At just 1.7 miles long, the Detroit Grand Prix IndyCar Circuit is the shortest in the series. One of the few true street courses still on the open-wheel calendar, it’s also one of the newest—kind of, anyway. Downtown played host to the series back in the late 1980s and early ’90s (before it was even called IndyCar, in fact) prior to its move a couple miles up Jefferson Avenue to Belle Isle. IndyCar just wrapped its third race there since its relocation, and while its return to downtown has been a shot in the arm for some, not everybody is thrilled to be racing on city streets again.
Pato O’Ward didn’t mince words after his disappointing performance earlier this month: “I hate this place,” he told pit lane reporters. “It sucks.”
He’s not alone. Drivers have lamented that Detroit’s street course is bumpy and unforgiving, common complaints when it comes to street circuits. Despite recent infrastructure pushes in the state of Michigan, there will always be room for improvement in road surface quality simply due to Detroit’s decades-long maintenance backlog. But is the situation really that bad, and if so, can anything realistically be done to improve it?
O’Ward counts himself among those who would like to see the Grand Prix return to Belle Isle, which hosted the race for decades and offers a self-contained venue with fast, flowing corners and better driver sight lines, but its location far outside of Detroit’s downtown commercial district puts it at odds with the objectives of local business boosters.
“You get to really appreciate what an IndyCar can do at Belle Isle, and here you’re just Mickey-Mousing around the whole time,” he said.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never seen the Belle Isle circuit from the point of view of an open-wheel race car, but on paper, the old park course doesn’t offer any meaningful advantages in terms of physical track width. In many cases, the right-of-ways are actually narrower than they are in downtown. Parts of the Jefferson Avenue straight are 10-15 feet wider than the old Belle Isle front straight, for example. So why does O’Ward remember it being so much less hostile? To answer that, we need to put down the paper and go outside—or at least to Google Earth.
Above is a driver’s perspective of each course’s longest true straightaway. Jefferson Avenue in downtown might be wider in real life, but the perspective mutes that considerably. Even without the temporary walls erected on the curbing, the buildings and trees lining the street make the new course seem tighter. Throw in the barriers and catch fencing, and that compounds quickly. These shots also make the park’s road surface look far better than that found in downtown, but keep in mind these images weren’t captured at the same time. The pic below is current.
Above is the same perspective, but from a pace vehicle that drove the course prior to this year’s race. A tricky street course can be tons of fun for spectators who have the opportunity to savor slow corners and a tightly bunched field, but as dramatic as this can all seem on the ground, the lack of room for safe passing makes the racing itself less compelling. Once foul weather enters the mix, a street course can transform a bona-fide race into little more than a very expensive parade.
As for widening the course? Detroit Grand Prix CEO Bud Denker says the course designers have already laid claim to as much space as they can and that the trackside walls are already right on top of the street curbing. There’s simply no more elbow room left.
But if they can’t make it wider, can they at least make it longer?
Physically, there are multiple reasons why the Grand Prix course is as short as it is. To extend the course west would either bring the end of the front straight closer to Huntington Place, eliminating much-needed runoff space, or force the course under the conference center, where race traffic would either need to be shunted through a narrow exit lane onto the continuation of Jefferson Ave (bad) or directed through the I-75 interchange with the Lodge Freeway—meaning both would need to be closed to traffic (worse).
To the east, the issue is less physical and more logistical, Denker says. The first opportunity for the course to jog north beyond the existing turn at Rivard would be at Riopelle, which would divert the course north alongside a recently completed townhome development. Sprawling northward from Jefferson is the city’s famed Lafayette Park residential area. Neither is the sort of neighborhood that wants IndyCars screaming through it, even for just one weekend out of the year.
Without relocating it entirely, the most plausible expansion for the Detroit Grand Prix would take the course on a detour deeper into downtown as it loops back on itself from the east. Once it crosses I-375, the course is free to snake through city streets without fear of choking major arteries, plus it maintains most of the existing front straight, diminishing the impact on top speed. Hey, we all wanna go fast, right?
A route similar to this would not only come close to doubling the track’s length (from 1.7 to 2.9 miles), but it would loop in several major downtown landmarks, coming within a block of Campus Martius Park and the Monroe roe Street Midway. Sadly, including Woodward in the fun is essentially a non-starter. In short, the Q-Line streetcar runs all the way to its terminus, and nobody wants another Baltimore.
That said, there could still be logistical headaches aplenty. Not only would this make parking more of a challenge (many of the best race-accessible garages are located somewhere along this route), but several businesses would likely take issue with the potential disruption to foot and automobile traffic alike. As badass as it would be to see IndyCars screaming through the Greektown Casino’s valet lane in a Monaco-esque display of uncorked internal combustion, I imagine the safety stewards would have something to say about the arrangement.
Sadly, any serious discussion of a course expansion will likely have to wait for at least a few years while the city works through ongoing road improvement projects, including a major streetscape overhaul in Greektown that will keep streets closed to vehicle traffic through at least part of 2026. The series has signed on in Detroit through at least 2028, and we can expect it to look fairly similar for the duration of that contract. But with the RenCen‘s days potentially numbered and multiple downtown projects vying for attention, the next generation of the Detroit Grand Prix may end up being shaped more by politics than practical necessity.
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