They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but F1 hopes to spectacularly break that rule with the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix this weekend (Nov 17-19).
It’s been more than 40 years since the sport tried to make it big in Sin City. In 1981 and 1982, at the peak of F1 fascination in the United States, when the sport set up shop at a temporary circuit sketched out in the expansive car park of the Caesars Palace hotel and casino.
Suffice to say the flat, featureless venue failed to capture the imagination. The event’s collapse precipitated F1’s long decline in the United States, culminating in many years without a Stateside presence.
But in recent years the sport has enjoyed a resurrection in the USA. The grand prix in Austin, Texas, got the ball rolling in 2012, but it took a takeover of by American business Liberty Media to recognise the nation’s untapped potential as friendly territory.
Drive to Survive has played a major role, the Netflix series opening the door to the world of F1 for a generation of new fans in America for whom the Eurocentric sport has been obscured across the Atlantic.
Combined with the nailbiting 2021 season, Austin went from being a race that attracted a small hardcore group of fans to reliably selling out in hours and setting records for weekend attendance figures.
Off the back of the bulge F1 launched the Miami Grand Prix, a race with a distinct identity that proved F1 could speak the language of the United States.
Las Vegas, however, is F1’s biggest fish.
It’s not just about the race, which snakes for more than 6 kilometres around some of the city’s most recognisable landmarks.
It’s about the statement of shutting down one of the world’s best-known cities and moulding it in the sport’s image.
Every television shot of the neon-lit Vegas skyline will be watermarked with the F1 logo in an enormous flexing of sporting and commercial muscle.
You need go back only years, not decades, to find a time when the concept of shutting down Las Vegas Boulevard, the famous Strip, would have been a laughable proposition.
Yet for months the likes of the Venetian, the Mirage volcano, the Bellagio fountain and several other landmarks have been turned into construction zones to prepare for a race F1 is promising to be one of the year’s most memorable sporting events.
And F1 is so sure it’s onto a winner it’s putting its hands in its own pocket to pay for it.
It paid US$250 million (B8.8 billion) for land for the garages, and so far it’s spent $435mn on building a four-storey pit building, setting up a paddock area and on turning the cracked and broken roads into an F1-grade street circuit. Many more millions will have been spent by the time lights go out on Saturday night.
And it will be Saturday night, not Sunday - and it will be late, late night. The Las Vegas Grand Prix won’t get underway until 10pm local time (1pm Sunday, Phuket time). Qualifying on Friday night won’t get started until an even wilder midnight (3pm Saturday, Phuket time).
The rationale is twofold: Las Vegas is a 24-hour city with a 24-hour event calendar - or so it will advertise - and the race is late enough that Europe won’t have to set its alarm too early to wake up and watch it.
But the late starting hour will have the unintended side-effect of getting qualifying and the race underway in frigid conditions. Temperatures in the desert in November plunge below 10°C at night, well below regular operating conditions for F1 cars and in particular their tyres.
It’s the kind of curve ball that could turn a race around an uninspiring track layout into an unpredictable thriller, with teams and drivers needing to work well outside their usual practices to get heat into the rubber to access their usual performance levels.
It could be particularly exciting for those waiting for Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing’s dominance to break, with cold weather and smooth tracks the RB19’s only real weaknesses.
McLaren and Ferrari fans might also rejoice over a potential glimpse at a victory.
Whatever the on-track result, that the race takes place at all will be a triumph for F1 and its mission to rekindle its long-lost love with the United States.