The Baltimore Grand Prix has been billed by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other civic leaders as a tremendous win for the city and its residents, with a potential $100 million economic impact on the local economy and a $6 million boost to the city’s general fund via increased parking, amusement, and hotel-tax revenue. But more: The prestige and excitement of staging an honest-to-Andretti 180 mph, open-wheel street race downtown will vault Baltimore into the big leagues of cities around the world, alongside Monaco and, well, Long Beach, Calif.

With this in mind, City Paper sought out the original dreamers of this grand plan, and tried to get a look inside Baltimore Racing Development, the corporate machine staging the ambitious “festival of speed” on Sept. 2-4. We wanted to go over the economic projections, learn something about the personalities of the founding fathers, and watch up close as earth and concrete were moved to transform Baltimore’s busiest boulevards into a world-class racecourse.

To get into the spirit of it, we even brought along a debatably interesting car and an array of video cameras, view the playlist below.

For the most part, we failed.

Here, then, is the outside scoop on the Grand Prix—everything we could learn traveling the surface of the proposed track and the periphery of its corporate and political heart.

Team Coverage Playlist

Surrounded by apartment building managers in the Tremont Grand Hotel’s capacious ballroom on North Charles Street on July 15, Lonnie Fisher calmly tells each one precisely how tenants will be able to enter and leave their parking garages during next month’s traffic-disrupting, road-closing Grand Prix races. He tells them from memory—he appears to know every garage door in the 50-block area. His interrogators nod, but they don’t smile.

Fisher is here representing Baltimore Racing Development. He was hired as BRD’s corporate outreach person because “I have a 20-year background in throwing outdoor festivals,” he says, most notable among them the annual Starscape event. “I have a lot of familiarity with permitting.”

There are 100 or more people milling about the ballroom, looking at big maps the city’s Department of Transportation has set on easels. They’ve come with questions about detours and noise, resigned to the fact that downtown will be effectively closed Labor Day weekend so that the city can make some money. This is, anyway, the theory from which the entire event has sprung.

Fisher has one bit of important info: Even on race days, Charles Street will be open to car traffic after the race cars are off the track—circa 7:30 p.m.

For his part, Fisher is a paid-up believer. “I’m all-in, I’m an all-in type of guy,” he says. “That’s why they hired me.”

But who are “they”? Who is the Grand Prix’s founding partner? “That was before my time,” says Fisher, who was hired in October of 2010 and, anyway, “the story probably isn’t that interesting.”

City Councilmember William Cole (D-11th District) sits in the passenger seat of a doubtful-looking replica of a 1950s MG, gamely recounting—for a second time, owing to the reporter’s technical incompetence with a video recording—how the Grand Prix idea first came to him.

“In February of 2008, a guy came to me,” Cole says. “He told me he wanted to bring race cars to downtown Baltimore, and I did what any sane person would do—I told him I thought it was crazy.”

It is a practiced story. Cole started out suitably skeptical, but was made a believer when officials with the Indy Racing League—the race’s sanctioning body—arrived to tell him they had already scouted a potential track: “They came back and said, ‘We think this could be a grand slam for Baltimore,’” Cole says.

All that was needed then—in 2009—was some municipal permits, about $7 million worth of roadwork, and enough cash—$15 million, Cole guesses; BRD declines to share such information—to pay for the setup and all attendant crises.

But again, these guys? Where to find them? How did it actually start?

“This guy came up with the idea and he started going around and trying to get people interested,” Cole elaborates, “and he found people.”

Asked what happened before that, Cole says, “[Former 11th District City Councilmember] Keiffer Mitchell called me and said , ‘Hey would you mind meeting with this guy? He went to Boys Latin.’”

For the past six years, Mitchell has squeezed oranges on Sunday mornings at the downtown farmers market at a stand he calls Nutin but the Juice. Mitchell, who gave up his council seat in an unsuccessful bid to unseat then Mayor Sheila Dixon in 2007, says the Grand Prix is going to be great for Baltimore, bringing “economic development” and “international tourism,” among other benefits.

Of the founders? “A group of guys who had an idea,” Mitchell, now a state delegate representing the 44th District, recounts, “about doing a Grand Prix race here in the city of Baltimore.”

The founder of Baltimore Racing Development, Steven Wehner, has been called a “Baltimore-based entrepreneur” in Sun reports about the race. But he has seldom been seen at public events regarding the race, and reportedly sent a statement to the press conference for the opening of BRD’s downtown office, rather than attending the August 2009 event in person. Two years later his LinkedIn profile shows zero connections.

> Email Edward Ericson Jr.