This weekend’s Formula E Miami ePrix brings electric motorsport to the heart of a US city for the first time. At the same time it revives a rich tradition of street racing in the downtown area of the Florida metropolis that dates back more than 30 years.
The 2.17km ePrix circuit is the fourth track to grace the streets in this area of Miami and there is a common link between all of them — Biscayne Boulevard. The major trunk road that runs north-south down the coast of the city has been incorporated into each of the tracks, including the eight-turn layout on which the 20 Spark-Renault SRT_01Es will do battle on Saturday.
The history of street racing in Miami begins with the late Ralph Sanchez, who had a hand in the three previous Miami city circuits. The Cuban refugee, who arrived in the US on a ‘Freedom Flight’ from Havana in the early 1960s, became a successful property developer and amateur racer. He combined the two and came up with the idea of the Miami Grand Prix, conceived as a round of the North American IMSA GT Championship to take place early in the season between the Florida endurance classics at Daytona and Sebring.
A 2.98km circuit was laid out in the Bayfront area adjacent to the port where Miami’s deep-sea fishing fleet was based. It was a true street circuit that incorporated a section of Biscayne Boulevard, the roadways within Bayfront Park and even a loop through a railway goods yard, which entailed the cars crossing the rail tracks going in and coming out.
The first Miami GP was not a success. Heavy rain brought a premature end to the race after 27 laps (10 of them run behind the safety car), after which US sportscar legend Al Holbert Jr was declared the winner aboard his a Chevrolet-engined March GTP prototype. Sanchez bounced back for ‘84, pulling off a coup by persuading two-time Formula 1 world champion Emerson Fittipaldi out of retirement to take part in a March GTP car entered under the ‘Spirit of Miami’ banner.
Jaguar won the ‘84 race with Brian Redman and Doc Bundy, before Holbert triumphed again, this time sharing a Porsche 962 with five-time Le Mans 24 Hours winner Derek Bell. The Briton, who had taken over the car from Holbert for the run to the flag, looked on course for an easy victory until a series of late-race cautions allowed the pursuing Darin Brassfield, who shared his March-Chevy with David Hobbs, to close up and pass when the race went green for the final 15 minutes of its three-hour duration.
“That was the early days of the Porsche 962 and we hadn’t worked out how to get the engines to run smoothly when we were crawling behind the safety car,” remembers Bell. “When the green flag came out, my engine went ‘splutter, bang, splutter’ and I lost the lead to Brassfield.
“I remember coming down the inside of him into the first corner to retake the lead. He told me afterwards that he didn’t think that it was possible to overtake there, and I replied that nor did I – but I thought I might as well give it a go!
“That first Miami track was pretty amazing. It had a mix of everything, fast corners as well as slow stuff — it was really varied,” continues Bell. “It was a place where you couldn’t afford to hit the walls, but if you wanted to be quick you had to graze them occasionally.”
The Miami GP was also an exceptional event that helped change the face of the city, according to Bell. “It turned the city into the Monaco of the US at a time when it had a pretty poor reputation,” he says.
Redevelopment of much of the site of the first track forced the Miami GP to move north, although only by a handful of blocks. It jumped over Port Boulevard causeway and into Bicentennial Park, which means that sections of today’s ePrix venue follow the same route used back in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The Miami GP found a home on the three-mile Bicentennial Park circuit from 1986 until 1995. The track once again included sections of Biscayne Boulevard, but much of its length was on roadways through the park.
“That was a good track,” recalls Elliott Forbes-Robinson, who claimed Nissan’s first GTP victory on the Bicentennial Park circuit in 1987. “There were some pretty quick corners for a city track, real nice sweepers. It was bumpy in places, but you expect that for a street circuit.”
Forbes-Robinson, known in the sportscar paddocks as ‘EFR’, claimed victory in the ‘87 Miami GP victory together with Geoff Brabham, whose son Matthew raced in rounds two and three of this year’s FIA Formula E Championship in Malaysia and Uruguay respectively. They were among the big-name drivers to win the Bicentennial circuit along with French Le Mans legend Bob Wollek, 1987 World Sportscar Champion Raul Boesel and Juan Manuel Fangio II, nephew of five-time Formula 1 world champion of the same name.
Top of the bill at the Miami street event in 1994 was the US Trans-Am silhouette sportscar series before Sanchez brought North America’s top single-seater series, CART, back to Miami, having previously run an event in 1985-88 on the Tamiami Park circuit. This was a lead-in to a regular CART fixture at the Homestead-Miami Speedway that Sanchez was building to the south of the city.
The lone CART fixture on the Bicentennial circuit, which ran in the opposite direction to its sportscar iteration, was won by future F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve in the opening race of his championship-winning campaign.
Street racing disappeared from Miami with the opening of Homestead, but its hiatus only lasted until 2002. Sanchez, who had sold his interest in Homestead to the International Speedway Corporation, was now working with American Le Mans Series founder Don Panoz and jointly promoting the Trans-Am series. They hatched a plan to bring sportscar racing back to the downtown area, though by the time the race came to fruition Sanchez had stepped away through illness.
Former ALMS boss Scott Atherton remembers the route to the race becoming a reality for 2002.
“Ralph had introduced us to two friends of his, a developer called Willy Bermello and a lawyer known as Peter Yanowitch, who eventually became the promoters of the event,” he explains. “They, like Ralph, were very enthusiastic about motorsport and we joined forces to bring street racing back to Miami.”
The new event was run as an ALMS/CART double-header after, remembers Atherton, “some pretty aggressive lobbying from their president Chris Pook. Quite rightly they saw Miami as a pretty important market in which they wanted to be represented.”
The new track — officially known as the Miami Bayfront Park Street Course — measured 2.23km and was largely contained within the remodeled Bayfront Park, with a start-finish straight on Biscayne Boulevard and a loop through a car park. The last section was abandoned for 2003, reducing the circuit length to just 1.85km.
The inaugural ALMS race was won by five-time Le Mans victors Emanuele Pirro and Frank Biela at the wheel of a factory Audi prototype run by the Joest Racing team. Pirro recalls a “challenging low-grip track with a bizarre, long right-hander around a fountain” that wasn’t particularly to his liking. His most vivid recollection, however, is of the heat and humidity of the September fixture.
“The heat meant I could barely finish the race,” he explains. “I think I must have been right on the limit of exhaustion and I nearly fainted on the podium.”
That’s year’s CART race was won by future Toyota F1 driver Cristiano da Matta, while Mexican Mario Dominguez took honours in the renamed Champ Car series in 2003. But it was that year’s running of the Miami ALMS races that produced one of the defining moments in Miami street racing history. Former grand prix drivers Johnny Herbert and JJ Lehto claimed victory for the privateer Champion Audi squad ahead of the Joest entry of Biela and Marco Werner after completing the race on just one fuel stop after a flash-fire in the pits.
The third chapter of sportscar racing in downtown Miami ended after the 2003 event. A new, thoroughly-modern one begins with round five of the FIA Formula E Championship this weekend.
