Phoenix Street Circuit

Circuit History

Phoenix came to Formula One through an ambition to revive its downtown. The idea of a street race is credited to Howard Pynn, a local businessman and developer who was asked in 1985, at the request of Mayor Terry Goddard, for ideas that might bring new life to the city centre. Over the next few years Pynn approached John Bishop of the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA), representatives of Indy car racing and finally Formula One, while Chris Pook, the founder of the Long Beach Grand Prix, produced a feasibility study that was presented to the city council in 1988.

Pook pointed Pynn towards Jack Long, the promoter of the Canadian Grand Prix, and in 1988 the two men met Bernie Ecclestone. The opening came from Detroit, which declined to fund the facility upgrades Ecclestone wanted and switched to a CART race for 1989. Phoenix inherited Detroit's early-June date, and on January 13, 1989, the city council approved an annual Grand Prix under a five-year contract.

A circuit on the city grid

The city had less than four and a half months to turn its streets into a Grand Prix circuit. Work began early in 1989, fencing off and repaving the streets and putting up temporary grandstands, pit garages and a timing tower. Under the contract the city built and paid for the track, while Ecclestone's organisation kept the promotion, the ticket revenue and the television rights, an arrangement that would shape the rest of the story.

The layout used in 1989 and 1990 measured 2.361 miles / 3.800 km, rounded to 2.36 miles in the period press, and ran anti-clockwise. The pits and start were on Jefferson Street, towards the western end of the lap, and from there the cars ran east to a right-hander onto 1st Street. A short run around the block via Madison Street and 2nd Street brought them back onto Jefferson, which curved gently east towards 5th Street. A left turn there began a loop around the Phoenix Civic Plaza, the city's convention centre: north on 5th Street, west along Monroe Street past St Mary's Basilica and back south down 3rd Street to Washington Street.

Washington provided the longest straight, about eight blocks westward past City Hall, before the cars turned north onto 3rd Avenue, west along Adams Street and south again down 5th Avenue to rejoin Washington. A left-hand hairpin between 6th and 7th Avenues took the circuit across to Jefferson, and a double-apex left-hander fed the cars back onto the start-finish straight.

It was a lap of flat streets, mostly right-angled corners and concrete walls, with a bumpy surface that gave trouble from the outset. During support-race practice on the Thursday before the first Grand Prix, a manhole cover lifted and the surface broke up at one corner, and it had to be patched overnight with quick-drying cement.

Heat and a record pole

The first Iceberg USA Grand Prix, round five of the 1989 World Championship, was held on June 4, 1989, and the early-summer date in the desert dominated the weekend. Ayrton Senna's Friday lap of 1:30.108, an average of 94.287mph, stood for pole position. It was the 34th of his career, breaking the record of 33 he had shared with Jim Clark. His McLaren team-mate Alain Prost lined up second despite crashing heavily on the Saturday morning, and Eddie Cheever, a Phoenix native and the only American in the field, qualified 17th for Arrows.

The temperature was 101°F at the start. Lotus altered its cooling at a cost of around 12% of its downforce, brake fluid boiled on the Brabhams and Maurício Gugelmin was black-flagged for topping up his brake fluid. Alessandro Nannini had already withdrawn with a neck injury from a practice crash. A proposal to shorten the race to 70 laps failed when Ken Tyrrell alone refused to sign, so it ran instead to the two-hour time limit.

Senna led by around eight seconds until a misfire set in. Prost passed him on lap 34, and Senna retired with an electrical fault 10 laps later, leaving Prost to take his first win of the season and the 36th of his career. Riccardo Patrese finished second for Williams and Cheever third, a podium for the local driver. The race was stopped after 75 laps. Only six cars took the chequered flag and nine were classified, and Christian Danner's fourth place proved to be the last points the Rial team ever scored.

The announced crowd was 31,441, well short of the organisers' hopes.

A March date and Senna versus Alesi

To escape the heat, the 1990 race moved to the season-opening slot on March 11, 1990, on an unchanged course. Cool conditions, with temperatures in the mid-60s Fahrenheit and rain threatening, produced a very different weekend and an unexpected front row. Gerhard Berger took pole for McLaren in 1:28.664, and the Italian Pierluigi Martini put his Minardi alongside on Pirelli qualifying tyres, the only front-row start in the team's history. Andrea de Cesaris was third, Jean Alesi fourth in his Tyrrell and Senna only fifth.

Alesi took the lead at the first corner and pulled out a gap of around nine seconds. Senna caught him and went by at the first corner on lap 34, only for Alesi to take the place straight back around the outside at the next turn. Senna made the pass stick a lap later and went on to win the 72-lap race by 8.685 seconds, with Thierry Boutsen third. Berger's fastest lap of 1:31.050, an average of 93.312mph, remained the race-lap record for the original layout.

The crowd was sparse, estimated at no more than 20,000. The day before, the Trans-Am series had opened its season on the circuit with a 42-lap race won by the Finnish driver Robert Lappalainen in a Roush Ford Mustang, from Chris Kneifel and Max Jones. Paul Newman finished eighth in an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

A one-sided contract

By the summer of 1990 the city was trying to renegotiate. In July the Phoenix New Times reported that Phoenix took nothing from ticket sales and could not even stage a golf tournament during race week without Ecclestone's approval. The city had built the track, but in its view the race had done little to promote Phoenix. It wanted the city promoted on the worldwide television broadcast, local television coverage, cheaper tickets and access for the local press. Councilman Alan Kennedy, the council's point man for the race, warned that the contract would not be renewed beyond its five years without concessions.

The paper contrasted the deal with Detroit's. There the city had received money from Ecclestone and shared in the ticket revenue, and its main cost had been a resurfacing job.

An arena forces a new layout

Before the third race the circuit lost part of its eastern section. Work on America West Arena began after the 1990 race on the block bounded by 1st Street, Jefferson Street and Jackson Street, closing the stretches of 2nd Street and Madison Street that had carried the corners after the first turn.

The revised layout for 1991 measured 2.312 miles / 3.721 km and still ran anti-clockwise. From the first corner the cars now ran two blocks south on 1st Street, turned east along Jackson Street on the south side of the arena site and north up 3rd Street to Madison. Madison led east to a hairpin at the far end of the circuit, which turned the cars back west along the curve of Jefferson.

The Civic Plaza loop was dropped altogether. In its place the cars left Jefferson at around 3rd Street and cut diagonally across a car park to rejoin Washington Street at about 2nd Street, through a quick left-hander that Mika Häkkinen told Motor Sport he took flat in fourth gear. From there the lap followed the original route west along Washington and around the western loop.

Senna leads every lap

The 1991 race was held on March 10, 1991, again as the season opener. Senna took pole in 1:21.434, the 53rd of his career, with Prost, now driving for Ferrari, alongside him, and Patrese, Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet and Alesi behind. Senna led every lap in the new McLaren MP4/6 and won by 16.322 seconds from Prost, with Piquet third. Once again the two-hour limit intervened, and the race was stopped after 81 of its scheduled 82 laps.

The new fast corner onto Washington Street caught out Patrese, whose gearbox jumped out of gear there, and Roberto Moreno then ran into the stranded Williams. Alesi set the fastest lap of the race in his Ferrari, 1:26.758, an average of 95.936mph. Häkkinen and Mark Blundell were among the newcomers making their World Championship debuts, and the new Jordan team contested its first Grand Prix, Bertrand Gachot being classified 10th after an engine failure while de Cesaris failed to qualify. The weather was warm but overcast, and once again the crowd was small.

Ecclestone calls time

Through the summer of 1991 the race appeared set to continue. On August 22, 1991, Ecclestone faxed the city a date of March 15, 1992. Then, on October 7, 1991, he telephoned from London to say that Formula One would not be coming back. He gave no reason, but city officials linked the decision to the return of the South African Grand Prix, and it was Kyalami that opened the 1992 season.

Ecclestone later put the problem down not so much to poor attendance as to the impossibility of placing more than 20,000 seats where spectators could see, and even then only a small part of the race. The circuit, he said, had not been designed as a race circuit, and Formula One would return only to a purpose-built facility. In truth several things worked against Phoenix: a contract that gave the city the costs without the revenue, small crowds in every year, the June heat of 1989, poor sightlines on a street grid and a more attractive option for the season opener. Chris Pook, whose study had helped bring the race to the city, put it more simply: "There was never a chance."

The United States would not host another Grand Prix until Formula One went to Indianapolis in 2000.

Plans that never ran

Open-wheel racing came close to returning downtown in 2007, when Grand Prix Arizona, a Champ Car round promoted by local businessmen Dale Jensen and Bradley Yonover, was scheduled for November 30 to December 1, 2007. It was planned for a largely different course around Chase Field and US Airways Center, as the arena was then known, and it was cancelled for lack of sponsorship on August 28, 2007.

A Formula E bid followed. In October 2023 the city council funded a feasibility study, with options including a course around the State Capitol, but the plans stalled and Phoenix is not on the 2026–27 calendar. A Formula E official observed that the old Formula One layout no longer worked, given the light rail and businesses now along its route. No Indy car ever raced on the downtown streets: Phoenix's IndyCar history was written entirely at the oval in Avondale.

The streets today

Most of the circuit survives as public streets, though the city around it has changed almost beyond recognition. America West Arena opened on June 6, 1992, and has been known as Mortgage Matchup Center since October 2025. The ballpark now called Chase Field opened in 1998, as Bank One Ballpark, on land that took in the eastern end of the 1991 layout, and the Collier Center and Bank of America Tower stand over the 1991 diagonal.

At the far western end, the hairpin block between 6th and 7th Avenues, still a car park in 1991, has been built over by an office building. The Civic Plaza has become the Phoenix Convention Center, rebuilt and expanded between 2006 and 2008, and light rail now runs along Washington and Jefferson. No part of the circuit's infrastructure is known to survive.

Jump onboard