Exhibition Place is a publicly owned 197-acre mixed-use district on the Lake Ontario shoreline just west of downtown Toronto. Motorsport activity on the grounds dates back over a century, including automobile demonstrations during the Canadian National Exhibition from the early 1900s. From 1952 to 1966, the Exhibition Stadium grandstand hosted stock car racing on a quarter-mile paved circuit. In 1958 the venue hosted a NASCAR Cup Series race, which marked the first career start of Richard Petty.
Plans for an Indy car street race at Exhibition Place were proposed as early as the late 1970s following the 1977 Formula One Canadian Grand Prix, when Labatt sought an alternative to Mosport Park. Toronto City Council rejected the proposal by two votes; Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau moved quickly to claim the Formula One race for that city. A series of subsequent proposals eventually succeeded when Molson Breweries, through its Molstar Sports and Entertainment arm, secured CART sanctioning rights in Canada. After a short-lived inaugural event at Sanair Speedway in 1984 — unpopular due to the tight tri-oval and Rick Mears's severe qualifying crash — Molstar revived the Exhibition Place concept. City Council approved the race in July 1985 by two votes.
The first Molson Indy Toronto was won by Bobby Rahal on July 20, 1986. The event rapidly became Canada's second largest annual sporting event after the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, with three-day attendance figures routinely around 170,000. It remained part of the CART schedule through 2003, and then the Champ Car World Series from 2004 to 2007.
In the 1996 race, American driver Jeff Krosnoff was killed in a crash with four laps remaining. In the same incident, volunteer corner marshal Gary Avrin was also killed, and marshal Barbara Johnston was injured. Adrian Fernandez was declared the winner.
The race name changed in 2006 from Molson Indy Toronto to Molson Grand Prix of Toronto, partly to distance the series from the rival Indy Racing League, which had gained exclusive rights to the "Indy" name after 2002. Steelback Brewery replaced Molson as title sponsor in 2007, renaming the event the Steelback Grand Prix of Toronto.
When Champ Car and the IRL unified in February 2008, the race's future was briefly in doubt and the 2008 event was cancelled. Andretti Green Racing purchased the former race assets and confirmed the event's return for 2009. Honda Canada Inc. signed on as title sponsor, introducing the Honda Indy Toronto name. The race rejoined the now-unified IndyCar Series schedule and continued annually — with exceptions in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions — through 2025.
The 2.874 km circuit features 11 turns routed through the Exhibition Place grounds and along Lake Shore Boulevard. The track configuration remained largely stable across its history. In 2016, the layout was modified to accommodate the newly constructed Hotel X Toronto: the pit lane was relocated to the opposite side of the course, beginning at the outside of turn 9 and exiting after turn 11, which was sharpened as a result.
Michael Andretti is the all-time race winner with seven victories at the circuit across its various sanctioning eras. In 2013, the event was reconfigured as a two-race format with races on both Saturday and Sunday; Sunday's race produced what was considered the first successful standing start in unified IndyCar Series history. By 2015, the two-race format and standing starts were abandoned. The race was one of IndyCar's second-longest running street events, behind only Long Beach, and among the oldest recurring races on the schedule in terms of total events run.
In September 2025, it was announced that the event would relocate to Markham, Ontario for the 2026 season under a five-year agreement, ending 39 consecutive years of Indy car racing at Exhibition Place.