Detroit's motorsport history on temporary circuits predates Belle Isle. From 1982 to 1988 the city hosted Formula One on the Detroit Street Circuit near the Renaissance Center and Cobo Arena, a brutally demanding track that produced high attrition and tested brakes and gearboxes to their limits. Ayrton Senna won the F1 race three consecutive years (1986–1988). After FISA ruled the temporary pit area did not meet World Championship standards following the 1988 race, F1 departed and the event was handed to CART, which ran three further races on the downtown layout before its economics became unviable for the city.
CART relocated the Detroit Grand Prix to Belle Isle for the 1992 season, laying out a circuit through the island's parkland roads. The course provided a more self-contained and logistically practical setting than the downtown streets, and the island's scenic surroundings on the Detroit River made it distinctive among CART venues.
The race ran continuously as a CART event from 1992 to 2001. The event then lapsed — CART's contract expiration removed it from the calendar from 2002 to 2006, and the economic crisis afflicting Detroit's automotive industry kept it off the schedule again from 2009 to 2011. The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the 2020 edition.
The Belle Isle circuit operated as a street circuit with configurations that evolved over the years. Juan Pablo Montoya set the unofficial track record of 1:13.056 during qualifying for the 2000 Tenneco Automotive Grand Prix of Detroit, driving a Lola B2K/00. Michael Andretti was the most prolific pole-sitter during the CART era at the venue, claiming front-row starts in each of the Detroit CART races on the downtown circuit before the move to the island.
After the CART–IRL unification in 2008, the Grand Prix returned to Belle Isle under IndyCar sanctioning from 2012. The race became a fixture on the IndyCar calendar through 2022, often run as a doubleheader weekend. In 2013 IndyCar introduced a two-race format at the venue — one race with a standing start on Saturday, one with a rolling start on Sunday — marking the first successful standing start in unified IndyCar Series history. The two-race format was later abandoned as logistical and weather complications (the 2014 weekend had both races compressed into a single Sunday) outweighed the novelty.
Beyond open-wheel competition, Belle Isle also hosted rounds of the American Le Mans Series in 2007 and 2008, bringing GT and prototype machinery to the island circuit during the period when IndyCar was absent.
After the 2022 race, IndyCar and Detroit's promoters announced a return to the downtown street circuit beginning in 2023. The new downtown layout is substantially smaller than the original 1982–1991 circuit, featuring ten corners versus twenty-two, and focuses on Atwater Street and East Jefferson Avenue. Only two corners from the historic downtown circuit were repurposed for the modern layout. The decision to leave Belle Isle was partly driven by the higher resurfacing cost of the larger island circuit and concerns about the impact of street closures on local businesses.
Belle Isle filled a three-decade gap in Detroit's race calendar that the deteriorating downtown circuit could not sustain, and it preserved the city's place on the CART and later IndyCar calendar through periods of economic difficulty. The island setting — unusual for a motorsport venue in North America — gave the event a visual identity that distinguished it from stadium and purpose-built oval venues elsewhere on the schedule.
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