When F1 cracked the US with soul: the glamorous and sleazy Long Beach GP

F1
Matt Bishop profile pic
March 24, 2026

A stunning victory from Clay Regazzoni, in a Ferrari that oozed style, on a sun-baked street circuit: Formula 1's first visit to Long Beach in 1976 was extraordinary — and still significant, says Matt Bishop

Group of F1 cars head downhill in 1976 Long Beach Grand Prix

The Californian sun and Long Beach cityscape gave F1 a cinematic backdrop in '76

LAT

Matt Bishop profile pic
March 24, 2026

This coming Saturday, March 28, will mark the 50-year anniversary of Formula 1’s discovery of Long Beach. Regular readers of this column will know that I like anniversaries, particularly round-numbered ones, although I concede that they can sometimes feel contrived, as though we are imposing retrospective significance on events that, at the time, seemed merely part of the onward churn of history. But the 1976 United States Grand Prix West at Long Beach is a lily that requires no such gilding. It was, in ways both obvious and subtle, a race that mattered then and has continued to matter since. Indeed, it was a weekend on which spectacle, sport, and serendipity conspired to produce something not only enjoyable but also important.

The grand prix itself was won, and won magnificently, by Clay Regazzoni, whose performance that sunlit Californian afternoon deserves to be remembered not merely as a victory but as a masterclass. He started the race from pole position, he drove its fastest lap, he led it all the way, he won it by more than 40 seconds, and he thereby realised that perfect F1 holy grail, a grand chelem, the 26th scored in F1 (the total is now 70). It was the finest performance of Regazzoni’s long, mercurial, and slightly chequered career, and therefore the best of his five F1 grand prix wins.

Sun-baked concrete barriers were decked out in logos brasher than had been seen in F1 ever before

He had been quickest in the Saturday morning qualifying session, his error-free 1min 23.823sec benchmark making him the only driver to beat the 84sec barrier; then in the afternoon he produced a prodigiously impressive pole lap, shaving the barriers everywhere and making no mistakes anywhere, to lower that mark to 1min 23.099sec. No-one else got close to that, and his team-mate Niki Lauda was unable to get within half a second of it.

The car that Regazzoni and Lauda were driving that weekend — for the last time as it happens — was the glorious Ferrari 312T, in its high-airbox configuration, a machine that, for me, occupies a place in the uppermost pantheon of F1 design. It was chunky — almost pugnacious in its stance — but it was elegant nonetheless, and Mauro Forghieri had drawn it with a visual coherence that spoke of purpose rather than ornamentation. Nonetheless, the result was beauty. Long Beach 1976 would be the final grand prix of F1’s high-airbox era, and that of the 312T — a white turret rising proudly above rosso corsa bodywork like a periscope, topped with a neat rendering of the Italian tricolore — lent it an architectural and stylistic chutzpah that modern F1 cars, constrained as they are by ever-tightening regulations, cannot hope to emulate.

Clay Regazzoni corners on tight Long Beach F1 circuit in Ferrari 312T

F1 design at its finest? Regazzoni heads to a crushing victory at Long Beach

Bernard Cahier/Getty Images

Then there was the engine, also designed by Forghieri: a naturally aspirated 3.0-litre flat-12, whose shrieking timbre echoed off the hotels and apartment blocks of Long Beach with operatic ferocity. It did not merely make a noise; it sang, it keened, and it proclaimed its presence in a way that stirred the spirit. Even now, half a century on, one can close one’s eyes and almost hear it, a mechanical aria carried on the Pacific breeze.

Long Beach itself, making its F1 debut that weekend, proved to be an inspired choice of venue. Set beside a shimmering expanse of the world’s largest ocean — the venerable RMS Queen Mary anchored majestically in the harbour, its three oblique funnels punctuating the horizon beside the long Shoreline Drive not-quite-straight — it offered a backdrop of cinematic splendour. As a vista, Long Beach outclassed the bucolic charm of Watkins Glen and even shaded the picturesque beauty of European circuits steeped in decades of tradition. Here in California was something altogether different, a fusion of sport and spectacle that felt distinctly and unapologetically American. The boulevards on which the race would run were lined with palm trees, fig bushes, and jacarandas; the circuit was delineated by sun-baked concrete barriers decked out in logos brasher and more numerous than had been seen in F1 ever before; and the interplay of light and shadow between the diners, dive bars, and strip clubs all combined to create an atmosphere that was at once glamorous and sleazy.

James Hunt with Alan Jones and John Watson in front of adult cinema at 1976 F1 Long Beach Grand Prix

James Hunt (left) finds a distraction at the trackside cinema, standing alongside Alan Jones and Harald Ertl

David Phipps/Sutton Images

As a street circuit, Long Beach immediately established itself as one of the finest F1 had ever known. It was demanding without being capricious, and, although it was challenging, it was no more dangerous than anywhere else. Its corners required precision, its straights rewarded bravery, and its margins for error were, as ever on street circuits, unforgivingly slim. Yet it flowed; the drivers liked it; it invited them to commit themselves; and, unlike Monaco, it offered them opportunities to overtake one another. In an era when street racing was still something of a novelty at the highest level of the sport — Monte-Carlo apart — Long Beach set a standard that many subsequent venues have aspired to match but few have equalled.

The broader context of the race adds another layer of historical significance. The 1976 season marked the first time that the wild and wonderful country that we could then still confidently call the land of the free would host two F1 grands prix in a single year, for the United States Grand Prix East would be run later that season at Watkins Glen. Until then, only one other nation had ever been accorded the same honour: Italy, in 1957, when F1 grands prix were held at both Monza and Pescara. That the USA should join that exclusive club was emblematic of F1’s growing global ambitions and of its recognition that the American market, stimulated and elevated by its appetite for spectacle and scale, offered fertile ground for expansion. Half a century later Liberty Media has fully realised those ambitions — and then some.

If Regazzoni’s triumph and Long Beach’s debut provided the sporting and scenic centrepieces of the weekend, there was another element – arguably even more extraordinary – that elevated the event into the realm of the truly unforgettable. I am referring to the support act that brought together a constellation of superstars spanning multiple generations of grand prix racing. To describe it as a historic race is accurate but insufficient. It was a living and moving museum; a rolling tapestry of motor sport history.

From the archive

Imagine, if you will, a grid comprising René Dreyfus, then a sprightly 70; Juan Manuel Fangio, 64; Maurice Trintignant, 58; Carroll Shelby, 53; Jack Brabham, 49; Phil Hill, 48; Stirling Moss, 46; Richie Ginther, 45; Innes Ireland, 45; Dan Gurney, 44; and Denny Hulme, 39. They were not merely participants, although they were exactly that. No, some of them were also true motor sport titans, and many of them were, are, and will always be figures central to F1’s ever-evolving chronicle. Better still, they were flailing away at the oversized steering wheels of cars that were themselves pivotal artefacts of different eras: pre-war leviathans from the 1920s and 1930s, boxy and upright; and missile-shaped monsters from the 1950s.

The sight of those men – some (such as Dreyfus) long retired, others (Hulme for example) having only recently hung up their F1 helmets – circulating together on the streets of Long Beach must have been truly magical. I wish so much that it hurts that I had been there to witness it, for it must have felt as though time had folded in on itself, allowing past and present to coexist, if only briefly. For the record, the race was won by Gurney in a 1959 BRM P25; from Brabham, second, in a 1959 Cooper T51, the only rear-engined car in the field; and Fangio, third, in a 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 that he drifted through even the faster turns with all the finesse that had furnished his legend 20 years before. But the result is incidental. What mattered was the sight, the sound, the smell, and the sense of continuity: the reminder that F1 is not merely a sequence of races but a lineage, a tradition, and a story that is constantly being written even as it honours its past.

Queen Mary liner in background with Ferrari 312T on track.

A snapshot of style, as Regazzoni passes the RMS Queen Mary

Klemantaski Collection/Getty Images

Finally, there was the curious, almost dramaturgical subplot involving Mario Andretti. At Long Beach in 1976 he was driving for the Vel’s Parnelli Jones F1 team, a patriotic American outfit whose ambitions had been lofty but whose shelf life was, as we were about to find out, now lilliputian. His race was, by any objective measure, unremarkable: he qualified 15th then he ran in the midfield for 15 laps before retiring with a water leak. Yet what happened afterwards would prove to be of far greater consequence.

The team’s owners, Vel Miletich and Parnelli Jones, had decided that they would shut up shop as far as their F1 operation was concerned after Long Beach 1976, but they had not told Andretti. He found out when the legendary editor of National Speed Sport News, Chris Economaki, tipped him the wink just before the race. At that moment one might reasonably have wondered whether Mario’s F1 career might be drawing to a close. He was, after all, achieving enormous success in IndyCar – or USAC (United States Auto Club) as it was then called — and, although he had won the 1971 South African Grand Prix for Ferrari, his F1 career had been very much a stop-start affair. Indeed, even though Long Beach was only the third grand prix of the 1976 F1 season, Vel’s Parnelli Jones was already the second team for which Andretti had driven in F1 that year. The other, for which he had raced in the 1976 season-opener at Interlagos, had been Lotus. It had been an ignominious outing for him, ending in a lap-six collision with his team-mate Ronnie Peterson.

From the archive

Two months later, on the Monday morning after the 1976 United States Grand Prix West, in the breakfast hall of the Queensway Bay Hilton in Long Beach, Andretti bumped into Colin Chapman, the Lotus boss. The two men struck up a conversation, despite their recent disengagement, bonded anew by their shared frustration, for Andretti had just lost his F1 drive and Lotus had just endured one of its worst ever weekends: Bob Evans had failed to qualify and Gunnar Nilsson had qualified 20th and last, after which humiliation on race day he had suffered a lap-one suspension failure that had catapulted him into the Shoreline Drive barrier at 175mph (282km/h); miraculously, although he had been both shaken and stirred, he was uninjured. Chapman’s and Andretti’s impromptu confab ended with a handshake — and, by the time the F1 circus had reconvened for the next grand prix, the Spanish at Jarama, Andretti was back behind the wheel of a Lotus.

The rest, as they say, is history; but it bears repeating nonetheless, if only for the sheer improbability of its genesis. Mario would go on to win a grand prix for Lotus later that 1976 season, in Japan, in a downpour, then he would score 10 further grand prix victories for Lotus over the next two years — four in 1977 and six in 1978 — culminating in the 1978 F1 drivers’ world championship. It is one of the sport’s great trajectories, a narrative arc that transforms a chance meeting in a Long Beach hotel on a Monday morning in March 1976 into a triumphant celebration on a Monza podium on a Sunday afternoon in September 1978.

Mario Andretti with Ronnie Peterson and Colin Chapman after the Lotus team-mates crashed in the 1976 Brazilian Grand Prix

An uncomfortable-looking Mario Andretti stands between Colin Chapman and Ronnie Peterson after clashing with his Lotus team-mate in Brazil

LAT

So, when one considers the 1976 United States Grand Prix West in its entirety, it becomes clear that its significance extends far beyond the confines of a single race. It introduced to F1 a circuit that would become an enduring favourite; it showcased an always charismatic but sometimes erratic driver racing impeccably a stunning red car that perfectly epitomised its era; it brought together legends of the past in a manner that honoured their achievements while delighting all who saw them in action together for that one last time; and by sheer happenstance it set in motion a chain of events that would shape the careers of two of our sport’s greatest figures.

Fifty years on, it is tempting to view such a weekend through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia, and to romanticise it as of a simpler and purer time; but that would be to do it a disservice. Long Beach 1976 is not significant because it was quaint, charming, or representative of a bygone age; no, it is significant because it was dynamic, innovative, and forward-looking. It demonstrated that F1 could adapt, could expand, and could embrace new ideas without losing sight of its core identity. That is a tricky nut to crack, as Liberty Media is now finding out, despite its conspicuous and laudable success in making 21st-century F1 one of the world’s most effective sporting money-spinners. So, in an age when F1 finds itself grappling with questions of direction, relevance, and authenticity, the example of Long Beach 1976 serves as a reminder that a sport’s evolution need not come at the expense of its soul. It is possible to be both new and true, to innovate without alienating, and to entertain without trivialising. Doing that requires ambition, vision, wisdom, perspective, a sense of history, and a willingness to take risks. But, as that sun-drenched weekend on the Californian coast half a century ago so vividly illustrated, and illustrates still, the rewards can be extraordinary.

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