The road under your tires was an IndyCar racetrack — Detroit's Grand Prix roared around these public streets at a hundred and sixty miles an hour until the park-for-the-people won it back in twenty twenty-two.
Feel the pavement under your tires? You are driving a racetrack. This very road — Sunset Drive, here at the west end — was the start-finish straight of the Detroit Grand Prix, and the loop ahead threaded Central Avenue and The Strand into a tight, bumpy, concrete-walled circuit run flat-out on Belle Isle's own public streets. IndyCars first raced here in nineteen ninety-two, came and went over the years, and ran their last island race in twenty twenty-two; on the straightaways between these curbs the drivers touched something like a hundred and sixty miles an hour. They half-loved it and half-feared it — no room for error, a wall waiting on every mistake. Big names ran it, the kind you'd know from the Indy 500, and Roger Penske's outfit brought the race back to life after a quiet stretch. Then the Grand Prix moved back to downtown Detroit in twenty twenty-three, near where it first began, and the island streets went quiet again. Now the honest other half, told light: plenty of Detroiters were glad to see it go. The race fenced off their island for weeks each summer, chewed up the grass, and one year the crews dug out the spring daffodils to make room for the track — until the year the daffodils won and the schedule had to yield to the flowers. The park-for-the-people came out ahead in the end. So ease through this curve gentle and savor it. Today the track is all yours — no walls, no checkered flag, just the river up ahead and the whole island waiting.
