Jim Michaelian’s love of auto racing began when he was 12 or so, when he learned to drive a car on the back roads of his grandmother’s vineyard in Fresno.
As a teenager back at his home in Alhambra, he graduated to driving hot rods. He loved to drive fast while attending UCLA and working at different jobs before starting his career with the Grand Prix of Long Beach in 1975.
That love of speed brought him to the attention of local authorities.
“Driving around Southern California,” he would tell me in earlier interviews, “I got my fair share of tickets.”
Michaelian then discovered that he could drive as fast as he wanted and not get a ticket — if he became an auto endurance race driver.
The racing world was stunned when Jim Michaelian died in March at age 83. But the legacy Michaelian leaves behind is about not only his management of one of the nation’s premier motorsports events, but also his own racing career.
Jim Michaelian (right), who had a lifelong love of motorsport racing, is with race car driver Danny Sullivan. (Courtesy of Grand Prix Long Beach)
Jim Michaelian is driving in the 24-hour Daytona endurance race in 2014. (Courtesy of Grand Prix Long Beach)
Jim Michaelian and son Bob (second and third from left) compete with their driving team in the 2007 Daytona endurance race in Florida. (Courtesy photo)
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Jim Michaelian (right), who had a lifelong love of motorsport racing, is with race car driver Danny Sullivan. (Courtesy of Grand Prix Long Beach)
Endurance motorsport races occur over multiple hours and test the car’s reliability and the driving team’s stamina. Well-known events include the 24-hour races in Daytona, Florida, and in Le Mans, France, which was first run in 1923 and holds the record as the oldest of the endurance races.
“My dad found endurance racing to be super exciting,” said Bob Michaelian, the older of Jim’s two sons. “My brother Mike and I became avid racing car fans because of him.”
Bob Michaelian said his father raced for 33 years, starting in 1991 and ending in 2024. His last race was in Monza, Italy.
His father raced at tracks in the United States in Daytona and Sebring, Florida; Watkins Glen, New York; and in Europe in Le Mans, France and Nurburgring, Germany, among other places.
The younger Michaelian is an auto endurance racer himself.
“I raced with him in Daytona and other tracks,” he said. “They were amazingly special opportunities.”
As children, he and his brother Mike delivered the Press-Telegram on their bikes. But when it rained, he said, his father would put them in his car and drive them on their routes to deliver the paper.
He said his father’s loss of his left eye because of cancer more than 20 years ago “did not slow him down.”
“He had to compensate for the loss of his eye,” the younger Michaelian said, “but he kept racing. He was a fearless driver.”
John Doonan, president of the International Motor Sports Association, called Jim “a racer’s racer.”
Steve McNeely, who lives in Pasadena, was another auto endurance racer — who drove in races with the elder Michaelian.
“I was Jim’s co-driver when he did his first IMSA race in Sebring in the early 1990s,” McNeely said last week. “We did endure and drove to the end, finishing around 20th.”
That race, McNeely said, was the beginning of a “very enduring friendship” with Michaelian on and off the track.
“I also helped Jim do driver training for the Long Beach Grand Prix pro/celebrity races, and I did many of Jim’s legendary ‘walkabouts’ on race weekend,” McNeely said. “Jim was always excited about driving. He had loads of enthusiasm.”
Bob Michaelian said his father loved auto endurance racing, but he was “super passionate” about the Grand Prix of Long Beach, which he ran for so many years.
“My dad loved the city of Long Beach,” the younger Michaelian said, “and the positive impact the race had on the city.”
Funeral plans
Jim Michaelian’s funeral is scheduled to take place from noon to 2 p.m. June 13, a Saturday, at Cottonwood Church, 4505 Katella Ave., Los Alamitos.