1984 Dallas Grand Prix

 

 Melbourne, Valencia, Baku, Singapor, Sochi, Hanoi... the trend of urban or semi-urban circuits in F1 is not recent. There was a time when the Grand Prix circus sought to get out of the hat a maximum of new Grand Prix in urban centers, suburban or around parks.
In the 70s, only two classic European city races were on the calendar: Monaco and Montjuich (Barcelona), until a young American promoter, Chris Pook, decided to propose a sort of an american Monaco to the ambitious boss of FOCA, Bernie Ecclestone.
That was the birth of the Long Beach Grand Prix, in 1975. Bernie Eclestone saw no problem in having two American races on the calendar. The new continent market is immense, and it remained to conquer. The Long Beach Grand Prix became almost a classic. Appreciated by everyone, it would remain in the clandar until 1983, when, exceeded by the cost of registration and F1 requirements, Chris Pook decided to "sell" his product to his countrymen of Formula Indy (CART), much less greedy.

A few years before, in 1978, the Canadians - or french-Canadians to be more precise -  thanks to the presence of Gilles Villeneuve at the highest level of motorsports, decided to switch the Canadian Grand Prix from the old and quite dangerous Mosport permanent track to the public roads around the complex that served the Olympic Games in 1976 and the World Expo in 1967 located on the "île Notre-Dame" island in the middle of St laurent river. Only a few years later, the canadian Hero, Gilles Villeneuve, lost his life, but his home Grand Prix remained faithful to the calendar until 2019 except one year, 1987, when some contract issue with the main sponsor prevented the race from taking place.

Subsequently, the boss of FOCA together with the FISA were going to have eyes bigger than the belly by aiming always higher, in order to make the formula 1 more cosmopolitan than it was already, with announcements of new big city races, but constantly postponed. There were more than rumours about racing in the streets of New-York, Moscow, Fuengirola (Costa del Sol - Spain), Paris, Roma... But each time, these projects came up against various barriers: politics, bureaucratic burdens, ecologists demagogy...etc.
Not surprisingly, the Americans, more liberal and entrepreuneuring than europeans, would achieve more often their Grand Prix projects on temporary circuits even if with a certain dose of improvisation and amateurism, to say the least.
Except that each time, it was worse than before. None of these new urban circuits could do as well as Long Beach, whether in Las Vegas, Detroit or Dallas.

The last one on this list, Dallas, was going to be a caricature of those Suburban US Grand Prix: Concrete walls everywhere of course, which made driving not only complicated because of the multiple blind turns, but also because of lack of sufficiently wide run-off areas and sometimes no run-off area at all, which added the danger to the difficulty, in addition to the tarmac that breaked out to the point it threatend the race existence itself. And to make the weekend even more detestable, an unbearable heat wave due to a wrong date choice.

The fact remains that, despite everything, and perhaps also because of all of this, the Dallas Grand Prix was going to remain in history as one of the most memorable because it was so out of the norm. It was also one of the most contested Grand Prix we have ever seen. How can we forget also the unprecedented scene of Nigel Mansell who collapsed by pushing his Lotus-Renault towards the finish line, and the multiple retirements due to shunts against the concrete walls that made some parts of the circuit look like an F1 cemetery, tricking even the dominant McLaren giants, Prost and Lauda!

 

 

Later on, the Formula 1 World Championship would continue to welcome new street circuits, but this time, after the painful Dallas lesson, the FISA and the FOCA were going to tighten the screws which would allow the birth of some of the most beautiful city Grand Prix, starting in 1985 with Adelaide, followed by Phoenix in 1989 then, much later, Melbourne in the mid 90s. 

Welcoming the new century, F1 was about to enter a new era, that of Hermann Tilke's modern but formatted racing tracks including streets circuits pushing the quality requirements to unprecedented levels. But how many of them would leave a memory as lasting as Dallas GP?