4am ‘clown show’ to instant icon: How F1 almost ate itself whole in Vegas… and still won   

It’s 8:38pm on Thursday 16 November 2023 in Las Vegas, and Formula 1’s world is crashing down.

Carlos Sainz has just run over a water valve cover whose concrete fastening had failed, his Ferrari sucking it out of the ground with the immense downforce generated by its underside.

The heavy iron disc rips through the car, obliterating the floor, chassis and engine. The Spaniard pulls to the side of the road, lucky that the cockpit had been out of the firing line.

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The first practice session is red flagged and eventually called off, and remarkably things get only worse from there.

Second practice is delayed until the unhinged time of 2:30am to allow engineers to inspect and secure every drain cover around the 6.2-kilometre circuit.

Fans are sent home long before running resumed, however, with F1 realising too late that security staff had reached their maximum shift lengths.

After widespread criticism over an astounding lack of communication, F1 offers Thursday-only ticketholders merchandise vouchers but refuses to apologise.

The sorry saga is the subject of a class action before the US District Court of Nevada, where Liberty Media is attempting to have the case dismissed.

Formula 1 had ploughed more than $1 billion into setting up the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and suddenly it was left scrambling to salvage a weekend that had almost immediately flown off the rails.

When Thursday practice finally ended at a ludicrous 4:00am on Friday morning, the odds were stacked high against it pulling it off.

In those late-night and early-morning hours, it felt as though Formula 1’s chickens had all come home to roost, and the ever-present tension between sport and spectacle seemed sure to devour the weekend whole.

PIT TALK PODCAST: F1’s follow-up visit to its premier Las Vegas Grand Prix comes with title permutations, with Max Verstappen on the brink of sealing a fourth championship, while Ferrari is targeting big gains on McLaren at the top of the teams standings.

’99 PER CENT SHOW AND 1 PER CENT SPORTING EVENT’

Formula 1 has always flirted with the line separating sport from spectacle. With just 90 minutes every other Sunday or so to make a compelling account of itself, it can’t afford to leave its success entirely in the hands of pure competition.

In Las Vegas it unashamedly crossed deep into spectacle territory to create the most hyped event in the history of the sport.

With the amount of money it had invested in getting the race off the ground, it couldn’t afford not to turn the dial up to 11.

And from the moment teams and drivers landed in Nevada, F1 expected all shoulders to the wheel to help make the race a success.

The workload was intense, by far the busiest weekend of the year for teams and drivers between sponsor and media commitments and F1’s own jam-packed scheduling to make the most of the precious days it had command over the city.

Some even had their precisely organised Wednesday — the day before track action started — disrupted at the last minute by a call from F1 requiring them to attend a red-carpet event at a casino elsewhere in the city, disrupting the crucial final day of preparation before taking to the brand-new track.

The most public additional engagement was the star-studded ‘opening ceremony’ later that night which concluded with the drivers standing on a series of giant platforms and waving awkwardly to the crowd in the main grandstand.

It was all too much for the then freshly crowned three-time champion.

“99 per cent show and 1 per cent sporting event,” Max Verstappen declared. “I just always want to focus on the performance side of things, I don’t like all the things around it anyway.

“We are just standing up there looking like a clown.”

It might not have been just him rejecting the enforced hype, with his damning assessment coming amid reports of poor ticket sales in a season of mostly sellout grands prix.

Ticket prices had been set at exorbitantly high levels and hotel rates jacked up in some cases by more than 600 per cent to make the most of F1’s arrival, but with seats and rooms still vacant in the weeks leading up to — and in fact on the first day of — the event, prices were slashed to bargain-basement levels.

An entire grandstand was even ripped out of the track late in the piece, with ticketholders comfortably accommodated elsewhere around the circuit.

All this simmering in the background was brought to boil by the frayed nerves and worn patience by the event’s bizarre timing, with qualifying set for midnight Saturday morning and the race scheduled for 10:00pm later that day.

It was just about all the sport could handle at the end of a long, gruelling season that Red Bull Racing’s domination had long ago sucked the oxygen from.

Sainz’s blown-up Ferrari looked like the final straw that would condemn Las Vegas for good.

A GREAT PLACE TO RACE

The assumption at the beginning of Las Vegas weekend had been that Formula 1 couldn’t lose. A soporific race wouldn’t matter in the context of the sport bending Sin City to its will for three days in a way no event before it had ever managed to achieve.

But its catastrophic Thursday — and early Friday — changed the equation. Having bet everything on creating a big spectacle, it now had to put all its chips on the on-track action saving the weekend from headlines of unsafe racing conditions and bumbling mismanagement.

The Las Vegas Strip Circuit’s layout was chosen from 31 alternatives cooked up by Formula 1 as the most exciting to race, but even then it had been given little credit in the days leading up to the race, its simplistic layout dominated by a long run down the Las Vegas Boulevard and a loop around the luminescent Sphere.

“It was so-so on the sim,” Lewis Hamilton, otherwise a booster of the race, said beforehand. “It’s definitely not Silverstone.”

But what it lacked in character it made up for in quirk.

The race’s unusual late-night timing meant the ambient temperature sunk well below 10°C at lights out, way out of the regular operating window of the cars and Pirelli’s tyres.

The low-energy layout meant grip was always in short supply, and the slow, tight corners were good at generating mistakes.

The long DRS-enabled back straight down the Strip leading to a slow chicane also promised plentiful overtaking.

Things started hopefully. For only the seventh time in the 21-race season a driver not from Red Bull Racing took pole, with Charles Leclerc and Sainz locking out the front row for Ferrari, though the Spaniard dropped to 12th with an engine penalty stemming from his practice calamity, promoting Verstappen to the front row.

Hamilton and Sergio Pérez were eliminated in Q2, while both McLaren drivers, having enjoyed a rapid late-season ascendancy, were eliminated in Q1.

A mixed grid featuring fast drivers out of position always bodes well, but the race far exceeded expectations.

Amid the most straightforward season in the sport’s history, Las Vegas facilitated 82 passes, including a genuine battle for victory between Leclerc and Verstappen.

“It was one of the best races,” Hamilton said after dropping to 18th and recovering to seventh. “So many people, all the media, everyone has been so negative about this race and about the show and all that.

“I was [like], ‘Just let it be and let’s see how it goes’. Great race. This is like Baku but better.”

Even Verstappen was converted.

“I always expected it to be a good race,” he said.

“I think low [degradation] on the hard tyre, a lot of slipstreaming of course with the long straights, and probably a bit of a headwind maybe on the straight as well.

“When you’re following you don’t really lose that much time, because they are that slow, the corners.

“And then there’s a lot of drafting around the track … so that made the racing much better.

“Today was fun. That’s the only thing I want to say about it; I think today was fun. I hope everyone enjoyed it.”

THE FINANCIAL GAMBLE PAYS OFF

The sigh of relief from F1 head office could’ve altered weather patterns.

Despite the frenetic build-up, the controversy of its hyped media campaign and the chaos of the first day of track action, it had pulled of the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

But it was more than just vindication. It was a statement from a sport full of confidence and ambition at the zenith of its new era. The giant F1 logo atop the pit building stands as a permanent monument to its conquest.

Of course Formula 1 was always likely to try to sell the race this way, but even Las Vegas authorities — no strangers to big events — found themselves impressed by the grand prix’s impact.

“November in Las Vegas is typically the eighth-best month of the year,” said Steve Hill, president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, per Autosport.

“November last year was the second-best month in our history.

“We knew it would be big, but the attention [exceeded expectations], and frankly, F1 did a fantastic job of building to that race.

“It was two or three times more marketing value than we would have expected going in, and we would have been happy with a third of what we got.

“We were going to be thrilled with what we expected, but what we got was eye-opening.

“It’s such a big event that it makes a real difference even in Vegas.

Hill’s glowing assessment is backed up by a report from Las Vegas’s local government describing the grand prix as “the largest sporting event with a global audience” in the history of the city.

The Clark County Commission also said it was the most lucrative event ever held for local authorities, reporting an economic impact of US$1.5 billion (A$2.3 billion) — more than the US$1 billion brought in by this year’s Super Bowl, played just south of the circuit.

“The economic impact was the biggest we’ve ever had. The fiscal impact, the taxes generated by the race, were the biggest thing that’s ever happened in Nevada. That matters.

“What we also got, which is something that is so valuable, [was] eyeballs across the globe on Las Vegas,” added Hill.

“It was a multiple of what we typically get in a given year, all year, just on that race that weekend.

“That matters too, and the celebrity aspect is a part of the draw, the visual is a part of the draw. Everything that happens on the Sphere goes viral, that was a really big part of the race.

“The attraction F1 brings to the city, we just can’t replicate. So it matters a lot to us.”

THE DIFFICULT SECOND ACT

Of course Formula 1 can’t count on the first-time factor generating the same level of interest this year. F1 cars racing down the Strip won’t be a novelty forever.

The Las Vegas Grand Prix must make the difficult transition from one-off spectacle to an event integral to the world championship.

It’s something of which Hill is acutely aware as he contemplates the second running of the race.

“I talked about it being the biggest weekend we’ve ever had … we’re not going to get back to that on a regular basis and I don’t think anybody should expect that,” he said candidly.

“It’s successful enough that it’s clearly going to be successful, so what we’re all doing is trying to find that balance point with the sustainability of the race in Las Vegas so that everybody involved is thrilled to have that.

“That’s really the definition, ultimately, of success. We’re not probably going to be able to compete with year one numbers again and don’t need to in order for it to be successful. If the numbers were half that, it would still be a game-changer.”

The good news is that there’s plenty of scope for improvement.

F1 was on a steep learning curve last year as a first-time race organiser. If it got the balance wrong, it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Lessons were bountiful and valuable, from big-picture matters like better managing time — qualifying has been brought forward from midnight to 10:00pm, as just one example — to even smaller problems like properly lighting the expansive paddock, which was shrouded in darkness last year.

But more important than improved logistics will be how F1 turns Las Vegas from a high-speed marketing exercise into an established grand prix.

Not every race has to be an event for the hardcore Formula 1 fan, like Silverstone or Spa-Francorchamps. In a calendar of 24 races, there must be room for the spectacular, the quirky and the image-driven, not just for F1’s identity but simply to break the monotony.

In this regard Las Vegas really does set a new standard.

But now Formula 1 must build a sporting legacy that transcends the spectacle, and on this it can ask for advice from last year’s chief antagonist.

“Of course a kind of show element is important,” Verstappen said after singing Viva Las Vegas from the cockpit to celebrate what would be the 18th of his 19 wins for the season. “But I like emotion.

“When I was a little kid, it was the emotion of the sport that I fell in love with, and not the show of the sport around it.

“When you go to Spa, Monza — these kinds of places have a lot of emotion and passion, and seeing the fans there is incredible.

“Of course I understand that fans need maybe something to do as well around the track, but I think it’s more important that you actually make them understand what we do as a sport, because most of them just come to have a party, drink, see a DJ play or a performance act.

“I can do that all over the world. I can go to Ibiza and get completely shitfaced and have a good time.

“And they become fan of what? They want to see maybe their favourite artists and have a few drinks with their mates and then go out and have a crazy night out, but they don’t actually understand what we’re doing or what we’re putting on the line to perform.

“If you would actually invest more time into the actual sport, what we’re actually trying to achieve here … if the sport would put more focus onto these kinds of things and also explain more what the team is doing throughout the season, what they are achieving, what they’re working for — these kinds of things I find way more important to look at than just having all these random shows all over the place.

“It’s not what I’m very passionate about, and I like passion and emotion with these kinds of places.”

The ever-present tension between sport and spectacle remains.

Formula 1 set out with a mission to win over Las Vegas, and despite its shambolic first day on track last year, it achieved its objective.

But if it’s to be an enduring victory, its next goal must be to have the Las Vegas Grand Prix win over Formula 1 fans.

That aim is still pending.