Last year’s race was plagued by complaining residents and businesses over traffic, city obstructions, and a race track that damaged Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari when a manhole came loose, requiring a very expensive repair.
Nonetheless, the actual race was quite exciting, and screaming F1 race cars created the look and feel that Las Vegas, and F1 owner Liberty Media, hoped to create.
With a more tightly contested championship among drivers and teams at the top this year, the anticipation is growing.
Liberty Media’s (FWONK) gamble on the US, and in particular Vegas, where Liberty has spent a whopping $600 million to develop for a 10-year race deal, appears worth taking.
While experts predict this year’s race will pull in slightly less than the $500 million or so in revenue for Formula 1 and the $1.5 billion in Las Vegas economic impact achieved in last year’s race, the contest and its weeklong festivities will still be a boon for all those involved.
The 300,000 or so attendees expected for the race tend to spend nearly four times as much as regular Vegas visitors, the city said.
And that’s good for F1, the city, and, of course, the teams that actually do the racing.
“It’ll be bigger and better than last year,” Williams F1 team principal James Vowles said to Yahoo Finance.
“There was some teething issues; that’s fairly normal when you’re trying to put together the scale of operation that Formula 1 is, and you have to say that the three US races, but especially Las Vegas, it is just this jewel in the crown of what we have across the whole calendar, and it could be that we have a championship decided this weekend. So it’s … sort of excitement that brings it all together,” Vowles added.
BWT Alpine F1 team principal Oliver Oakes believes Liberty Media is the main driver behind F1’s recent success in Vegas and the sport overall in the US, which really emerged during the pandemic and following the release of the Netflix F1 series, “Drive to Survive.”
“[Liberty Media has] done an amazing sort of job bringing the sport to everybody. I think everyone talks about ‘Drive to Survive’ and the effect that’s had, but actually I think it goes much … wider than that,” Oakes told Yahoo Finance.
“You can see now every event in F1 is a three- or four-day weekend, whether that’s sprint races thrown in, whether that’s concerts on event, it’s fantastic. And they’ve been the ones driving this growth.”
