Grand Prix of St. Petersburg will be returning for its 22nd year from February 27 to March 1.<\/a> The 1.8-mile temporary street course has 14 turns and weaves around parts of downtown St. Pete while also utilizing part of a runway at Albert Whitted Airport.<\/p>\nWhile work on the grandstands and part of the course inside the airport grounds has already begun, course construction affecting streets in downtown St. Pete begins on Monday.<\/p>\n
Kim Green with Green Savoree Racing Promotions\u00a0said it will take the team between 15-16 days to construct the course. That includes nearly 2,000 12-foot steel-reinforced concrete blocks that will be placed along the course and 25,000 feet of chain-link fencing. It will take Stepp\u2019s Towing about 400 trips to haul all the necessary concrete.<\/p>\n
Track setup took 75 days for the first race and the group has gotten more efficient over time, Green said.<\/p>\n
Nikita Johnson, 17, will be one of this year\u2019s drivers. Johnson is from St. Pete and said the way the roads are constructed to drain rainwater makes the course even more interesting. He says the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg is one of his personal favorite races.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really tricky with the crests, we have a lot of crests here because we have to get the rain water off,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty hard because it sucks you into the corner into the apex\u2026 so that\u2019s a big thing here. There\u2019s some interesting big bumps here that want to throw the car around.\u201d<\/p>\n
Construction on the course is expected to wrap up by February 25. The races begin on February 27 and run through that weekend.<\/p>\n
New this year, the Nascar Craftsman truck series<\/a> will also be competing. Those races take place Saturday, February 28.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 In less than three weeks, some of the waterfront streets of downtown St Pete…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1564,274,48747,558,115,596,110,202,204,203,199,201,200,135,278,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-146123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-st-petersburg","8":"tag-angie-angers","9":"tag-app-top-stories","10":"tag-auto-racing","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-pinellas-county","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-st-pete","16":"tag-st-pete-headlines","17":"tag-st-pete-news","18":"tag-st-petersburg","19":"tag-st-petersburg-headlines","20":"tag-st-petersburg-news","21":"tag-tampa","22":"tag-top-stories","23":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}