ARLINGTON — The first open-wheel street race in North Texas in more than four decades went off like gangbusters Sunday, with the inaugural Java House Grand Prix of Arlington drawing rave reviews all around. Good thing, too. It’s taken 42 years for open-wheel racing to get over the last time it was here, when chunks of track came up in the 100-degree heat at Fair Park and a driver fainted while trying to push his car to the finish.
The moral of 1984’s F1 Dallas Grand Prix: Never schedule anything outside around here in July.
Of course, every season presents its challenges. Officials had to bump up the start of Sunday’s NTT IndyCar race an hour to avoid expected 40-mph gusts later in the afternoon.
Hard enough to pilot these road rockets without a gust catching a wing and landing you on the other side of the interstate.
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No question about it, this wasn’t your usual sports experience out at JerryWorld and the Globe, and not exactly a Friday night on Central Expressway, either.
“It’s been an incredible event,” said Kyle Kirkwood, the winner. “This event was done right. The track was built properly with the fencing, the walls, the branding. It looked clean.
“It looked exactly how a premier motor sports race should look like at a street course, right?”
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Better, if you ask the runner-up.
“My expectations were already high,” Alex Palou said, “but this has exceeded them by 10 times.
“This is by far the best street race that I’ve been part of.”
You may or may not be surprised by who got the credit. The race was billed as a collaborative effort with Penske Entertainment, the Cowboys and REV Entertainment, the Rangers’ official events partner. But, other than Pudge Rodriguez, who teamed up with DeMarcus Ware as an official co-starter, it was decidedly a Jerry Jones production, if not infomercial.
The 83-year-old billionaire and his Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders seemed to be everywhere Sunday. There he was rubbing elbows with Roger Penske. Or yukking it up on the Fox set.
Or dancing on top of JerryWorld.
His cartoon image, anyway.
A natural born promoter, Jerry saw the potential when Greg Penske, Roger’s son, approached him after the demise of the IndyCar series at Texas Motor Speedway three years ago. Penske figured a circuit around JerryWorld and the Globe might attract fans who aren’t inclined to drive out to TMS.
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They were also hoping for a younger demographic charmed by the buzz of street racing over ovals. Last year, Penske said, they doubled the size of their 18-to-34 market. A cursory look over the packed grandstands Sunday – officials expected a crowd of 80,000 – indicated they got what they marketed.
“If you’re not changing,” Penske said, “you’re not winning and you’re not trying hard enough. At the end of the day, I think the team we’ve got at IndyCar, the team with the Cowboys and team with the Rangers, we feel that we’ve got a great partnership starting out.”
Of course, time and ticket sales will tell. The fact that the agreement is being called a “three- to five-year” deal tells you something. If it comes back next year – and there’s no reason to think otherwise at this point – that’ll beat the Dallas Grand Prix’s open-wheel run.
The first mistake back in ‘84 was trading the chance of rain in spring for the heat of mid-summer. Officials even moved up the start of the Dallas race three hours, to no avail. Temperatures in the cockpits reportedly hit 140 degrees, transforming sleek miracles of automotive technology into 180-mph crock pots.
On the other hand, the conditions back then provided for one of racing’s iconic moments: Nigel Mansell, his gearbox on the fritz, getting out to push his car on the final lap. He made it about 50 meters before going down like Alec Guinness at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai.
“I was so angry,” Mansell said later. “I just kept pushing. Then the lights went out, and I woke up in the hospital, on a drip in a bed packed with ice.”
Hardly the image F1 was trying to sell at the time, and that was that. Dallas and Addison hosted a few Trans Am races over the next decade or so, but no more open-wheel. Until Sunday.
The sport is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. An Oscar nomination for F1 with a star turn from Brad Pitt certainly helps. IndyCar may not be as glamorous as F1, but a rising tide apparently floats all open-wheel cars as well as boats.
Bill Miller, president of the Grand Prix of Arlington, hopes the race will become a “signature event” on the calendar and a template for what street circuits might become.
How big can this one be going forward? Maybe second on the IndyCar calendar only to you-know-what.
“This is a great event, by any stretch, let alone for a first-year event,” said Dan Towers, CEO of TWG Motorsports, Sunday’s winner. “So thank you to Jerry Jones and the team that put this together. I think everybody knows they do it right.
“We need big events like this event here in Arlington, Texas.”
The partnership with the Cowboys drives much of the optimism. Say what you will about Jerry, he knows how to put on a show.
Going in, he told Penske that if he was to be associated with open-wheel’s return, it had to be “extremely high quality” for everyone from drivers to fans. Penske delivered.
“It is beyond anything I ever expected,” Jerry said.
From a personal view, there’s something about the concrete barriers of a makeshift street circuit that remind me of four brothers swapping paint in the hallway trying to be first to the bathroom. The 190 top-end speeds on the backstretch are also believed to be a Randol Mill Road record.
Also interesting to see Felix Rosenqvist of Sweden racing a car in Texas A&M livery. Seems like Texas ought to respond in kind next year.
Or at least UT-Arlington.
Besides the fact that no one got hurt or ended up in ice, the whole thing was over in a little less than two hours, which fits the 18-to-34 attention span, all right.
A win all the way around, if you ask me, even if weather once again played a factor. If it’s not broiling heat forcing officials to move up the start time, it’s gale-force winds doing the same. Always something around here. Like the deep freeze in 2011 that settled in during the area’s one-and-only Super Bowl. Might be why JerryWorld hasn’t hosted one since. Unless it’s because of the owner, a force of nature, too, come to think of it. He outdid himself this weekend. Now if we could just get him to take up racing full-time.
Race day in North Texas: See photos from Kyle Kirkwood’s victory in the inaugural Java House Grand Prix of Arlington
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