), Phoenix (1989-91) and, since 2000, at its present location, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the circuit to host IRL, F1 and NASCAR events.

The United States Grand Prix should not be confused with the Indianapolis 500, which, although not an F1 race, counted toward the Formula One World Championship between 1950 and 1960. For this reason, you will often see variations in Grand Prix statistical books (for instance, some count Ferrari's involvement in the 1952 Indy 500 as a GP start, whereas others do not).

The only time the circus visited Sebring was also the 1959 championship finale. Jack Brabham sealed his first world title that day after Stirling Moss's early race retirement, but it is an event most remembered for two other occurrences - Brabham's Cooper-Climax grinding to a halt on the final lap, forcing the Australian to push it over the line, and Brabham's demise leaving Bruce McLaren as the youngest F1 race winner at that time.

Aged 22, McLaren was over two years younger than Mike Hawthorn was when the Briton won at Reims in 1953, and his mark stood for 44 years until Fernando Alonso eclipsed it at Budapest in 2003. Down the field, Sebring also featured the unique sight of 1959 Indy 500 winner Rodger Ward aboard a Kurtis Kraft Midget racer. He wasn't able to set the world alight with his speed, qualifying nearly 44 seconds off pole!

In 1960, the race moved across the continent from Florida to California, and Stirling Moss took a dominant win from pole as Riverside hosted its sole F1 race. It was only in 1961 that F1 found a long-term home stateside - New York's Watkins Glen circuit - and Innes Ireland wrote his name into the record books by taking his only career win in 50 starts with the up-and-coming Lotus team.

He began a run of eight consecutive years in which the US Grand Prix was won by a British driver, and from 1962 to 1968 it was the exclusive domain of Jim Clark and Graham Hill, who both won three times each. Clark's 1966 win is unique as being the only win for the radical BRM H16 engine, which was shoehorned into the Lotus 43 chassis as the team awaited the much more practical Cosworth DFV V8, which appeared in the following season.

Jackie Stewart's 1968 win ended the British monopoly, and in 1969 it would be Jochen Rindt who would score his maiden win, again in a Lotus. Joining him were two more British drivers, who both made their last podium appearance - Piers Courage was second in the Frank Williams-owned Brabham, while 1964 world champion John Surtees was third for BRM.

It is a race notorious for Graham Hill's serious accident, in which he broke both legs. Despite competing for six more years, Hill, who was the reigning champion at that time, was also never to reappear on the F1 podium.

The treacherous nature of F1 in that era was underlined when the championship returned to Watkins Glen a year later. Rindt and Courage, who were 1-2 in the 1969 event, had both been killed over the course of the 1970 season, and Rindt's posthumous championship was already confirmed by the time young Emerson Fittipaldi, making only his fourth F1 start, took victory in the Lotus 72 vacated by Rindt.

A similar course of events unfolded again in subsequent years, as Francois Cevert took what would surprisingly be the only win of his career at the Glen in 1971, two years before the violent crash that took his life. Tragedy struck again in 1974, when Austrian rookie Helmuth Koinigg was killed after crashing his Surtees.

By 1976, the United States was deemed big enough to host two events a year, and after the success of a Formula 5000 race the previous year, Long Beach was promoted to the F1 schedule, its street race proving a handy replacement for Spain's Monjuich Park, which had been dropped after the chaotic 1975 race.

Clay Regazzoni won the first race around the California streets, which would be his last win until the 1979 British GP. Sadly, his career was ended at Long Beach in 1980, when the brake pedal snapped on his Ensign, sending him down the escape road and straight into the abandoned Brabham of Ricardo Zunino, leaving him paralysed.

From 1976 to 1980, Watkins Glen and Long Beach appeared together on the calendar, with Carlos Reutemann winning both races in 1978, and Gilles Villeneuve matching the feat in '79. Most recall Watkins Glen 1979 as the weekend Villeneuve lapped 11 seconds quicker than any other driver in the wet practice sessions.

Alan Jones (Williams-Ford Cosworth FW07B) leads Gilles Villeneuve (Ferrari 312T5) and Carlos Reutemann (Williams-Ford Cosworth FW07B), 1980 United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen © LAT

Alan Jones took victory at the Glen in 1980, which proved to be the last stand for the iconic venue - in 1981 a track around the Caesar's Palace car park in Las Vegas replaced it. Not that Jones himself would have minded too much, as it was there that he scored victory in what was supposed to be his last Grand Prix start before retiring. He wasn't able to shake the F1 bug, and after a one-off drive in 1983 he returned one last time in the 1985-86 seasons.

The pole winner for the '81 Las Vegas race was Carlos Reutemann, who at age 39 was set to become the fifth-oldest world champion in history. He ended up fading away to eighth at the finish, and Nelson Piquet's fifth place was enough to give the Brazilian the first of his three titles by a single point. Keeping with his mercurial tendencies, Reutemann quit F1 for good two races in the following season.

In 1982, the USA became the first country to host three races in the same season, when the existing duo of races were joined by another street race, this time in Detroit, home of the US car-making industry, and all three races would produce memorable outcomes.

Long Beach was the scene of Niki Lauda's first victory since coming out of a two-year retirement, while at Detroit teammate John Watson broke Jackie Stewart's record for biggest come-from-behind victory, when he won from 17th on the grid. Stewart had previously won at Kyalami in 1973 from 16th place, and Watson's win was doubly impressive, coming on a track so sinewy that it had to be altered in 1983 to improve the average lap speed.

The brief Las Vegas experiment ended with Michele Alboreto scoring his maiden F1 victory - Formula One did not return to the Nevada venue after 1982, and not too many were upset about it.

If Watson's Detroit win in 1982 was something special, his Long Beach win in 1983 was one for the ages. After McLaren had a lousy qualifying, Watson and Lauda were left 22nd and 23rd on the grid. Unperturbed, the two made their way through the field in tandem and ended the day 1-2, breaking the record Watson himself had established less than a year earlier. To put his achievement in context, only six races in history have been won from lower than 15th on the grid, two of which are his.

For Long Beach, it was a great race to end its seven-year association with F1, and it switched to being an IndyCar race thereafter. Detroit continued until 1988, and produced a few notables of its own. Alboreto's win in 1983 was the last of 23 wins for Ken Tyrrell in Grand Prix racing, and the last of 155 victories for the three-litre Cosworth DFV and derivatives, 16 years after its first one.

In its latter stages of existence, the Detroit Grand Prix was the exclusive property of Ayrton Senna. The Brazilian won the last three races held there and was on pole for three of the last four. His 1987 victory was the last of 79 F1 wins for the Lotus team, and he led the final race there from start to finish for McLaren.

When Phoenix became the US Grand Prix host in 1989, somebody clearly didn't get the memo on climate conditions in Arizona. The race was held on June 4th, a time of year when temperatures in the Grand Canyon state easily top 40 degrees Celsius. Alain Prost tamed the conditions and took victory, the only one of his 51 career wins to come on American soil.

Sanity had prevailed by 1990, and the race was moved to March. Ironically, the teams were confronted with a rainstorm during practice, and this meant the grid was decided by the times from Friday qualifying, providing one of the strangest looking grids of the modern era.

Ayrton Senna (McLaren-Honda MP4/5B) leads Jean Alesi (Tyrrell-Ford 018), 1990 United States Grand Prix at Phoenix © LAT

Pole went to Gerhard Berger on his McLaren debut, but after him it was Pierluigi Martini (scoring Minardi's only front row start), Andrea de Cesaris (tying Dallara's best ever qualifying) and Jean Alesi (Tyrrell's best grid position since 1982). Further down, Olivier Grouillard's Osella was eighth, ahead of both Ferraris!

The performance was down to Pirelli's qualifying tyres, but nobody told Jean Alesi, and his wheel-to-wheel battle with Ayrton Senna is what most people remember of the three F1 races in Phoenix. In 1982, there were three races in the US, but by 1992, Formula One had lost its foothold in the world's largest economy.

Indianapolis came to the rescue in 2000, and it has pretty much been a Michael Schumacher benefit ever since - he has won there four times, tied with AJ Foyt, Rick Mears, Al Unser Sr and Jeff Gordon as the all-time best at the speedway.

He would have the record already but for his little faux pas at the end of the 2002 race, when in his haste to have a Ferrari formation finish he accidentally let Rubens Barrichello beat him to the line by 0.011 seconds, the closest finish since timing and scoring began timing to a thousandth of a second in the late 1970s.

The 2001 race was notable as the end of the road for many of the F1 regulars. Mika Hakkinen took his last ever victory in his penultimate start, while it was also the last race for McLaren team legend Jo Ramirez, and British TV commentator Murray Walker, who retired from the role he first assumed at the 1949 British Grand Prix.

It doesn't come as a lot of comfort to the 100,000-plus fans that showed up for the 2005 US Grand Prix, but that "race" produced a whole host of firsts, lasts, and not-quites.

Fourteen did-not-starts is an all-time record, while zero retirements tied the mark from the 1961 Dutch GP (the 2005 Italian GP also tied that record, much more impressively). It was the last time Ferrari finished 1-2 in a race to date, although Schumacher and Barrichello narrowly avoided colliding after the final round of pitstops.

Had they removed each other from the race, it would have left Tiago Monteiro as the winner, which might have been bittersweet for Toyota, who would have scored their maiden F1 win in the back of a Jordan! As it was, Monteiro had to settle for third, the first ever podium for a Portuguese driver, and teammate Narain Karthikeyan's fourth place was the first (and only) points finish for a driver from India.

By default, Minardi scored points with both their cars in a race for the second time (after the 1989 British Grand Prix), and it was the second successive year that the team scored at Indianapolis, as Zsolt Baumgartner was eighth in 2004.

All of this was possible because of Michelin's mass withdrawal, and it's rather ironic that the French tyre maker will arrive in Indianapolis this year having just scored its 100th Grand Prix victory last weekend in Montreal.

Michelin will seek to exorcise more than just the ghosts of last year's debacle - it has not won a major race at the Speedway since Joe Dawson won the 1912 Indianapolis 500.