Las Vegas: Beautiful as a truck, too bad the engine stalled

Only those who do nothing never make a mistake. As such, we can salute the colossal effort made by Liberty Media and its teams to organize a Grand Prix in the streets of Las Vegas (United States). By investing half a billion dollars out of his own pocket to become the promoter of the event in Sin City, the American group has clearly taken risks in the hope of bringing about a new economic model.

If the work to establish the Las Vegas Strip Circuit has transformed the city of Nevada into a hellish construction site for local residents and workers, the end result is quite spectacular. Visually at least.

Whatever the pilots thought, the launch ceremony on Wednesday (November 15) was a success. Given their annual emoluments, these gentlemen can be asked to greet the crowd for 30 seconds.

Then, the view of Formula 1 launched at full speed on the arteries of the city of sin, the famous Strip in the lead, has something quite hypnotic. Afterwards, the route itself has a false air of Baku (Azerbaijan) or Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), with endless periods of full load interspersed with ultra-slow sections.

Not the height of happiness and technique, but enough to potentially lead to a chaotic race on Sunday, which seems to be the only objective of the discipline's pundits when it comes to adding a new track to the calendar.

What a shame then that F1 got its feet wet in the first minutes of action on the track!

Makeshift repairs after the accident which led to the interruption of FP1 of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. / © DPPI

The hard

The Free Practice 1 session was in fact interrupted after eight minutes when the poor Carlos Sainz had the misfortune of driving over a detached manhole cover. Assessment, one Classic Ferrari for sale disemboweled, a logically furious Frédéric Vasseur, and a huge headache for Formula 1 and the FIA.

The premier category stakeholders now had to ensure that all the drains on the route were securely secured, while repairing the plate that had lifted. A titanic job in an already busy schedule and above all regulated by the minute.

Toto wolff, main team Mercedes Benz, tried to defuse the situation by pointing out that such a mishap had already occurred in F1. We think of the 2017 Malaysian GP where the Haas de Romain Grosjean had been seriously damaged by a protruding edge. Same in Baku in 2019, this time in an incident involving the Williams by George Russell.

These unfortunate episodes were, however, the result of a maintenance problem and did not appear for the first edition of the GPs concerned (1999 for Sepang, 2016 for Azerbaijan). With experience, one could naively believe that the FIA ​​would be particularly vigilant on this aspect during its traditional pre-homologation inspections...

However, we have noticed in recent years that F1 often serves as a guinea pig for tracks completed in very short timeframes (example: the ultra-fast and dangerous Jeddah track approved the day before EL1 of the 2021 Saudi Arabian GP) .

The visual atmosphere compensates for the lack of roughness and character of the track / © DPPI

F1 a victim of its own media hype.

In addition, the extreme schedules practiced in Las Vegas (start of Free Practice 2 initially scheduled for midnight local time!) do not allow any postponement. Under penalty of making the drivers ride at unchristian hours. This is exactly what happened this Thursday/Friday with EL2 kicking off at 02:30 a.m.! If only the fans who had paid crazy amounts of money to watch 8 minutes of on-track action during FP1 had been able to stay... But no, they were asked to leave the circuit grounds at 01:30 a.m. for logistical reasons.

The spectators were logically angry against F1, in a country which took so long to recover from the trauma of Indianapolis 2005... We also know the tendency of Americans to take legal action as soon as they are wronged ("Customer is king” in Uncle Sam’s country). Enough to give Liberty a cold sweat, even if they know the market perfectly.

In the end, EL2, extended by 30 minutes, went off without a hitch and offered particularly polished images. But the damage is done. F1 has bombarded us so much with promos, teasers, and other articles of all kinds to describe the Las Vegas Grand Prix as the second coming of Jesus on Earth that the expectations generated would already have been very complicated to satisfy without the slightest hiccup. So after the scenario of this opening day…

Let's hope that this false start does not permanently damage the reputation of Formula 1 in a city where its arrival was already far from unanimous.