PORTLAND , Ore. — Portland Int’l Raceway has staged a Champ Car race since 1984, the same year the Long Beach Grand Prix joined the CART calendar. Yet while Long Beach has grown into the “crown jewel” of the current Champ Car slate, the Portland race has struggled for attendance, and its future has been debated almost every year for the last decade.
That’s a shame for a number of reasons.
First of all, PIR is a natural road course located within about five miles of Portland’s city center. It’s closer to a major urban area than any other road course, and it’s easily accessible by public transportation with a light-rail stop right at the track’s main entrance.
The track may lack elevation change, but it’s technically challenging to drive, and it produces some amazingly clean road races. Every lap of this year’s race was run without the pace car making an appearance, making for 208-consecutive laps of green-flag racing at PIR over the last two years. The 1999 race went caution-free as well, so it’s not a fluke or anomaly.
It’s also an important market for Champ Car and open-wheel racing in general.
With the demise of Champ Car’s event in Vancouver, Canada, the Portland GP is the only major open-wheel race in the Pacific Northwest — a region NASCAR is desperately trying to tap into.
The problem is — as with many other markets — Portland’s attendance has slumped dramatically since the formation of the Indy Racing League and the subsequent open-wheel split.
With IRL vs. CART/Champ Car politics dominating the news and drivers and sponsors flocking to NASCAR, it’s no wonder Portland and other markets have lost interest in open-wheel racing.
Sports fans expect luxuries these days, and in that regard, PIR is a little rough around the edges — though a “PIR Master Plan” approved in 2004 is designed to improve access and amenities for fans.
But the upgrades may be slow in coming because the facility is owned and operated by the City of Portland through its bureau of Parks and Recreation. The track is operated as an Enterprise Fund, with operating expenses and capital improvements covered by the revenues that it generates.
PIR receives no general-fund tax dollars.
Champ Car has steered the talk about Portland’s future toward recreating the event as a downtown street race. That formula has certainly worked well in some other places —Long Beach and Toronto in particular — but Champ Car has an uneven record at best in terms of the long-term stability of those events.
In fact, if Champ Car or an outsider made the same kind of investment in Portland Int’l Raceway that it would take to set up the infrastructure of a new street course, it would go a long way toward making PIR one of the finest road courses in North America.
That  might help bring attendance back to an honest 70,000 on race day rather than the laughably optimistic 70,000 that was announced as this year’s three-day total.
“Maybe it wasn’t the biggest crowd we’ve ever seen, but it was still pretty decent,” said race winner Sebastien Bourdais. “It doesn’t cost all that much to put the race together here. The race track is here. The facility is what it is.
“I think it’s as good a race as any other.”
“For sure it would be disappointing to lose this track,” added pole man and runner-up Justin Wilson.  “It’s one of the better tracks in the U.S. to race on as far as permanent road circuits. I think it’s been an important part of Champ Car’s history, and hopefully it will be a part of the series for the next number of years.”