When the lights go down and the 20-car Formula 1 field smashes its way into the first corner of Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix (2 p.m. ET, ABC), it will mark the official South Florida debut of Earth’s greatest motorsport series.

But it won’t be the first race with “Grand Prix” and “Miami” in the same title. Not even close. Prior to this weekend, nearly 30 events have been held as the Miami Grand Prix in five different series.

So, yes, F1 will make history by racing around Hard Rock Stadium this weekend. But there’s little else that could be described as little about Miami’s motor racing roots. From the Alabama gang and the Andrettis to an Indy 500 founding father and a famous TV racing death that wasn’t real, South Florida’s road to Formula 1 had more twists and turns than the 19-turn, 3,363-mile Miami International Speedway, fake marina parking lot and all.

Do you like fast cars? Do you like history? Then, put on your pastel painted helmet and go for it.

Mr. Fisher Beach and Track

At the end of this month, they will race the 106th Indianapolis 500 at Speedway, Indiana, located 1,200 miles northwest of Miami Beach. But the same man was instrumental in transforming these two places into American institutions.

Carl Fisher was a Hoosier demigod, one of the four founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He sought to build a proving ground for his Indianapolis-based automotive interests, from the first patent headlights to his auto showroom, widely recognized as the first-ever auto dealership.

IMS opened in 1909 and hosted the first Indy 500 in 1911. Fisher also built America’s first coast-to-coast highway, the Lincoln Highway, then decided he wanted to build a highway north as well. -south (which became the Dixie Highway) which connected the Midwest to Florida. Why? Because he liked to vacation in Miami. He loved it so much that he dedicated himself to turning an island of mangroves and snakes into a vacation oasis. He called it Miami Beach.

Fisher devised ways to lure vacationers to his new oceanside paradise, including building a 1.25-mile wooden oval with a 50-degree incline similar to that of Everest. The Fulford-Miami Speedway moved to North Miami Beach and announced a 300-mile event on February 22, 1926. Fisher called on his Indianapolis friends, and they showed up. Two-time Indy 500 winner Tommy Milton took pole while defending 500 champion Peter DePaolo won the race and the aptly named Carl G. Fisher Trophy.

Unfortunately, the track was destroyed seven months later by the great Miami hurricane. Luckily, the timber from the flattened expressway was repurposed by Fisher to help rebuild the town.

The Miami Gang?

Open-wheel racing disappeared from Miami along with the Fisher track and wouldn’t return for six decades, but there was certainly no shortage of race cars in South Florida. Sports cars rolled down the roads and runways of cities and airports, from Singer Island to Boca Raton, while race cars and stock cars slid down a half-mile dirt road north of Miami, the Palm Beach Speedway, built in 1949 and running until 1984. It’s where Indy 500 racers like Al Keller trained before heading north each May and where seven NASCAR Grand events National were hosted and won by, among others, NASCAR Hall of Famers Tim Flock, Herb Thomas and Lee Petty.

Palm Beach Speedway is also where youngsters Bobby and Donnie Allison fell in love with stock car racing and took their first laps. It’s true: the founders of the Alabama Gang were born in Miami.

“Yeah, it still blows people away, that we were all born in Miami, and we didn’t move to Alabama until we were adults and married,” Bobby Allison recalled in 2019. “Red Farmer wasn’t born there, but he grew up there. We were surrounded by really, really good runners all our lives, all over there in South Florida.

Bring it to the street

The first Miami Grand Prix, held in 1983, has its roots in the sports car racers of Boca and Singer Island. The event was conceived by Miami entrepreneur Ralph Sanchez, who was born in Cuba and, like the Allisons, fell in love with auto racing as a child.

He was drawn to the romance of the first Cuban Grand Prix, a 1957 Formula 1 event held on the oceanfront streets of Havana and won by Stirling Moss. Sanchez was 8 years old. Only four years later, he was evacuated to Miami with other Cuban children as Fidel Castro’s revolution engulfed the island country.

Decades later, as Miami suffered from a drug-tainted reputation, Sanchez followed in the tire tracks of Carl Fisher, seeking to lure visitors and businesses to his city through auto racing. Inspired by the race of his childhood, he mapped out a 1.85-mile course that ran through downtown Miami’s Bayfront Park and onto Biscayne Boulevard, a road that briefly parallels the path Fisher paved to the beach.

Over the next 11 years, Porsches, Nissans, Jaguars and a Ford Mustang won IMSA and Trans Am events, moving from Bayfront Park to nearby Bicentennial Park.

At the same time, IndyCar racing returned, now under CART sanction, and at another location, 15 miles inland on a 1.78-mile road course that passed through Tamiami Park. This Victory Lane, which now sits somewhere below the Florida International University Panthers football stadium, was reserved for legends only, with two wins for Al Unser Jr. and one for Michael Andretti and Danny Sullivan.

Speaking of Sullivan…

Crockett and Tubbs meet Danny Tepper

Sullivan won the inaugural CART version of the Miami Grand Prix on November 10, 1985, just six months after winning the Indy 500 via his legendary “Spin and Win”. No rider on the planet was hotter property.

So when “Miami Vice,” the hottest TV show on the planet, was looking for a guest star to step into a racing-themed episode shot in January 1986, they called Sullivan. He played Danny Tepper, a Porsche racing driver accused of killing a prostitute named Florence Italy.

Spoiler alert: Danny Sullivan wasn’t a great actor, but he held on as Danny Tepper was cleared by Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, who realize the real murderer is Tepper’s father. Danny wins the race (of course he does), but his father takes the Porsche and leads Crockett and Tubbs through an impromptu street race and dies in an accident.

“I’ve done some cool stuff and to be honest with you I’ve always considered myself a pretty cool guy,” said Sullivan, who won 17 IndyCar races and also made 15 F1 starts, in 2018. “But there has never been anyone cooler in the history of mankind than Don Johnson was on the set of ‘Miami Vice’ in 1986.”

Welcome home…place

Sanchez was the mastermind behind the sports car and CART events, but argued with the freewheel folks when they wanted to change the date of the rainy season finale race to early fall, right in the middle of hurricane season.

After a seven-year absence, future F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve won Champ Car’s comeback race in 1995, run on a revised version of the urban course at Bicentennial Park. It was never meant to be more than a temporary fix while Sanchez’s dream facility was being finished 35 miles south of Miami, a rectangular mini-Indianapolis known as Homestead-Miami Speedway .

CART named the track in 1996 and raced there until 2000, when IndyCar took over the event. In 2002-03, CART held a pair of street events at the Bayfront Park course, but folded soon after. From 1998 to 2012, Grand Am raced on the Homestead-Miami Speedway road course, most events as the Miami Grand Prix.

Since 2013, Homestead-Miami — and all of South Florida’s major races — has been owned exclusively by NASCAR. The track-owning arm of the sanctioning body long ago purchased the racetrack from Sanchez and held its season finales there until 2019.

All other series have evolved. The only exception was March 14, 2015, when F1’s electric cousin, Formula E, ran the Miami ePrix on another street course that skirted Biscayne Bay, the fastest lap and race won by the F1 bluebloods to Nelson Piquet Jr. and Nico Prost, sons of former world champions.

Finally F1

Sanchez died in 2013, and many thought his real racing dream – F1 in Miami – probably died with him. But now a new Miami Grand Prix is ​​coming to his city.

“There has been an incredible, unsolicited outpouring of memories and support this week, from around the world,” Patricia Sanchez Abril wrote in an email Wednesday morning. The daughter of Ralph Sanchez, who grew up attending Formula 1 events with her father, is now a professor of business law at the University of Miami. “He passed away nine years ago now and memories tend to be short, so we were so happy to see his legacy live on in such a meaningful way.”

On Tuesday, Abril was alongside Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber and Emerson Fittipaldi, Indy 500 winner, F1 world champion and longtime Miami resident. They cut the ceremonial ribbon to kick off Miami Race Week.

“In the ’80s, my dad always wanted this for Miami,” Abril said. “He loved this city and envisioned racing putting it on the map in a positive light. Even then he knew F1 would be in Miami. He didn’t know it would take 35 years but he was definitely the one who set it up. We are so proud of his lasting legacy, and we can see his signature smile as he beams with pride that F1 has finally arrived here.”

Abril said this week that she was going through her father’s memoir and found a quote.

“I’m very proud of what I’ve done. I brought racing to South Florida,” Ralph Sanchez said in his memoir. “I’ve built something that I’ll leave behind. Whenever people talk about racing in South Florida, I’m the culprit.”