Who had the best beard at the Long Beach Grand Prix? Here's our favorites

There’s a lot more to the Grand Prix than racing. In fact, we spent all of Friday at the track and only saw a minute or two of actual racing.

Mostly, we horsed around at the Lifestyle Expo, ate our way around the circuit and people-watched. Here are some of the high points of our nonracing visit to the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach on Day One.

Best swag

There’s a lot of free stuff to be had at the Grand Prix, mostly in the Lifetyle Expo, where you usually have to jump through a hoop or two to score product. The Hustler Casino exhibit had a blackjack dealer you had to beat in order to win a beer cozy with a little pocket holding a bottle opener. We hit a 5-3 hand with a king, the dealer busted. We have a Hustler beer cozy now.

Best beard

You go to a car race, you’re going to see a beard or two.

Don Cleaver of Big Bear had the best beard on the whole circuit. Easily. It wasn’t all fancy like some of your beards. Just about a yard’s worth of chin hair.

Best tattoo

You’d think this category would be hotly contested. It wasn’t. Long Beacher Mike Wood’s dorsal side is dominated by a massive tall ship flanked by a brace of flying fish over the motto “Homeward Bound” and his suame.

We know he’s from Long Beach because it says so between his shoulder blades. Nice ink.

Best spokesmodels

Gotta go with Ashley and Kimberly for Traxxas radio-controlled cars. They treated us with dignity and respect. Didn’t yell at us like the spokesmodel for the fancy American sports car did.

Best car cave art

An original acrylic, overflowing with heroes of WWII and racing, including spitfire pilots, and driving aces Stirling Moss and Jackie Stewart. For a cool $8,700, you can hang this bad boy up above your Jowett Jupiter.

Best food

Strolling down the midway and, for that matter, most of the circuit, you’re assaulted by food booths offering turkey legs, barbecued meats, hot dogs, hamburgers and sausages. All fine race fare, don’t get us wrong, but what you’re going to want to do is waddle over to the food truck compound behind Grandstand 31. Food trucks swept all the food categories we could eat.

Best taco

In a stuing upset in a category long dominated by the Mexican variety, the Spicy Asian Taco floored your judges who, to be fair, were starving before we wolfed down these little jewels of chicken, cilantro, onions and a secret spicy sauce. They were from a food truck with a pun-ny name that we can’t put in print. Look for the truck with Pho and/or King and Awesome painted on it.

Best French fry alteative

Man, can you ever buy fries at the Grand Prix. Duck fries, lobster fries, curly fries.

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We’re giving the nod to Long Beach’s Oh My Gaga truck for its buffalo chicken tater tots. The tots were drizzled with ranch, and they were so good we went full-on milleial and snapped photos of the dish. We could use food-writer descriptors of the tots to make us look fancy, but we’ll simply go with “them tots is good.”

Best ice cream

Finally, dessert. The fine folks at Recess Ice Cream truck served us an ice cream cookie sandwich, with Kona coffee-flavored ice cream.

“Wait, what?” the milleials asked.

To which we milleially reply: “Yes. Kona. Coffee. Ice cream. Sandwich. Sooooo good.”