Chris Pook

For all I knew, they were going to roll out the red carpet for Chris Pook. The steakhouse in downtown Long Beach, California, is now called 555 East, but it used to be Lombardo’s, where Pook was beyond a regular. He once had an office just through the back door, and would use the restaurant as a hub in the early days of planning and executing the first Long Beach Grand Prix, which took place in 1975. For a chaotic period of Pook’s life, he basically lived here.

Pook took meeting after painstaking meeting at Lombardo’s, navigating the various trip mines in front of someone foolish enough to attempt putting on a Formula 1 race in an American city. Sitting at the restaurant in 1973, Pook scribbled a draft of the course — speeding along the ocean, with the retired Queen Mary ocean liner glistening on the other side of the harbor, cutting in just outside the restaurant’s doors on Linden Ave. — on one of the bar’s paper napkins.

At that time, Long Beach — a working-class oil town about an hour south of Los Angeles — was barely on the map. But when I was down there to meet Pook, the scene in front of me was a pleasantly humming beach town. Sunny and 75, with a salty breeze. Young people cruised by on skateboards. Businessmen threw ties over their shoulders to eat their lunch. Pook helped build this world.

“They don’t know me from Adam around here,” Pook told me as we settled into a booth, after I asked if he was still VIP at 555 East. Once known as a bulldog of the racing world — ceaseless, intense, and not without a few enemies — Pook has reached his golden years. At 83, he shuffles a bit, and lately has been fighting a cough he just can’t seem to shake. The man Mario Andretti called “the ultimate visionary when it came to street racing in America” no longer has an active role in the Long Beach Grand Prix, which stands as the longest running major street race in America, and it looks like it’ll stay that way. But even after sixty years of living at the beach, retirement doesn’t suit him.

Pook, whose own account of his life sounds ripped from a Dickens novel, has been all business since he was a kid. You can’t really hear the English accent anymore, but he was born in Glastonbury, of reasonably good means. Pook’s father was an engineer and an inventor, who also opened up a small theater — “I probably got the entrepreneurial spirit from him,” Pook said — and as a young man Chris promoted his first event when he was about nine: a dog show, with all of the neighborhood pets competing for prizes. Pook covered expenses by charging an entry fee.

Coming of age in post–World War II England, Pook joined the sea of young people fascinated with auto racing. Abandoned airfields were turned into race tracks, and the line between fan and racer was vague. “You’d go to a race meet,” Pook remembered, “and many of the competitors would drive their car there and stick a number on the side and race it.” Pook had a brief foray as an amateur rally car driver, but decided he’d rather go into business.

“There was no opportunity,” Pook said of England in that era. “You couldn’t make any money.” And there was this lingering mystique of the Americans after the war. The country winked from across the ocean, like a beckoning siren. “As a kid you’re impressionable, and those thoughts stay,” he said. “I remember talking to a G.I. who came from Arkansas, and I thought Arkansas was the greatest place in the world.”

Pook didn’t end up in Arkansas, but Long Beach might have been just as random. He was fleeing the very un-British weather that first greeted him in New York during the summer, and soon followed a lead for work that brought him to Southern California. Not long after that he started a Hollywood tour business, and then an airfare ticketing agency, which he operated out of the office in the building by Lombardo’s. He didn’t want the business of people trying to figure out which island of Hawaii to go to, instead focusing on big clients, like the Oakland A’s. “I wanted to do volume,” he said.

In the early 1970s, Long Beach was in a bad way. A new mega-mall decimated mom-and-pop shops, and nearby Disneyland had annihilated the local amusement park. Offshore oil rigs were pumping so hard that the foundation of the city was jeopardized, leading to the nickname “The Sinking City.” And sailors from the naval base became the dominant capitalistic force, leading to a swirling sea of bars, porno theaters, and prostitution. At one point, in 1975, a ceremonial funeral was held. “We declared downtown dead,” a city manager remembered in the ’90s.

It was in this Long Beach that Chris Pook had his idea. The city, in an attempt to buck the downward trend, was investing in a convention center, and, in an ‘aha’ moment, Pook realized he had connections to city employees through his travel agency he could tap. “I was sitting listening to the Indy 500,” he said, “and all of a sudden a bunch of color clicked on.”

Pook saw in front of him a Formula 1 race speeding through the streets of Long Beach. There was a scenic oceanside area to stage it in, and a new tourism initiative to push it through local government. “My reasoning was that if Monte Carlo could make it work,” Pook said, “why can’t Long Beach make it work?”

Pook’s life wouldn’t get any less hectic once the racers got involved either. Indy 500 winner Bobby Unser, who was scheduled to drive a promotional demonstration run in an F5000 car around the new course, arrived at the event in handcuffs, according to Kirby’s Pook biography. Unser had been pulled over for speeding, and then subsequently arrested for having an unlicensed firearm; some pleas on behalf of the event eventually got him cleared.

“That was the lifestyle,” Pook said. “Here today, gone tomorrow. It’s much safer today. These guys were sitting in the frickin’ race car made out of tube metal, with one gas tank over their legs behind the dashboard, and another gas tank under their butts under the seat. I mean, they’re like bombs.”

On race day, the main event played itself out as a war of savage attrition. Brian Redman, the then 38-year-old English driver for Haas-Hall Racing, had won the Sports Car Club of America’s F5000 championship in 1974, and was defending his title. After practice the night before the race, Redman had the feeling that something wasn’t right with the differential of his car — a Lola T‐332C — and told Jim Hall, who had the part replaced.

The next day, during the first leg of the race, Redman was cruising in fourth — behind Mario Andretti, Tony Bries, and Al Unser — and “reasonably happy,” as he told me, when I caught him on the phone. “At about the tenth lap, the differential broke again,” he remembered, groaning. “Now I don’t have any limited slip. So to try and control wheel spin, I had to do it with my foot, like they did in those days. There was no traction control, stability control, or anything that they have today.”

Redman believes this mechanical error actually helped him, because he couldn’t give the car full power, and thus had to race conservatively. Soon, Andretti passed by in his peripheral vision, on the side of the track, having fallen victim to a driveline error. Bries’ car suffered the same fate, and Unser struck a wall, leaving Redman to blast through the finish line with the whole pack behind him. “It was a really lucky win,” Redman said, laughing. “But, of course, in those days, to finish first, you first have to finish.”

It was a small miracle that the 1975 Long Beach Grand Prix happened at all. But the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile — which now had a proof of concept and a promoter determined to make it smoother next year — was convinced: Pook, who at one point had to borrow money against his house to keep cash flowing, had pulled it off, and in 1976, the first Formula 1 race on the West Coast took place. Clay Regazzoni won it that year, but in time, he would also be associated with one of the worst moments in Long Beach racing history, when a crash in 1980 paralyzed him from the waist down.

Pook kept the Formula 1 race going until 1984, when the Long Beach Grand Prix switched to CART — whose cars were similar to Formula 1, but heavier and cheaper — in the face of advancing costs. (These days, it’s an IndyCar race.) Eventually, Pook became CEO of CART in 2002, and the LBGP was taken over by Jim Michaelian, one of the race’s original employees.

Pook’s story is a miraculous chapter in American racing, but it didn’t come without some chop in the waters. A 1994 story in the Los Angeles Times cited “former employees and associates” who noted Pook’s “abrasiveness and his penchant for ruthlessly ‘stepping over bodies’ in his headlong rush for success.” When I asked Pook about that line, he made no apologies for how he ran a business.

“I am a pretty tough disciplinarian,” he said. “I mean, if you work for me, you’re gonna do what you say you do, and you’re gonna do it on time. And in the event business, you can’t be late. There’s no tomorrow in the event business.”

It was a good time sitting in a booth and hearing Pook tell stories, though there were moments when his blustery account of his life gave me some pause. And I knew I wasn’t the first journalist struck by the feeling. There was another detail in that same 1994 L.A. Times article that I’d wanted to better understand.

The follow-up I’d sent wasn’t meant to be antagonistic. One’s educational record is tangential, at most, to one’s ability to launch a Formula 1 race. And yet, the claim — or the persistent error, in Pook’s framing — seemed to say something about the way myths can both serve us and reveal us. As Pete Biro, his former public relations director, put it in that 1994 L.A Times article when asked about Pook’s backstory: “Remember, he’s a salesman.”

However credulous you want to be about it, Pook certainly spins a compelling yarn. Maybe a little bit of gamesmanship in the barstool department is a part of being a successful race impresario — particularly if you had to start your Grand Prix career from a travel agency office. When I asked Pook’s biographer, Gordon Kirby, whether he thought Pook fit the mold of a typical race promoter of this era, he didn’t hesitate: “I would say he fits the definition to a tee,” Kirby said. “He can tell a great story. And that’s what you need to do to be a racing promoter.”

A few years ago, Pook made a public push to bring Formula 1 back to the Long Beach Grand Prix. Facing off with his old colleague, Jim Michaelian, Pook took a last stand on behalf of his race, making the case for abandoning IndyCar. And he came up short. “F1 won’t come back,” Pook said, a little glum, when I asked if he was still trying to make it happen. “F1 is done now here.” The mighty Pook had thrown in the towel.

“It’s too bad, in my estimation,” said Kirby, “that [Pook is] no longer involved in racing. Because he is a great promoter, salesman, and spokesman for the sport.”