Las Vegas Was Primed to Fail. So Why Didn’t It?
F1’s $500 million investment paid off thanks to pure racing
Formula 1 touched down on the Vegas Strip earlier last week with the promise of putting on an unforgettable show. The days that followed won’t be leaving anyone’s memory anytime soon.
Until the lights went out on Saturday evening and the racing commenced, the focus of the Las Vegas Grand Prix veered off-track as the pinnacle of Hollywood’s who’s who lined team garages, happy couples (including former F1 driver Jacque Villeneuve) tied the knot in a pop-up trackside chapel and drivers’ schedules were stretched thin as they hopped from nightclub bartending shifts to Elvis photoshoots.
Zlatan Ibrahimović, Paris Hilton, Shawn White, Shaquille O'Neal, Rhianna, A$AP Rocky and Gordon Ramsey were just a few in the sea of celebrities who dotted the paddock club.
Everything about the lead-up to the main event seemed to confirm fans’ fears: F1 is turning into more spectacle than sport.
But F1 proved, in Vegas, you can have it all.
Come Saturday, the noise off the track reduced to a hum, muffled by the engines of 20 elite racing cars.
The wing-to-wing action began in the first corner of lap one when Max Verstappen (Red Bull) drove Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) off the track.
The incident came after three parade cars broke down during the opening festivities, spilling oil on the left side of the track. The slick surface caused Verstappen to slide Leclerc’s Ferrari outside of the white lines in a move that was reminiscent of the Red Bull driver’s aggressive style in previous years.
Although Verstappen’s subsequent five-second penalty didn’t slow him down, Perez and Leclerc took turns leading the race — a rare yet refreshing shift from Verstappen’s 951-lap lead over the 2023 season. The Dutch driver took home the trophy after 50 laps and a mid-race tap from Mercedes’ George Russell, but Leclerc’s Driver of the Day status illustrated a fierce battle between the two drivers for the top podium step. In a last-lap leap, Leclerc overtook Perez to prevent a Red Bull one-two.
The debut, dusty track was a gem for overtaking, even in the most unexpected of places. Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes) stunned as he swooped around the outside of AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda on lap eight.
“I’m grateful that the race was so good, there was so much overtaking — like Baku but better,” Hamilton said in a post-race interview with SkySports. “ I wasn’t expecting the track to be so great. There were lots of overtaking opportunities.”
Tire strategy snatched the spotlight this weekend as track temperatures dropped to levels never seen before in the sport. While tire degradation due to hot surfaces is an everyday headache for teams to address, graining — micro-tears on the tire surface leading to slow lap times and poor performance — caused many drivers to miss out on points.
Oscar Piastri barely scraped into the point threshold. The McLaren racing driver wrestled his way up the leaderboard to fourth as the race neared the final minutes after starting from 18th on the grid. A poorly timed pit stop strategy left the Australian rookie at the mercy of a mandatory second stop for fresh tires, plummeting his orange car to tenth.
Piastri, who has wowed this season with a sprint race win and two race-day podium finishes, was the star of overtakes but couldn’t quite manage a podium after dropping down the grid with minutes left.
Despite the double Red Bull podium, the race result was anything but routine. Verstappen joins Alan Jones and Michele Alboreto — past winners at the 1981 and 1982 Caesars Palace Grand Prix — in the history books as an F1 Las Vegas race winner.
The race, however, didn’t necessarily scrub away the chaos, or resentment, following F1’s entry into an entertainment era.
The series already faced skepticism in the months ahead of the Cirque du Soleil production. Average ticket prices were four times that of the cheapest races on the calendar — Hungary, Austria and Imola — and nearly 50% higher than the Miami Grand Prix; a race receiving its own bank-breaking criticism.
Prices dropped nearly 60% just days before on-track action began, signaling to outsiders that the demand may not have been as high as expected.
Around every turn, fuel was only added to the vexed masses’ torches. On Thursday, the first free practice prematurely ended just nine minutes in after Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari tore a manhole cover from the street circuit. Sainz received a much-debated 10-place grid penalty for replacing parts after the incident. The organizers worked to reinforce the track’s other drain covers, pushing the second free practice into the early hours of the morning. The rescheduling carved into F1’s 4:00 a.m. curfew and interrupted local residents’ commutes.
But Toto Wolff, team principal of Mercedes-AMG Petronas, wasn’t convinced the practice session was worth the upset.
“We have a free practice we are not doing, and no one is going to talk about it tomorrow. It is completely ridiculous that you are speaking about a fucking drain cover that’s been undone… Nobody watches that [free practice one] in European time anyway,” Wolff said in a press conference. “How can you even dare try to talk bad about an event that sets the new standards to everything… Give credit to the people that have set up this grand prix, that have made this sport much bigger than it ever was.”
The real contention wasn’t the drain cover or even the lengthy commute times. Instead, fans whose time on track was cut short spoke out.
Attendees who had paid hundreds of dollars to watch the practice session were kicked out of the stadium seats with a $200 voucher for the official Formula 1 merchandise store.
“If I were a fan, I would tear the whole place down,” Verstappen said in response.
Spectators may not have torn the arena down, but they did attempt to undo F1 in court.
In a class-action lawsuit that was filed by Dimopoulos Law Firm and JK Legal & Consulting against the event and Liberty Media, fans demanded a minimum of $30,000 in damages after they were forced to leave the grandstands, according to court documents.
F1 is no stranger to lawsuits regarding canceled races. In 2005, fans sued the FIA, F1 and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for refusing to refund tickets after tire issues led seven teams to withdraw from the U.S. Grand Prix. In a series of reasons cited by the district court that dismissed the case, the judge ruled that ticket contracts allowed fans entry into the event but did not specify anything about viewing the race itself. As the current case unravels, F1 may lean on similar arguments.
Free practice was just one of many complaints.
In the city that never sleeps, drivers, engineers and commentators didn’t either. The night race and schedule changes following the free practice one debacle left American viewers confused at the midnight qualifying and 2:30 a.m. second free practice starting times on home soil.
Las Vegas residents also bashed F1 for the grandstands blocking the Bellagio Fountains and the construction creating traffic jams. Some went as far as saying they hoped the event would bankrupt F1.
Although residents on the flip-side acknowledged that tourism dollars and street repaving will aid the county, large-scale sporting events have a track record of polishing the reputation of a host city at the cost of local people. Historically, Olympic host cities have scrubbed clean their image at an expense by straining resources and forcibly removing houseless populations ahead of the main event.
“We can’t be a circus that shows up that’s all glitz and glamour and [local] people are affected negatively by it,” Hamilton said ahead of the Grand Prix.
Sky-high entry fees, timing and sponsorship prioritization dominated the conversation around the event. As Vox put it, F1 “severely overestimated the Venn diagram of who loves to watch racing and who can afford a laughably decadent experience.”
“There’s many events now that are just incredibly expensive and fans, real fans that really love the sport, can’t even afford to get to the races and actually watch them,” Leclerc said in a pre-race interview.
Fans weren’t the only ones unimpressed with the publicity grab that was the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Verstappen was the most outspoken of all 20 drivers with his discontent.
First, he deemed the event “99% show and 1% sporting event.” Next, he slammed comparisons to other extravagant races on the calendar, like the Monaco Grand Prix.
“Monaco is Champions League,” Verstappen said. “This is National League.”
The “Hunger Games”-style opening ceremony had the World Champion complaining that the drivers looked like “clowns” and, finally, he simply said the event was “not really my thing… Some people like a show, I don’t like it at all.”
Las Vegas may look like a tipping point for F1 as the third U.S. race seemed to be a culmination of years’ worth of placing production value above race product. However, the sport has shown its cards and isn’t backing out now — especially with a 10-year contract and a $500 million investment.
Joe Pompliano’s Substack,
, eloquently explained why the sport won’t be throwing Las Vegas in the bin just because of a lawsuit and a disgruntled fanbase.You see, Formula 1 is traditionally an asset-light business. They don’t own the teams, the cars, or even the racetracks. Instead, countries worldwide pay Formula 1 between $20 million to $55 million annually to host races. These countries then serve as race promoters, selling tickets, sponsorships, and expensive hospitality packages.
This has historically been a great business model for F1 — you limit your downside by simply collecting $50M+ hosting fees and signing lucrative broadcasting agreements.
But while it has been lucrative over the years, it also limits F1’s financial upside.
This is why, for the first time ever, Liberty Media and Formula 1 decided to serve as the promoters for their own race in Las Vegas. And it’s also why the Las Vegas GP won’t be leaving the calendar anytime soon: because F1 won’t let it leave the calendar.
Think about it this way: Liberty Media has already invested over $500 million of its own money on this race, including buying a 39-acre piece of land for $240 million last year to build a permanent, four-story, 300,000-square-foot paddock building.
Furthermore, even with 10,000 tickets still unsold, Liberty Media and F1 are going to make a killing on this event. The cheapest ticket on race day ($1,000+) is still more expensive than any of the other 20+ races on the calendar, and several people have told me that Miami’s ownership group makes more money off ticket sales for the Miami Grand Prix (3 day-event) than they do all of NFL season (8-9 home games each year).
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, too. There will be events, parties, and concerts all week long. Netflix hosted its first-ever live sports event — The Netflix Cup — at the Wynn on Tuesday, and the most popular hotels have a 95%+ occupancy rate, equating to millions in revenue.
Also, another thing to remember is that cities spend billions of dollars in taxpayer money to build new NFL stadiums based on the hope that they will eventually be awarded a Super Bowl. But this year’s Las Vegas Grand Prix is projected to bring a $1.7 billion economic impact to Las Vegas, which is roughly 2-3x more than what the city expects for this year’s Super Bowl.
That economic impact is also why the Clark County Commission (aka Las Vegas) has already agreed to extend Formula 1’s use of the Las Vegas Strip through 2032.
F1 gambled big on the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and the organization will head back to England with the whole lot.
“It’s going to become a fixture, and I think an important fixture for the sport,” Wolff said.
“I think for all those who were so negative about the weekend, saying it was all about the show blah blah blah, I think Vegas proved them wrong,” Hamilton echoed.
Even Verstappen had a change of heart as he held onto the first-place trophy.
“I think it created quite a good amount of racing here, so it was a lot of fun,” Verstappen said. “I hope everyone enjoyed it a bit, already excited to come back here next year!”
It’s ironic, and a bit poetic, that a Grand Prix expected, and almost desired, to fail because of a lack of focus on racecraft went down as one of the best races of the season.
It was excessive. It was bright. It was over the top. But it was also good racing.