Saturday, September 25, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JOE HAWK: Wheels in motion to make Las Vegas Champ Car haven

The smooth racecourse with its ample room for passing. The bright desert sun with its warm, chamber-of-commerce welcome.

Race fans cheering their favorite drivers from temporary grandstands. A black-tie gala the night before that drew celebrities from far and wide.

Two decades have passed. Hundreds of like races have since been run.

But Paul Gentilozzi remembers well the last motorsports venture that used the Las Vegas Strip as its glitzy backdrop and, frankly, he can't get the neon vision out of his mind.

"It was all overwhelming," Gentilozzi says of the 1984 Caesars Palace Grand Prix. "There was a lot of Hollywood glamour and international flavor. Just really neat stuff."

Which is why Gentilozzi, co-owner of the Champ Car Series that races tonight in a double-header event with NASCAR's Craftsman Trucks at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, has designs -- early though they may be -- on bringing open-wheel racing back to the city proper.

No, it won't be on the Strip -- "That would be like closing Fifth Avenue in New York or Lake Shore (Drive) in Chicago," Gentilozzi acknowledges -- nor will it be on a temporary course set up in a hotel parking lot, such as the four-year Caesars Palace Grand Prix was.

Rather, Gentilozzi is eyeing service roads just off the Strip, still with the glorious resort skyline as a backdrop, for a possible road race in 2006.

"Every day in Vegas, there's something special going on. We think we could be one of those special things," he says unabashedly.

Just the mention of a possible road race in the resort corridor brings back fond memories of the Caesars Palace Grand Prix, first held in 1981. It was a special event at a special time in the city's history. It was a grand local production at a time when the city was beginning to spread its wings internationally.

Today, what happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas. But in the early 1980s, advertising wasn't so coy: What happened in Vegas was fodder for conventional international marketing.

When Watkins Glen fell off the schedule after the 1980 season, Formula One racing used the opportunity to further cultivate the western United States. Whereas Long Beach, Calif., started the organization's 1981 race season, a new venture in Las Vegas was set to conclude it.

With a winding but wide 2.3-mile course constructed in a parking lot where today the Forum Shops sit, the first two Caesars Palace Grand Prixes featured spirited racing and were a huge success with the 30,000-plus fans annually, many of whom traveled from France, Italy, Argentina, Brazil and even Australia to support their drivers with the series championship on the line.

The event wasn't so popular with the racers, however. First, there was the counterclockwise driving, which put a tremendous strain on their necks. Then, with the 1981 event being held in October and the '82 event contested even a month earlier, the lingering desert heat was troubling. When Nelson Piquet of Brazil won his first world championship by placing fifth in the 1981 race, it took him 15 minutes to recover from heat exhaustion after barely making it to the finish line.

Still, moments after Strip entertainer Diana Ross stood on the winner's platform and toasted both Italy's Michele Alboreto, who won the 1982 race, and Finland's Keke Rosberg, who captured that year's points title, then-resort president Harry Wald announced the signing of a deal with NBC to televise Las Vegas races the next two years.

The deal, however, would not be consummated -- not with Formula One, that is. Formula One dropped Las Vegas from its schedule, but CART, then a 4-year-old version of open-wheel racing, gladly jumped aboard.

The Caesars Palace Grand Prix was run two more years as a CART event, with Mario Andretti winning on a revamped 1.125-mile course in 1983 and Tom Sneva winning in 1984.

The relationship ended soon thereafter when the resort decided to use the parking lot as the site for its high-end shopping mall.

The idea of returning open-wheel road racing to the Strip was broached several times in the late 1990s. But with the heavy traffic the resort corridor creates, all the marketing in the world -- or world marketing, for that matter -- couldn't convince hotel executives to shut down the Strip for a weekend of racing.

"And we understand that," says Gentilozzi, a former drag racer and road racer, who took in the 1984 Caesars Palace Grand Prix as an observer. "You have to compromise. But at the same time, we want to create something that won't be a compromise in terms of racing or racetrack.

"We've found a couple of locations that stay off the Strip and use low-service roads. We have some ideas that offer some real challenges for the drivers and great viewing for the fans."

These ideas have been zipping through Gentilozzi's mind at 200 mph since he and fellow Champ Car owners Gerald Forsythe and Kevin Kalkhoven bought the bankrupt CART racing series at the start of the year.

"We've only been going for eight-plus months so we haven't been able to get everything done," Gentilozzi explains. "But this is in our plans for 2006. We hope there are people out there who understand the creativity it takes to create the financial impact of a venture like ours (estimated $20 million in nongaming local revenue this week)."

Gentilozzi says the Champ Car Series could come to Las Vegas twice each year, with a race at the Speedway and one off the Strip.

"I really think it can be done," Gentilozzi says of the latter venture. "All it takes is a little bit of an open mind. It would draw world attention. ... When people think of street racing, most think of Long Beach or Monte Carlo. This could be both Long Beach and Monte Carlo."

Joe Hawk's column is published Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. He can be reached at 387-2912 or jhawk@reviewjournal.com.