Any of several competitive international road races for sports cars of specific engine size over an exacting, usually risky course.

Grand Prix motor racing

Grand Prix motor racing has its roots in organized automobile racing that began in France as far back as 1894. It quickly evolved from a simple road race from one town to the next, to endurance tests for car and driver. Innovation and the drive of competition soon saw speeds exceeding 100 mph, but because the races were held on open roads there were frequent accidents with the resulting fatalities of both drivers and spectators.
Grand Prix motor racing eventually evolved into formula racing, and Formula One can be seen as its direct decendant. Each race of the Formula One World Championships are still called a grand prix.

Organized racing

A seminal event in racing came in 1900 when James Gordon Bennett, Jr. (1841–1918), the owner of the New York Herald newspaper and the International Herald Tribune in Paris, established the Gordon Bennett Cup in Europe, an annual race that attracted international competitors. Each country was allowed to enter up to three cars. Following Bennett's lead, in the United States, the wealthy William Kissam Vanderbilt II launched the Vanderbilt Cup at Long Island, New York in 1904. Influenced by these racing events, Louis Chevrolet (1878–1941), a Swiss-born employee of a French motor vehicle manufacturer would move to the United States. Beginning in 1910, he would become a major figure in American racing and the designer of a car for General Motors that bears his name.

The first Grands Prix

In 1906, the first (and at that time only) race carrying the name Grand Prix was organized by the Automobile Club de France (ACF), and run over two days in June. The Le Mans based circuit used was roughly triangular in shape, each lap covering 105 km (65 miles). Six laps were to be run each day, and each lap took about an hour using the relatively primitive cars of the day. From the 32 entries representing 12 different automobile manufacturers, the Hungarian-born Ferenc Szisz (1873–1944) won the 1260 km race in a Renault.