Like Music to Their Ears

On the freeway transition from the 405 to the 710, headed to Long Beach, if you open the car window you can smell it: the mix of oil and fuel, fumes to some, perfume to most of the several hundred thousand people who will drive, bike, skateboard or walk to the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach this weekend.

On Ocean Boulevard, at least five blocks from the race course, the pavement transfers a shuddering, thundering, rumbling sense to your feet. The power of the machines is coursing through the streets and moves from the toes through the stomach to the head.

Four blocks away and the ear drums begin to quiver. Buy the ear plugs. If you’re looking for advice on what to do, how to attend the Grand Prix, item No.1: Buy the ear plugs. The plugs cost $1 outside the course, $2 after you’ve gone through the gate.

Two blocks away and all sense of self is gone. The race cars, brightly colored green ones, yellow ones, red ones, have taken over. They are on the road course, warming up, taking practice laps and it is a dilemma: Put in the ear plugs and remove yourself from the essence of the weekend or throw caution to the wind, take out the plugs and to heck with hearing for the next week or two.

“What?” asks Bruce Flanders, voice of the Grand Prix as he calls himself, track announcer and unabashed fan of the pageantry of the event. Flanders says “what?” a lot. He doesn’t wear ear plugs, hasn’t since he started calling the races here in 1978 when the track ran Formula One. Flanders, 56, is part of the racing. He holds a three-day conversation with the fans. He talks, they scream answers across the track. He tells a joke, they laugh. “Or,” Flanders says, “they throw things. Then I know the joke wasn’t funny.”

The Grand Prix of Long Beach is like that. Short on formality but full of tradition.

Going to the Yard House, standing in line and waiting for a green wrist band giving you permission to enter and drink margaritas and scream over the rumble of the engines and the magnified voice of Flanders, is a tradition. If your timing is perfect, you make it to the Yard House on Saturday after the celebrity race is finished and before the CART drivers, the headliners, take to the track for qualifying.

The weekend is about being able to buy a cigar at the Cuban Cigar Store, then taking three steps to the right and buying a Brazilian bikini, in the pattern of the black-and-white checkered flag, at the RaceGirl tent.

This is not the Masters, boys and girls. This is not the place to try to find out who’s leading the Masters. This is where a properly proportioned woman wears a tight white shirt with the word “Dangerous” spelled in silver sparkles across her chest. “I ran out of stuff to spell ‘curves,’” the woman giggles, and what stuff she ran out of, who can be sure?

The weekend isn’t only about the Hooters Girls wandering through the paddock, which is where all the racers and their crews have their work areas, and causing mechanics to drop their tools to have a photo taken with the girls.

Women also are at work in these shiny-clean trailers. Nadine Haupt, 30, has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue and a master’s degree in the same field from Oakland University. She is the track support engineer for Ford-Cosworth. She is working with rookie driver Mario Dominguez, who is in his second CART race.

Haupt, who has bright red hair and freckles, walks past the Hooters Girls and the women offering their chests for drivers to autograph and explains how she hooks up a laptop and can tell in a minute whether Dominguez’s engine is offering enough power and whether the car is behaving as it should over the changing pavement--from concrete to asphalt and back to concrete.

Haupt realized her love of the internal combustion engine and of what the engine could do to a car when she had a Chrysler internship and worked on the development of the Viper.

Now she drives a black Porsche 911 from her home in Venice to the office in Torrance. Haupt knows cars.

Joe Anderson knows what the Grand Prix of Long Beach is about. Anderson, a 39-year-old aerospace engineer from Redondo Beach, is attending his 15th consecutive Grand Prix. He gets a block of rooms at the Super 8 at the traffic circle and every year more and more of his friends come along for the ride and for the party.

“It’s the carnival atmosphere,” Anderson says. “It’s the eye candy, it’s the party at the Yard House.

“But more than that, it’s these incredible athletes. It is so physically and mentally challenging driving these cars with these engines for two hours. I’ve gotten so much into the racing that I do some myself.”

Anderson has a Toyota Celica, a Viper, a Shelby GCHS and a Ford Bronco. He doesn’t race the Bronco and he has to go now. For a beer, for a look at the women, for a sniff of the perfume, Chanel mixed with fuel, for the shudder of the engine and the parties to come.

Diane Pucin can be reached at [email protected].