SeeCalifornia.com

It’s that time of year when birds chirp, flowers bloom and car engines zoom around the streets of Long Beach for the Toyota Grand Prix, taking place April 11-13, 2014.  The event launches on Friday with celebrity races, then moves into a weekend of highly-charged action filled with professional car racing in an incredible ocean setting.

In addition to the motorized vehicles, there’s another street race where peddlers must keep pace at the Amgen Tour of California happening this year from May 11 to 18, 2014. Cities along its route include Folsom, San Jose, Monterey, Cambria, Pismo Beach, Santa Barbara, Santa Clarita, Pasadena and Thousand Oaks. The world’s top cyclists participate in a multi-staged event in which they ride from one stage to the next, then rest overnight. The next day the begin their next leg of the journey.

To top off the street racing theme, Memorial Weekend May 24-26, 2014, brings the Kinetic Grand Championship, a multi-staged event starting in Arcata and going to Eureka, Lolita and Ferndale.   In this race contestants build their own vehicles capable of covering territory on streets, but also surviving a trek through water for a leg of the journey.