The United States Grand Prix West was a race held at Long Beach, California, as a Formula 5000 race in 1975 and a Formula One world championship event from 1976 to 1983. After 1983 the event returned as the Grand Prix of Long Beach of the CART series.
With the Watkins Glen track on the downslope during the mid-70s, the USGP West was created, making the US just the second country (after Italy) to host two Championship F1 events in the same season. The street circuit was an immediate success from its first race in 1976, and it became the U.S.'s answer to the Monaco Grand Prix. The layout of the downtown course changed three times over its eight-year run, but all featured a sweeping "straight" (actually a long right-hander) down Shoreline Drive along the harbor. In the final event in 1983, John Watson won from 22nd place on the grid, the farthest back from which a modern Grand Prix driver had ever come to win a race.
Part of the interior of the circuit is the 13,600 seat Long Beach Convention Center which also doubled as the pit paddock for the Formula One teams when in Long Beach.
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, grand and/or west:
“United States! the ages plead,—
Present and Past in under-song,—
Go put your creed into your deed,—
Nor speak with double tongue.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Federated Republic of Europe—the United States of Europe—that is what must be. National autonomy no longer suffices. Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers. If Europe is to remain split into national groups, then Imperialism will recommence its work. Only a Federated Republic of Europe can give peace to the world.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“Not only [are] our states ... making peace with each other,... you and I, your Majesty, are making peace here, our own peace, the peace of soldiers and the peace of friends.”
—Yitzhak Rabin (b. 1922)
“The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars, it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)