CART: Champ cars roar into Windy City with Target Grand Prix
19 August 1999
DETROIT - A sports spectacle that has lay dormant in Chicago for 80 years will be revitalized this week in roaring fashion.Champ Cars, which graced the Windy City for the last time in 1918, return this week to the Chicago suburb of Cicero as the sleek 850-horsepower machines converge on the new Chicago Motor Speedway 1-mile oval for Sunday's 225-lap Target Grand Prix Presented by Shell (ABC-TV, 4 p.m. ET, one-hour delay), Round 15 of the 20-race FedEx Championship Series season.
It marks the return of Champ Car racing, which enjoyed a brief but productive four-year run in Chicago in the early 1900s as part of the AAA Championship. All 12 events during that span were run on board tracks, which were oval layouts constructed of wooden boards, and some of the winners are legends in Champ Car racing.
The inaugural Chicago event - a 500-mile race - was held June 26, 1915 and won by Dario Resta, who drove a Peugeot at an average speed of 97.5 miles per hour. Resta also won the second event held that year in Chicago, a 100-mile race that was run August 7. Resta continued his dominance of the Chicago event as he swept the two events in 1916, a 300-miler in June and a 250-mile race in October, en route to winning the AAA championship.
Chicago played a vital role in the 1917 AAA Championship as it played host to six events on the 21-race schedule. Earl Cooper, that year's AAA champ, won the city's June opener while Ralph DePalma and Louis Chevrolet emerged victorious in the September doubleheader. The highlight was a tripleheader in October when Tom Alley, Ralph Mulford and Pete Henderson claimed wins.
DePalma ushered out the Champ Car era in Chicago with flair in 1918 by sweeping the July doubleheader. His winning speed in the first race - 110.70 miles per hour in a Packard - was the fastest in Champ Car's 10-year history to that point.
Eight decades later, Chicagoland fans will be treated to high-tech Champ Cars that are expected to reach speeds of nearly 200 miles per hour at the 1-mile oval while enjoying the comforts of the completely refurbished Sportsman's Park.
The short oval has been constructed within the confines of Sportsman's Park horse track, making it one of only two facilities in the country to host both types of racing. The 67,000-seat facility, completed in just over a year, will feature 42 luxury sky suites, 40 indoor chalets, 4,000 club-level seats and a row of pit-row suites. The track itself should lend itself to thrilling wheel-to-wheel racing due to the generous width, which measures 70 feet in the straights and 80 feet in the turns.
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