Even wearing earplugs, with hands clapped over my ears, the jet-engine sound of the Indy cars pierced my nerves on Sunday, as I sat in the front row of the grandstand at the Baltimore Grand Prix.

And yet a fellow racing newbie sitting beside me wearing similar earplugs, Robert Noble, was utterly unperturbed and, in fact, thrilled by the skull-splitting whine of these 175-mile-per-hour road-rockets careening down Pratt St.

“OH. MY. GOD. Can you BELIEVE this!” Noble bubbled, pointing with fresh delight at every car, each time one passed. “This is fantastic!”

Noble, a Baltimore financial consultant, stayed to the end of the 75th lap, but I had been driven away by the sound after 10 minutes – despite my delight at the spectacle of thousands of people flooding the streets of downtown Baltimore for something other than an earthquake evacuation or an Orioles loss.

Would folks like Noble or me (or the hard-core racing fans who spent $895 for VIP tickets) return to this event? How did it go over with neighbors?

Those questions seemed much easier to answer the morning-after than the biggies: what’s the true cost of this event to taxpayers, and was it worth the money and gridlock? (There were so many city and state police and other government workers in evidence through the weekend.) Those will take some time and reporting.

Meanwhile, here’s a report card based on a weekend of prowling the paddock among the pit crews, peering down from an office tower, patrolling the neighborhoods and hanging out in the grandstands among the margarita-swillers, the functional equivalent of the Preakness infield.

SPECTACLE AND BRANDING: B plus

The grandstands appeared to be full on Sunday and Pratt and Light streets were teeming.

Exact crowd size is already in dispute. (City police estimated the crowds at 15,000 on Friday and 40,000 on Saturday. Race organizers were saying: 150,000 to 160,000 over the three days.) At any rate, organizers delivered the event, as ordered: really fast cars that were loud, cool-looking and just dangerous enough. (Check out the dramatic video of Tony Kanaan’s airborne car Sunday morning scraping over the top and right fender of Helio Castrovenes car.)

City marketers got the photo and television beauty shots they wanted, showing race cars in the foreground, blue water and white sails in the background.

But for people actually attending the race, those simultaneous Inner Harbor/race car views were rare. (Photographers had to shoot them from buildings and helicopters.) For street-level spectators in the cheapest seats, they were impossible. Folks there had to peer through metal fencing and over cement barriers at the roofs of race cars whizzing by.

“I think that’s half the fun of this – the noise!” said Tim Scheeren, 57, who lives near Pittsburgh and was staying with his daughter and son-in-law, who live in Baltimore. “But if I do come again, though, I will get a grandstand seat so I can see better.”

Spectators were treated over the weekend to other views – up-close sightings, for instance, of stars like GoDaddy-sponsored race-babe Danica Patrick and hunky series leader Dario Franchitti. (He’s from Scotland, but of Italian descent.) That doesn’t happen so often at dedicated race tracks.

In the end, no one was hurt, there were no “flash robs” and the race produced a telegenic winner with a catchy name – Will Power.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS: C minus

I encountered a good many sour residents from the nearby neighborhoods over the weekend. Ellyn Smith, 39, who lives with her partner in Otterbein, said they were “really surprised” by the noise level inside their rowhouse.

“It was truly headache-inducing on Saturday,” Smith said. “We walked to the Inner Harbor today to try and get into the spirit of the thing, but it’s hard to get past the fact that you cannot sit in your own house without earplugs.”

Smith, like many we spoke to, complained about what she said was nightmarish traffic on Thursday and Friday and problems residents had getting through closed-off streets to their homes. “People were arguing with the cops, who weren’t letting them through, this system with special passes didn’t work,” she said. “It was not good.”

Others decided to make the best of it, including about 100 people craning for a free peek from the end of the Turn 3 hairpin, including a man who brought a stepladder from home and picnickers who spread a blanket and were eating Cheezits.

BUSINESS BENEFIT: D plus

Artist Tom Gregory explained that, as vice president of the Federal Hill Neighborhood Association, he has to “play it right down the middle” on the subject of the Grand Prix. “As much controversy as this thing has generated,” he said, “I’ve got to say, it looked really good on TV.”

Still, Gregory said his sense from talking to merchants and having lived in the city for 30 years is that “this is not going to be a big benefit to the city.”

“Everyone in Federal Hill is so sick of it, except for a few 20-somethings getting drunk at the mega-bars,” Gregory said. (He was nearby the race Sunday with his brother and other family members at the Inner Harbor, enjoying the water fountain and some ice cream.)

“A lot of people are pissed,” he said, “that promises weren’t kept, by [Baltimore City Councilman William H.] Cole and by others to include them.”

Count Barry Werner, vice president of the Federal Hill Business Association, among the disappointed. Like Gregory, Werner tries to see the positive side of the Prix. “It has a lot of potential,” he said. “This is the first year, there’s bound to be some bumps.”

But bookings, Werner said, were “much less than we expected” for Scarborough Fair, the B&B he co-owns in Federal Hill just a few blocks from Turn 3 on the race course. “If anyone should be sold-out you would think it would be me.”

Werner said organizers should have done a better job of marketing the event to people beyond the local DC, Baltimore, Pennsylvania crowd “that can just drive home, instead of stay in a hotel.”( According to the Baltimore Business Journal, hotel bookings during the race weekend were disappointing across the city.)

Werner said there were promises made to direct the Grand Prix crowd into nearby neighborhoods, via events, web links and signage, but none of that happened.

“The maps they use say it all – they show the race course and the viewing areas and it’s like the rest of the city doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s like when you go to Vegas and you can’t find your way out. They design it that way on purpose.”

For some restaurants, the event was a wash. “We had about the same number as usual, just a different crowd,” said Ray Jones, the bartender at Regi’s American Bistro on Light St. “The locals stayed away and we had more out-of-towners.”

Beth Hawks, owner of Zelda Zen in Federal Hill, puts it much more strongly. “It killed the neighborhoods,” she said. “I went around on a motorcycle with my boyfriend Saturday and we were in Fells Point, Little Italy and Harbor East. Restaurants were dead.” In Federal Hill, she said, “a lot of merchants I talked to had zero-dollar days.”

Other reports of the event hurting area restaurants rolled in today from WBAL-TV and The Baltimore Examiner, which heard from restaurants that Labor Day weekend business was definitely not “all that.”
Nick’s Fish House told The Baltimore Sun that it had the worst Labor Day weekend ever.

GRADE FROM AVERAGE SPECTATOR: B plus

“I think it’s great, I think it’s the best thing economically to happen to the city in the last 20 years,” said Rogers Bond, 74, a Baltimore social worker who came to see the race with a co-worker and his two grandchildren. Bond, who used to do some drag racing himself with a Chevy Nova, said “we’ll see in the next four years” if the event “produces” for the city.

Bond was waiting in one of the long lines to get into the race, as was another spectator Greg Gentle, who said he lives “right across the line in Pennsylvania. “Once you get rid of the hiccups, like these long lines, this will be great,” Gentle said.

An Alabama native, Gentle described himself as a NASCAR-turned-Indy fan who is “very interested” in racing. He said he parked in Lutherville, took the Light Rail and is a frequent visitor to the city via mass transit. “I’m not afraid of Baltimore like some people are,” said Gentle, who works at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

“I know there are just some places you don’t go, like North Avenue.”

Tim Scheeren was another Grand Prix spectator from Pennsylvania who liked the ease of getting in to Baltimore without having to spend much.

He and his family, who come from Pittsburgh, were staying with his daughter and son-in-law in town and had driven in on Sunday with ease. “We got a place to park for $3 a day!” he said, crediting his son-in-law with the coup.

Others meanwhile, like Jason Januszak, were performance car buffs coming in to town not just for the race but to bond with fellow members of their tribe.

“I have met so many other BMW guys, I am having a blast,” Januszak said, as he checked out a Lamborghini on display and sipped champagne in the VIP Balcony Club, not far from the cordoned-off area set aside for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s group and another for the Baltimore Development Corporation.

GRADE FROM SERIOUS RACE FAN: B

“The racing was good and the professional racing staff was particularly good, and very efficient,” said Walter Suman, an experienced racing enthusiast from Seattle who has attended many Indy and Formula One races. The tight urban course was exciting, he said, but, as some drivers had remarked, needs more turns to provide passing opportunities.

Another glaring problem, he said, was that “access to video screens showing starts and standings was non-existent.” It’s impossible to know what’s going on without these screens, standard features of other courses. Some screens were available in the pricier viewing areas, such as the south-facing deck in the Convention Center, but there were none for most grandstand viewers.

One other issue Suman flagged was the “poor crowd movement … way too many bottlenecks and dead-ends” for ticket-holders trying to move through the race area.

This was true – the walkway over Light St. was gridlocked on Saturday. The line to get in through the Light St. Pavilion was long and slow.

Suman also faulted the food offerings and questioned the choice of vendors with exhibits in the midway. “Waterproofing vendors? Replacement window vendors? Do people really come for this event to see that?”

His overall take on the race? “For a first year event, you’ve got to hand it to them, they pulled it off.”

KID-FRIENDLINESS: C

Parents with strollers struggled – grandstands and stairs made it difficult to get around. (Wheelchair-users, how did you make out?) A shocking number of people – including infants and toddlers – were without ear protection amid 118 decibels.

Older kids seemed to be having fun watching the race, but there were more than a few melt-downs with little ones. This parent, writing in Baltimore Magazine, found the race very unsuitable for kids and thought the Family Fun Zone, not to put too fine a point on it, “sucked.”

“The RACE Foundation’s ‘giant wheel,’ which seemed like such a big deal in a very vague way on the website, turned out mostly to offer discounts on insurance and kitchen flooring,” Evan Serpick wrote. “Fun, right kids?”