LONG BEACH >> If the stars of Long Beach’s Grand Prix are those with enough guts to navigate street courses at ludicrous speeds, the heroes of Tuesday’s construction kickoff were those with enough brains to figure out how to hold those cars on track.

The Toyota Long Beach Grand Prix race, which draws upwards of 170,000 attendees over three days, would be impossible without the engineers whose knowledge of compression ratios, fuel chemistry and aerodynamics enables drivers to attain the maximum possible speeds.

The 1.97-mile race circuit in the city’s shoreline area requires the installation of 14 million pounds of concrete blocks to protect spectators from any hurtling racers. There’s also some four miles of fencing, 16 grandstands and seven pedestrian bridges that must be built.

The IndyCar contest set for the weekend of April 11-13 will be the event’s 40th. Comparing today’s planning work to that of 1975, Grand Prix Association of Long Beach CEO Jim Michaelian said today’s process is much smoother.

“We know what we’re doing,” he said. “The first event, we were literally making it up as we go along.”

The kind of learn-as-you-go planning that led up to the inaugural race required Michaelian and other race planners to rent the top floor of the Long Beach Towers building at 600 Ocean Blvd. to have a bird’s eye view of track construction.

“It afforded an opportunity to look down on half of the circuit,” he recalled.

The more-evolved process of beginning this year’s track began with a relatively small number of workers, who by Tuesday had already installed several dozen concrete blocks marking the race track’s path along Shoreline and had also made considerable progress building a grandstand near the crossing of Shoreline and Linden Avenue, where the track’s 10th turn will be.

The 11-turn Grand Prix circuit around the Pike at Rainbow Harbor mostly follows the asphalt of Shoreline Drive and Seaside Way.

“The beginning crew starts with 25 to 30 people. It begins to increase as we put in more assets on the ground here,” Michaelian said. “Close to race weekend, we have 4,000 people here.”

By Tuesday morning, the construction team had placed 180 of the 10,000-pound concrete blocks along the edges of the racetrack, construction supervisor Davy Carillo explained.

The blocks, suspended by thick steel cables, are put into place one at a time by a crane operator. Carillo has to make sure each block goes in the proper spot.

“What I do is, kind of make sure the crane is lifting the blocks,” he said. “I make sure we put the poles into the blocks, we stretch the cable, put the fences up.”

Carillo, 48, of La Mirada said he has worked on the track since 1995. The crew’s work begins around 6:30 a.m. when workers set up cones to keep drivers away from the job sites and usually ends around 4 p.m., or before rush-hour drivers clog the roads around the city’s shoreline and downtown.

Carillo’s job isn’t finished on Grand Prix weekend. He and other construction workers hide with forklifts at various spots along the course to move any of the blocks back into position in case they are struck by a speeding racer.

“I’ve got to work,” he said. “I’d really like to be a fan one year.”

Carillo and a relatively small number of workers were on the job when Michaelian and Mayor Bob Foster met reporters for a news conference near the construction site. The men drove pace cars for a short distance in a parking lot before their interviews, and Foster, who was behind the wheel of the 1975 Toyota Celica ST that served as the inaugural race’s pace car jokingly boasted that those assembled could hear “all four cylinders” of the vehicle after he climbed out of the driver’s seat.

He said later in an interview that he’s had a chance to see the course from the vantage point of a passenger in a much more powerful vehicle.

“I’ll tell you one thing I did learn after taking two laps in a Formula 1 two-seat car about six years ago, these guys are more athletic than most people understand,” he said.

“You have G-forces against you; it’s hard to understand how that is,” he added before marveling at the drivers’ brains being able to process the race environment while moving at speeds of some 200 mph.

Foster, who is serving his final year as mayor, may himself have a try driving a lap around the Grand Prix track this year, something he has done in the past.

The trick, however, is choosing the right car.

“If I can get my hands on a new Corvette, I would like to do that,” he said, also holding open the possibility that he might drive his 400-horsepower supercharged Cadillac XLR.

“I might take that out there,” he said.

Contact Andrew Edwards at 562-499-1305.