What Formula 1’s Las Vegas Debut Got Right — And What It Got Wrong

I
t looks like a fireball. The Ferrari hurtles down the Vegas Strip at about 200 miles per hour, a cloud of orange sparks billowing out from underneath the car. The driver, Carlos Sainz, does what he can to bring the $15 million machine to a stop. He isn’t sure what happened, but knows something is wrong. He’s right. 

A drain cover on Las Vegas Boulevard came loose, flying up and into the car, tearing apart the chassis and cracking the floor. The Ferrari is fucked, to be sure. But a few inches in another direction and that drain cover may have come all the way through the floor and into Sainz’s body, and he’d be much more than fucked. He’d be dead.

The cars in Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix have only been on the track — which in this case is actual city streets that normal cars drive on every day — for a total of eight minutes when Sainz hits the drain. It is the first practice session of the weekend, the first time the multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art race cars have been on the sport’s newest course — a moment more than a year in the making. Fans from all over the world, Vegas locals, and media vultures like me have waited impatiently for this moment, and figured the odds against the Las Vegas Grand Prix ending up in some kind of fiasco were better than 6-5. Here we are, a week before Thanksgiving at a quarter to midnight the Thursday before race weekend, being proven correct. Over the next two hours, we watch trucks drive around the 3.8 mile course, pouring sand and concrete into the myriad drain covers in a hurried attempt to get things back on track.

 Somewhere close to 2 a.m. they kick us all out. The cars finish their practice in the wee small hours of the morning without any fans watching. The next morning, race officials say anyone who bought a practice ticket (around $200) would be given credit at the Formula 1 store (where hats cost $100 and T-shirts $80). Anyone who bought a ticket for the whole weekend will get nothing. Before the weekend is over, a class-action lawsuit is filed on behalf of more than 35,000 fans.

 As I wander through the morass early Friday morning, trying to find my way back to my hotel, I’m not sure how to feel about this auspicious start to Formula 1’s Las Vegas debut. On one hand, the real-time failure of a $600 million sporting event that McLaren chief Zak Brown had boasted would be “the largest sporting event in the world this year” will surely make for good copy. Pride goeth before the fall and all that. On the other hand, those brief eight minutes of seeing the world’s fastest race cars firing down the Strip, bathed in the bright lights and framed by these sky-high totems of American excess and leisure, loud enough to feel in my bones — well, that was undeniably cool. I wanted more.

FORMULA 1, WHICH HAS been around for roughly 75 years, is the most popular motorsport in the world — but it never really found an audience here in the States. For U.S. greasers, NASCAR has ruled. America’s most popular motorsport started roughly the same time as Formula 1, but with a far different history and trajectory. While Formula 1 evolved from international competitions between governments, car manufacturers, and millionaires, NASCAR started out as races between moonshiners and bootleggers who modified cars to outrun cops. NASCAR developed into a bona fide big deal, with media rights worth billions by the mid-aughts. Unlike F1, which markets itself as the sport of the aristocracy and has fans all over the world, NASCAR’s fan base is largely in the American South and rural areas where auto-racing culture is fostered by local drag strips and dirt tracks. 

F1 doesn’t just have a different history and fan base, it’s also a radically different sport. While NASCAR cars are pretty much all the same, F1 teams spend more than $100 million each to design, build, and race individually unique cars that are probably more closely related to a spaceship than any car you or I would ever ride in, let alone drive. Ten teams compete in a series of a couple dozen races that take place on racetracks and city streets all around the globe. 

Lately, you’ve probably been hearing more about F1. In 2016, the American company Liberty Media bought F1 for $4.4 billion, and it has worked to grow the sport’s fan base here ever since. And it’s working. Liberty’s first gambit was the Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive, which debuted in 2019 and is now in its sixth season. The show’s popularity led to ESPN and F1 signing a reported $255 million media-rights deal before the 2023 season, and the American viewership set a record in 2022 with 1.21 million average viewers, more than double the number from 2018. 

The Las Vegas Grand Prix is Liberty’s latest ploy, and it’s sparing no expense — from the racetrack to A-list entertainment to world-class chefs. The plan is to put on a show the likes of which no Formula 1 circuit — not even the storied and sophisticated Monaco Grand Prix — has ever seen. “We knew we wanted a new crown jewel in the portfolio, and we knew we wanted to race here in Las Vegas,” Renee Wilm, Liberty’s chief legal and administrative officer, tells me. “I have said from time to time that Las Vegas is the Monaco of North America.” 

But is it? Vegas and Monaco may both be gambling centers and playgrounds for the über rich. But Casino de Monte-Carlo enforces a dress code and charges admission, while Las Vegas is a kitschy spectacle, a postmodern middlebrow mishmash where everything from fine art and Michelin-star dining to strip clubs are on hand 24-7 and lit up in looping neon. A race in Vegas would be a new proposition for Formula 1, casting aside pomposity for good old American tackiness.

Die-hard fans have already struggled with the way Liberty Media and Drive to Survive appeared to be Americanizing the sport, turning it into a reality show focused more on drama than racing. A crown jewel in this most American of cities might be more than legacy fans could bear, and not something new American fans may even want. In the end, would the $600 million Liberty was betting on Vegas pay off?   

I ARRIVE IN LAS VEGAS on Wednesday, in time for the opening ceremonies. I get my first glimpse of the track as close as you could get. Andrew Gnatovich, author of the blog Las Vegas Cabbie Chronicles, gives me a tour. Along with Albert Park, Monaco, Baku, and Singapore, the Las Vegas Grand Prix is one of only five courses driven on streets open to the public instead of on a dedicated racetrack, so regular traffic drives the track until 5 p.m. Gnatovich and I trace the course the race cars would soon navigate, albeit in his Chevy Malibu. “When they first announced the event, I thought, ‘What a cool showcase for Vegas. What a cool showcase for F1. It’s a perfect marriage,” he says. “A Saturday night on the Las Vegas Strip, cars doing 200 miles an hour — what is not cool about that?”

The effort to turn Las Vegas into a racetrack has been nothing short of herculean. The city is no stranger to construction, with some of the largest buildings in America routinely demolished and rebuilt here every year. But this was something new. Nearly 2,900 workers spent 378 days to build a 300,000-square-foot permanent paddock facility to hold garages and offices, repaved miles of city streets with more than 100,000 tons of pavement, and built miles of temporary structures along the course to house fans, pop-up restaurants, nightclubs, and concert stages. As the construction tied up traffic and the project temporarily bulldozed everything in its way (including trees planted in front of the Bellagio 25 years ago), local sentiment turned against the race.

“It got worse and worse,” Gnatovich says. “And some time around when they started building the grandstands in front of the Bellagio is when I flip-flopped on it. They took up two lanes of southbound traffic on the Strip for going on three months.”

Across Las Vegas, cars sport “Fuck Formula 1” stickers, and nobody I speak to — from local friends to service workers — has anything good to say about the race. “Any local crossing their fingers that F1’s only gonna be here for three years, I think, is in for a rude awakening,” Gnatovich says. To placate the locals, race organizers offered them discounted tickets. The only catch was they were for practice sessions, not the race, which felt like adding insult to injury. Tickets for the actual race were offered at a mighty cost.

“The initial price was insane,” says JB, a local bar owner and ticket broker (which is what scalpers call themselves these days). I meet up with JB at the Double Down Saloon, a local dive-bar staple on Paradise Road, where the walls are covered in graffiti and stickers for punk bands, and the house has a drink called Ass Juice that they basically dare you to try. JB buys a round of Ass Juice for the bar and shoots his back no problem. He texts some of his scalper buddies and asks, “Did you guys buy F1?” They both respond immediately with “No.” 

“The minimum was like a thousand-plus for GA,” JB says. “Who is paying a thousand for GA?” And prices only went up from there. The Bellagio’s Fountain Club sold out of $11,250-per-person three-day packages that included rooms and tickets to the race. (The average room rate for the weekend was $2,200.) But not every property had such an easy time moving tickets. By the time JB and I sit down at the Double Down, tickets are still available to the race, and prices have dropped precipitously. “It’s solidly falling off a cliff,” he says. “I wanna say tickets for tonight are under a hundred bucks.”

The price drop wasn’t likely due to a lack of interest. Buzz was high among race fans and casual observers alike. But ticket prices were off the charts, even by Formula 1’s own standards. The average three-day ticket price of $1,667 is more than triple the cost of most other Grands Prix around the world, to say nothing of how it compared to other events in Las Vegas, where extravagance and value have always figured out how to coexist. This is, after all, the home of comped suites and crab legs on the buffet. 

The lack of a sellout is evident later that night from the rooftop of the highly exclusive Paddock Club, where I’m perched to watch the opening ceremonies. I face the main grandstand, where a lot of the seats remain empty at showtime. The show includes performances from Kylie Minogue, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and John Legend, who makes his entrance from up here on the roof. The Blue Man Group roam around the paddock, interrupting the live broadcast and generally freaking out Europeans who you’d think would be used to the avant garde. As Andra Day takes the stage to sing her rendition of “Come Together,” it begins to rain.

But the show goes on. Up and down the Strip, there’s a drone show, pyrotechnics, fireworks, and a dramatic entrance by each of the 20 drivers, lifted up to a series of platforms on the track from hidden chambers below. It’s all very Vegas, and very un-Formula 1. (Max Verstappen, reigning world champion, would later complain that he felt like “a clown.”) Ordinarily these guys would be sleeping, or engaged in other race prep. This performance is one of many they’ll make throughout the week, either in private hospitality suites or on big stages around the track in “fan zones” surrounded by cheering mobs. 

“I understand that fans, they need maybe something to do as well around the track,” the normally stoic Verstappen said during a press conference. “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.

“They don’t actually understand what we’re doing or what we’re putting on the line to perform.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, the whales begin to arrive. Las Vegas airport’s private-jet parking spaces quickly fill up, and planes are told to drop off their well-heeled passengers and then take off again, a “drop and go” in airport parlance, ideally to park in nearby Henderson, Nevada, where 18 acres of new private-jet parking spots were added ahead of the race.

Around the track there’s a last-minute scramble by construction crews, restaurant staffs, bus drivers, security guards — even race crews — to get ready on time. Thursday night is the initial practice sessions for the cars. F1 cars are put together for each race in roughly 48 hours in tiny 92-foot-deep garages. That means practice sessions are essential to feel out the car and how it drives on any specific track. The car is, for all intents and purposes, a brand-new car each and every race.

With an expected crowd of more than 300,000 fans, everyone in Vegas, not just the drivers, needed a practice run. 

The drain-cover debacle exposed more than just a weakness in the track, it exposed gaps within the entire operation. Not only did organizers not anticipate drain covers flying off during the race, they also didn’t predict how delays like this would impact the schedules of those like shuttle-bus drivers. The next day plenty of ink would be spilled about the Formula 1 fiasco in the desert, but they still had until Saturday night to get things right. All was not yet lost.

FRIDAY MORNING I meet up with David Woodley at the Peppermill diner, which cuts a decidedly old-school profile with its 1980s neon pink and purple, and takes up valuable real estate next to the luxurious Wynn. Woodley is the chief revenue officer for BallIsLife, a basketball media company, and is an F1 watcher. “I grew up a big racing fan,” he says. Unlike me, and a lot of the rapidly growing U.S. Formula 1 fan base who discovered it through Drive to Survive, Woodley followed it early on, moving from NASCAR to Formula 1 in a quest to cheer on the absolute fastest cars in the world. The engineering feat of it all appealed to him. 

“The guys working on this are like rocket scientists. They could be solving the problems of the world, but they’re out there trying to find an extra 10th of a second,” Woodley says. “I was hooked.”

His first race was the Montreal Grand Prix, where he expected to encounter something wholly different from what he was used to here. “NASCAR’s very blue-collar, not upscale. And Formula 1 had that upscale feel, but you could still bring a cooler full of beer into the stands, which is fun, right?”

When the Las Vegas Grand Prix was announced in 2022, Stefano Domenicali, CEO of Formula 1, said it would be a “truly spectacular celebration that has never been seen in our sport before, in the greatest arena on Earth.” Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton said the event would be “pretty hardcore” and McClaren driver Daniel Ricciardo, who was in the last year of his contract, said, “I was gonna retire. I will not no more.” 

Woodley pounced, buying four front-of-stretch tickets for about $2,500 a piece. “They did a good job of creating hype and FOMO,” he tells me. “And I guess I fell for it.”

After breakfast, I make my way over to the Wynn to watch one of the week’s more garish displays of wealth: a Sotheby’s luxury-car auction held in the resort’s space-age Awakening theater-in-the-round. James Corden plays host to more than 500 invited guests, among them a number of obscenely rich car aficionados bidding for Porsches and Lamborghinis, some of which aren’t even legal to drive on U.S. streets. The auctioneer is lowered from the ceiling in a gold and glass chamber, and the cars rise from beneath the floor and rotate on an illuminated platform. The star of the show is an actual Formula 1 car, the very first Mercedes that seven-time champion Hamilton ever drove. The car is undriveable, save for on a special track and only with a service agreement with the Mercedes F1 team to keep it operational. Bidding goes on for more than a half hour.

Eventually only two bidders remain, one who sits among us in the round (who’d previously won an auction for a $52,000 handbag for his wife), and another on the phone from his private jet somewhere in the air. The final bid is $17.1 million. As I leave the theater, I overhear someone say, “I thought there was supposed to be a recession.” Yeah, man, there is. This is why.

I decamp from the Wynn for Circus Circus, which is across the Strip from the Wynn geographically but on another planet financially. While the Wynn sold a $1 million package, Circus Circus is the popular spot for those looking to park an RV near the water hookups out back.

This also makes Circus Circus an ideal spot for Guy Laliberté, the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, to set up his own RV camp. Down in the shadow of the towering and brightly lit Circus Circus and Resorts World signs, in a thicket of shrubs and trees, Laliberté assembled “Frooogs Camp,” his own personal mobile village of hand-painted RVs, which he takes to Black Rock City, Nevada, for Burning Man each year. This weekend, Frooogs Camp is here because Laliberté is also famous for throwing what he calls “the one don’t-miss party for Formula 1.” His exclusive invite-only events host celebrities, political leaders, and drivers themselves in cities all across the globe, from the storied Jimmy’z nightclub in Monaco to his private estate in Montreal. 

For Laliberté, this weekend is decades in the making. In the Nineties, Formula 1’s then-CEO Bernie Ecclestone asked Laliberté to look into the prospect of bringing Formula 1 to Vegas. “Bernie back then didn’t really either think about or believe in the American market,” Laliberté says.

I swing by Frooogs Camp on my way to go see Jack Harlow at the Cosmopolitan, making my way down a winding trail to find a circus-style tent circled by RVs and food trucks. Inside the tent, hundreds of Laliberté’s friends and family sit at tables around a stage, whooping it up for carnival-style performers. A man named Brett Loudermilk swallows swords (and flirts with doing the same to the largest dildo I’ve ever seen); a woman named Anna Silva holds her leg next to her head while her husband Alfredo throws daggers into the wall all around her; a burlesque dancer named Banbury Cross pours champagne down her bare body then sinks to the ground to lick it up from the floor. The crowd rises to their feet and cheer her on with vigor. Jack Harlow, eat your fucking heart out. I stick around.

“I kind of use this camp to test ideas and provoke a little colorful environment in this city of light,” Laliberté says. “I like to be a little misfit in this environment.”

Laliberté is the perfect person to talk to about F1’s American gambit. Once a Québécois street performer, he’s brought a European-style of entertainment to U.S. audiences, and not in the usual places like New York or Chicago. It was here in Vegas that Cirque du Soleil’s seed found its purchase. Starting with the show Mystére in 1993, Cirque du Soleil grew over the next 30 years to dominate the Vegas entertainment industry once defined by lounge acts and comedians, and became a billion-dollar enterprise.

“It’s part of the ethos of Vegas to go and get those big events,” he says. “They’re trying everything. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

BACK AT THE TRACK, the sound of the hydraulic drills reaches a crescendo as the teams prepare the cars for qualifying. Outside the paddock building, Formula 1 had built a structure housing a pop-up MGM casino complete with slot machines and a roulette table, as well as a wedding chapel named Race to the Altar, where a ceremony is currently underway. “We’ve legally married two couples here in the paddock,” says Elvis impersonator and wedding officiant Brian Mills, before donning his shades and performing “Love Me Tender” for the bride and groom.

But the mood turns serious. One by one, drivers exit their team’s offices and cross over to their garages. Drivers for top teams like Red Bull and Mercedes are accosted by media and fans. Hamilton, by far the sport’s biggest star, sprints to his garage, an intense stare fixed on his face.

Amid all of the driver fanfare, a crowd has formed around Will Buxton, with fans mugging for selfies and autographs. The on-air commentator for F1 TV, Buxton has become a celebrity on par with the drivers thanks to his role in Drive to Survive. I ask him about his thoughts on the Las Vegas Grand Prix. “I think the scale of what they’ve achieved, this pit building, for example, is one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen in Formula 1. The most important thing to factor into all of this is it’s Year One,” he says. He thinks that Las Vegas is the perfect next step for F1. “The whole city feels like it’s a fan zone because that’s just Vegas normally. It’s a massive adult playground. It feels like a theme park anyway.

“Whether you’re someone that’s loved racing your whole life or someone that’s just got into it through watching Netflix, one thing I’ve loved about racing my whole life is it always felt like a community, something niche. And now this niche is big.”

In the East Harmon Fan Zone, I mingle with fans from all over, a sampling of this growing club. A couple of young women from Dallas who only got into F1 this year: “Well, I really like the cars. They’re like a small rocket.” A couple from L.A. who got hooked on Drive to Survive in 2020: “I’ve watched every race for the last three years.” A father and son from New York who frequent Vegas but have never been to an F1 race: “We’re on the last turn coming into the street, so it’s cool seeing the cars whip down that last turn. You get the different smells of rubber and the sparks.”

As I make my way through the crowd to watch the final qualifying race, I hear the name “Checo” chanted. That’s the nickname of Sergio Pérez, Red Bull’s other driver alongside world champion Max Verstappen. Pérez is a native of Mexico, and a six-time Grand Prix champ, but he’s second fiddle to his teammate, who drives the same car but finishes far ahead of him week after week. Still, this is southern Nevada. Pérez enjoys the same thing Mexican boxer Canelo Álvarez does when he comes to Las Vegas for a fight: a friendly crowd. I’m surrounded by a group of fans in Red Bull shirts who demand I yell “Checo number one!” I oblige.

But Checo does not finish number one. He finishes a disappointing 12th, not even good enough to get in the final qualifying session. The home-field favorite will have a lot of ground to make up tomorrow starting from 11th place. His teammate, the unstoppable Verstappen, will start in second, behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. As people make their way out of the grandstands, I hear cries of “Anybody but Max!”

SUNSET PARK IS A large and bucolic public park southeast of the Vegas airport. As I wander through it on race day, about 200 members of the Mongols motorcycle gang gather for a picnic, their bikes lined up as far as the eye can see. In the pavilion next to the Mongol party is the event I’m here for: a group of European motorsport fans gathered for a pre-race barbecue. Welcome to Las Vegas, mates.

The host, Andy Austin, owns a condo in the MGM Signature, and when he noticed his terrace overlooked the track, he thought about renting his place out for the weekend for $22,000, since he wasn’t an F1 fan: “Because I don’t know how to bet on it,” he explains. But when he realized his European friends and colleagues were interested, he extended an invitation. “We have the perfect spot for this. We are looking on seats that go for a thousand bucks per day,” says Remco Sonderen, who’s here from Amsterdam.

 “Everything in Vegas is bigger. I wouldn’t necessarily say better, but it’s bigger, more extroverted. So the race is also more of a show,” Sonderen says. “Americans are more competitive. You are raised ‘Be the best you can be.’ And in Europe, we say, ‘Doe Normaal,’ just do normal. Try your best to see where your limits are. And if you reach that limit, then you know where you are.”

It strikes me that if the Las Vegas Grand Prix is undergoing some version of this testing your limits, they’ve found them. They’ve made life miserable for locals, destroyed a car, got themselves sued by their own fans, and kept hundreds of thousands of people trapped in a labyrinth surrounded by $80 T-shirts and the Blue Man Group. Hunter S. Thompson could dream up nothing weirder. But to hear these European fans tell it: Good, now you know where you are. And where you are is Las Vegas.

THAT NIGHT THE MOOD at the racetrack is more acutely excited than before. If the Las Vegas Grand Prix is, as Verstappen and others characterized it, all a show, then this is the big climax. The red carpet is out, and Ryan Reynolds, Rihanna, and A$AP Rocky roam the paddock. Bad Bunny makes a beeline for the hospitality suites. Shaquille O’Neal wanders around the pit lane trying to figure out how to get access to the starting grid. At a normal F1 race, there might be one A-lister who shows up and gets the ultimate VIP treatment: to hang out in the Red Bull or the Mercedes garage with the team. Here, there’s a celebrity guest in every garage. The organizers distributed to media a list of celebrities in attendance that was 72 pages long, from Jimmy Kimmel Live’s Guillermo to Brad Pitt.

What really makes the atmosphere feel more electric on race day, though, are the fans. It’s 10 p.m. and they arrived having already tied one on for the most part. The race reported a capacity crowd of 315,000 on track. And across town the surge in visitors is noted — for better and for worse. The concentration of tourists in the walled-off racing area along the Strip has kept people from venturing downtown. Plaza Hotel & Casino CEO Jonathan Jossel claimed on the City Cast Las Vegas podcast that the Plaza had one of the slowest weekends since Covid. Ross Mollison, producer of Absinthe, one of the top shows in town, wrote in an open letter that they suffered compared to the same weekend in past years. Other high-profile shows, from Penn & Teller to Barry Manilow, simply went dark for the weekend.

But at the high-end properties, it’s a different story. The MGM is seeing its highest-grossing weekend ever. Stories circulate around the racetrack that the table-games dealers at the Cosmopolitan made more than $300,000 in tips the night before. And Wynn CEO Craig Billings said his company had more requests for credit and money wired to the cage than ever. 

High rollers like these don’t watch from a grandstand seat. They have access to the Bellagio’s exclusive Fountain Club, where caviar and champagne flow for the 3,600 guests who forked over more than $11,000 per ticket. A woman named Devon from Woodlands, Texas, is one of those ticket holders, but she gave up her seat at Fountain Club and opted instead to watch the race from the Paddock Club Suite, which sits above the finish line. Here, too, a ticket affords you all the wagyu steak, lobster, and sushi your belly can fit. Fans like Devon huddle around space heaters outside and pull chairs along the terrace rail for the best views of the racetrack one could get.

Devon says her husband bought the tickets to entertain clients, but neither of them had ever watched Formula 1. They binged Drive to Survive to prepare. As they got more into the show, they got more excited about the race — and decided to use the tickets themselves. “We ended up bringing our family instead,” she says. When I ask her where her husband is, she has no idea: “Probably down there with a driver or something.” Ah, the good life.

When the lights go out and the race begins, there’s a huge cheer, the uncorking of a year’s worth of anticipation and anxiety in one moment. Nine months ago, it seemed an impossible feat of civic engineering and corporate muscle to make this race happen. Two nights ago, it felt as if it may all unravel. But now the cars are off, and there’s nothing, not even the outcome of the race, left in doubt.

Almost immediately, perhaps because of a lack of tire grip from the cold late-night desert temperatures, or perhaps from an oil spill caused by an antique car brought onto the track before the race (more pageantry to fuck up the motorsport, naturally), the cars slip and slide along the first turn and nearly cause a pileup. Later, on lap three, Lando Norris loses control of his McLaren on turn 11 after hitting a bump in the track and careens into a wall at top speed. (He was taken to the hospital though unharmed.)

Going into the race, it was assumed everyone was competing for second place behind Verstappen, but after he forces Leclerc off the track in the first lap, Verstappen is given a five-second penalty. Then on the 25th lap, when Verstappen attempts to pass Mercedes’ George Russell, the two collide, which brings a safety car onto the track and gives Sergio “Checo” Pérez the opportunity to pit and change tires, and maneuver himself into position to challenge for the win. 

On the 32nd lap, Pérez uses his drag-reduction system, which is like a turbo button that F1 cars can only use on certain sections of the track. It helps Pérez rocket past Leclerc on turn 14 and take the lead, and the fans lose their ever-loving minds. “Checo number one!” It may have been the bet I placed on Checo to win earlier that day, or it may have been my cloyingly American need to see underdogs prevail, but I lose my mind along with them. 

Among the fans cheering for Checo is David Woodley, who has also placed a bet on him to win. After describing his first night as a “shit show,” Woodley’s love for motorsports is rekindled anew tonight. “They give you champagne as you’re walking in,” he says. “Food was all free. I had four lobsters.”

Woodley recalls his first Grand Prix, in Montreal, where at the end of the race, fans broke out their own bottles of champagne. “I was just in the normal stands,” he says. “They started pouring it in glasses. I thought, ‘That doesn’t happen at NFL games.’ ” It felt like something too sophisticated to happen in America, but here he was toasting bubbly in Vegas.  

I tell Woodley that I think this might be what really makes Las Vegas the right city for Formula 1. Nowhere else in the world does a better job of making everyone, no matter where they are on the social ladder, feel just a rung or two higher, even for only a moment. It may be smoke and mirrors, but so is Formula 1. “We call ourselves backpackers to billionaires,” Liberty Media’s Wilm tells me. “That’s our fan base.” It may have taken Vegas and F1 a long time to find each other, but Liberty seems to want to make it permanent: It signed a 10-year deal with the city and is already selling tickets for next year’s race. Despite the stereotype of Formula 1 fans as champagne-sipping fancy pants, the truth is the petrolheads and car junkies are legion, without class or station. Champagne-sipping car junkies, but legion all the same. 

By the time I arrive back at the paddock, Pérez has given the lead back to Leclerc. By lap 40, Leclerc gives the lead up to Verstappen, and everyone knows it’s a race for second. Verstappen wins his record-setting 18th race this season, with only one more to go.

I wander back to the rear of the paddock area, where the garages for the bottom-tier teams sit across from the makeshift wedding chapel and casino. Down at that end, there’s no press, no gawking fans or paparazzi, no hubbub to speak of. There’s only crews for the also-ran teams, in jumpsuits and helmets, standing around watching the race on a big screen while they take smoke breaks. As the fates of their racers become clear, they extinguish their cigarettes, bid adieu to the Elvis impersonator who shared his lighter with them, and wander back to their garages. Another day at work, another curtain call.

As Verstappen crosses the finish line, where Justin Bieber waves the checkered flag, Verstappen sings “Viva Las Vegas.” Perhaps he’s having a laugh at the fans, perhaps with them. It doesn’t matter. He’s the unstoppable three-time world champion of racing. His team, Red Bull, had already won the Constructors’ Championship, which comes with an estimated $140 million prize, not even enough to break even for the team’s expenses this season. NASCAR, this is not. The rich get richer. The house always wins.

As Verstappen, Checo, and Leclerc make their way to the Bellagio for the podium celebration, fireworks erupt from high atop seven of the Strip’s massive casino towers. On the roof of the Aria, 60 stories above, Jon Loreto, a large bald man about 40 years old, stands guard by one of the launch sites with a hose, spraying down the rubber roof in case anything goes awry. He’s a pyrotechnic designer with the company Pyrotecnico, and one of the designers of this show — one of the biggest the company has ever done. Planning the show took months and required coordination between more than 50 people on the roofs of seven casinos. Each rooftop is its own operation, all happening in a tightly constrained area, and timed with the race. “You don’t have a lot of room to make errors,” Loreto says. “There’s no second chances.” 

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t travel with the crew to shows like this. He’s from a small town in rural Pennsylvania, and before this trip he’d only once been on an airplane. “I don’t even like to go to Philly,” he tells me. Pyrotecnico’s creative director, Rocco Vitale, invited Loreto along because he knew he loved F1. 

On race day, one would think a seat on the roof of the Aria, 600 feet in the air, would beat Andy Austin’s balcony or the Paddock Suite by a country mile. But instead of seeing his first live F1 race up close, Loreto watched it on his phone while listening to the cars roar by below. Up to this point, the experience had been simply overwhelming. “I don’t know if Vegas is for me,” he says. Formula 1, however, this sport of noblemen and aristocrats, makes sense to him. He didn’t need to have a $17 million car or even a $2,500 ticket and all-you-can-eat lobster to understand what was cool about this sport. It wasn’t the glitz and the glamour. It was the cars. The cars go really, really fast. The stakes were as high as the roof of the Aria. One mistake and your car could be a fireball. Do everything right, and you’ll fly. It’s high risk, high reward. And that, not the singers and dancers and movie stars, is the real show. The racing, for fans like Loreto anyway, delivered. 

As the racing show finishes, and Pyrotecnico’s show begins, Loreto is surrounded by explosions of colorful embers and sparks. When the crowd finishes its cheer, Loreto looks over the edge and takes in the city. “That was pretty spectacular,” he says.

“I don’t know if I fit in here. But if they do this race again, I’ll come back.”

I
t looks like a fireball. The Ferrari hurtles down the Vegas Strip at about 200 miles per hour, a cloud of orange sparks billowing out from underneath the car. The driver, Carlos Sainz, does what he can to bring the $15 million machine to a stop. He isn’t sure what happened, but knows something is wrong. He’s right. 

A drain cover on Las Vegas Boulevard came loose, flying up and into the car, tearing apart the chassis and cracking the floor. The Ferrari is fucked, to be sure. But a few inches in another direction and that drain cover may have come all the way through the floor and into Sainz’s body, and he’d be much more than fucked. He’d be dead.

The cars in Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix have only been on the track — which in this case is actual city streets that normal cars drive on every day — for a total of eight minutes when Sainz hits the drain. It is the first practice session of the weekend, the first time the multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art race cars have been on the sport’s newest course — a moment more than a year in the making. Fans from all over the world, Vegas locals, and media vultures like me have waited impatiently for this moment, and figured the odds against the Las Vegas Grand Prix ending up in some kind of fiasco were better than 6-5. Here we are, a week before Thanksgiving at a quarter to midnight the Thursday before race weekend, being proven correct. Over the next two hours, we watch trucks drive around the 3.8 mile course, pouring sand and concrete into the myriad drain covers in a hurried attempt to get things back on track.

 Somewhere close to 2 a.m. they kick us all out. The cars finish their practice in the wee small hours of the morning without any fans watching. The next morning, race officials say anyone who bought a practice ticket (around $200) would be given credit at the Formula 1 store (where hats cost $100 and T-shirts $80). Anyone who bought a ticket for the whole weekend will get nothing. Before the weekend is over, a class-action lawsuit is filed on behalf of more than 35,000 fans.

 As I wander through the morass early Friday morning, trying to find my way back to my hotel, I’m not sure how to feel about this auspicious start to Formula 1’s Las Vegas debut. On one hand, the real-time failure of a $600 million sporting event that McLaren chief Zak Brown had boasted would be “the largest sporting event in the world this year” will surely make for good copy. Pride goeth before the fall and all that. On the other hand, those brief eight minutes of seeing the world’s fastest race cars firing down the Strip, bathed in the bright lights and framed by these sky-high totems of American excess and leisure, loud enough to feel in my bones — well, that was undeniably cool. I wanted more.

FORMULA 1, WHICH HAS been around for roughly 75 years, is the most popular motorsport in the world — but it never really found an audience here in the States. For U.S. greasers, NASCAR has ruled. America’s most popular motorsport started roughly the same time as Formula 1, but with a far different history and trajectory. While Formula 1 evolved from international competitions between governments, car manufacturers, and millionaires, NASCAR started out as races between moonshiners and bootleggers who modified cars to outrun cops. NASCAR developed into a bona fide big deal, with media rights worth billions by the mid-aughts. Unlike F1, which markets itself as the sport of the aristocracy and has fans all over the world, NASCAR’s fan base is largely in the American South and rural areas where auto-racing culture is fostered by local drag strips and dirt tracks. 

F1 doesn’t just have a different history and fan base, it’s also a radically different sport. While NASCAR cars are pretty much all the same, F1 teams spend more than $100 million each to design, build, and race individually unique cars that are probably more closely related to a spaceship than any car you or I would ever ride in, let alone drive. Ten teams compete in a series of a couple dozen races that take place on racetracks and city streets all around the globe. 

Lately, you’ve probably been hearing more about F1. In 2016, the American company Liberty Media bought F1 for $4.4 billion, and it has worked to grow the sport’s fan base here ever since. And it’s working. Liberty’s first gambit was the Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive, which debuted in 2019 and is now in its sixth season. The show’s popularity led to ESPN and F1 signing a reported $255 million media-rights deal before the 2023 season, and the American viewership set a record in 2022 with 1.21 million average viewers, more than double the number from 2018. 

The Las Vegas Grand Prix is Liberty’s latest ploy, and it’s sparing no expense — from the racetrack to A-list entertainment to world-class chefs. The plan is to put on a show the likes of which no Formula 1 circuit — not even the storied and sophisticated Monaco Grand Prix — has ever seen. “We knew we wanted a new crown jewel in the portfolio, and we knew we wanted to race here in Las Vegas,” Renee Wilm, Liberty’s chief legal and administrative officer, tells me. “I have said from time to time that Las Vegas is the Monaco of North America.” 

But is it? Vegas and Monaco may both be gambling centers and playgrounds for the über rich. But Casino de Monte-Carlo enforces a dress code and charges admission, while Las Vegas is a kitschy spectacle, a postmodern middlebrow mishmash where everything from fine art and Michelin-star dining to strip clubs are on hand 24-7 and lit up in looping neon. A race in Vegas would be a new proposition for Formula 1, casting aside pomposity for good old American tackiness.

Die-hard fans have already struggled with the way Liberty Media and Drive to Survive appeared to be Americanizing the sport, turning it into a reality show focused more on drama than racing. A crown jewel in this most American of cities might be more than legacy fans could bear, and not something new American fans may even want. In the end, would the $600 million Liberty was betting on Vegas pay off?   

I ARRIVE IN LAS VEGAS on Wednesday, in time for the opening ceremonies. I get my first glimpse of the track as close as you could get. Andrew Gnatovich, author of the blog Las Vegas Cabbie Chronicles, gives me a tour. Along with Albert Park, Monaco, Baku, and Singapore, the Las Vegas Grand Prix is one of only five courses driven on streets open to the public instead of on a dedicated racetrack, so regular traffic drives the track until 5 p.m. Gnatovich and I trace the course the race cars would soon navigate, albeit in his Chevy Malibu. “When they first announced the event, I thought, ‘What a cool showcase for Vegas. What a cool showcase for F1. It’s a perfect marriage,” he says. “A Saturday night on the Las Vegas Strip, cars doing 200 miles an hour — what is not cool about that?”

The effort to turn Las Vegas into a racetrack has been nothing short of herculean. The city is no stranger to construction, with some of the largest buildings in America routinely demolished and rebuilt here every year. But this was something new. Nearly 2,900 workers spent 378 days to build a 300,000-square-foot permanent paddock facility to hold garages and offices, repaved miles of city streets with more than 100,000 tons of pavement, and built miles of temporary structures along the course to house fans, pop-up restaurants, nightclubs, and concert stages. As the construction tied up traffic and the project temporarily bulldozed everything in its way (including trees planted in front of the Bellagio 25 years ago), local sentiment turned against the race.

“It got worse and worse,” Gnatovich says. “And some time around when they started building the grandstands in front of the Bellagio is when I flip-flopped on it. They took up two lanes of southbound traffic on the Strip for going on three months.”

Across Las Vegas, cars sport “Fuck Formula 1” stickers, and nobody I speak to — from local friends to service workers — has anything good to say about the race. “Any local crossing their fingers that F1’s only gonna be here for three years, I think, is in for a rude awakening,” Gnatovich says. To placate the locals, race organizers offered them discounted tickets. The only catch was they were for practice sessions, not the race, which felt like adding insult to injury. Tickets for the actual race were offered at a mighty cost.

“The initial price was insane,” says JB, a local bar owner and ticket broker (which is what scalpers call themselves these days). I meet up with JB at the Double Down Saloon, a local dive-bar staple on Paradise Road, where the walls are covered in graffiti and stickers for punk bands, and the house has a drink called Ass Juice that they basically dare you to try. JB buys a round of Ass Juice for the bar and shoots his back no problem. He texts some of his scalper buddies and asks, “Did you guys buy F1?” They both respond immediately with “No.” 

“The minimum was like a thousand-plus for GA,” JB says. “Who is paying a thousand for GA?” And prices only went up from there. The Bellagio’s Fountain Club sold out of $11,250-per-person three-day packages that included rooms and tickets to the race. (The average room rate for the weekend was $2,200.) But not every property had such an easy time moving tickets. By the time JB and I sit down at the Double Down, tickets are still available to the race, and prices have dropped precipitously. “It’s solidly falling off a cliff,” he says. “I wanna say tickets for tonight are under a hundred bucks.”

The price drop wasn’t likely due to a lack of interest. Buzz was high among race fans and casual observers alike. But ticket prices were off the charts, even by Formula 1’s own standards. The average three-day ticket price of $1,667 is more than triple the cost of most other Grands Prix around the world, to say nothing of how it compared to other events in Las Vegas, where extravagance and value have always figured out how to coexist. This is, after all, the home of comped suites and crab legs on the buffet. 

The lack of a sellout is evident later that night from the rooftop of the highly exclusive Paddock Club, where I’m perched to watch the opening ceremonies. I face the main grandstand, where a lot of the seats remain empty at showtime. The show includes performances from Kylie Minogue, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and John Legend, who makes his entrance from up here on the roof. The Blue Man Group roam around the paddock, interrupting the live broadcast and generally freaking out Europeans who you’d think would be used to the avant garde. As Andra Day takes the stage to sing her rendition of “Come Together,” it begins to rain.

But the show goes on. Up and down the Strip, there’s a drone show, pyrotechnics, fireworks, and a dramatic entrance by each of the 20 drivers, lifted up to a series of platforms on the track from hidden chambers below. It’s all very Vegas, and very un-Formula 1. (Max Verstappen, reigning world champion, would later complain that he felt like “a clown.”) Ordinarily these guys would be sleeping, or engaged in other race prep. This performance is one of many they’ll make throughout the week, either in private hospitality suites or on big stages around the track in “fan zones” surrounded by cheering mobs. 

“I understand that fans, they need maybe something to do as well around the track,” the normally stoic Verstappen said during a press conference. “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.

“They don’t actually understand what we’re doing or what we’re putting on the line to perform.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, the whales begin to arrive. Las Vegas airport’s private-jet parking spaces quickly fill up, and planes are told to drop off their well-heeled passengers and then take off again, a “drop and go” in airport parlance, ideally to park in nearby Henderson, Nevada, where 18 acres of new private-jet parking spots were added ahead of the race.

Around the track there’s a last-minute scramble by construction crews, restaurant staffs, bus drivers, security guards — even race crews — to get ready on time. Thursday night is the initial practice sessions for the cars. F1 cars are put together for each race in roughly 48 hours in tiny 92-foot-deep garages. That means practice sessions are essential to feel out the car and how it drives on any specific track. The car is, for all intents and purposes, a brand-new car each and every race.

With an expected crowd of more than 300,000 fans, everyone in Vegas, not just the drivers, needed a practice run. 

The drain-cover debacle exposed more than just a weakness in the track, it exposed gaps within the entire operation. Not only did organizers not anticipate drain covers flying off during the race, they also didn’t predict how delays like this would impact the schedules of those like shuttle-bus drivers. The next day plenty of ink would be spilled about the Formula 1 fiasco in the desert, but they still had until Saturday night to get things right. All was not yet lost.

FRIDAY MORNING I meet up with David Woodley at the Peppermill diner, which cuts a decidedly old-school profile with its 1980s neon pink and purple, and takes up valuable real estate next to the luxurious Wynn. Woodley is the chief revenue officer for BallIsLife, a basketball media company, and is an F1 watcher. “I grew up a big racing fan,” he says. Unlike me, and a lot of the rapidly growing U.S. Formula 1 fan base who discovered it through Drive to Survive, Woodley followed it early on, moving from NASCAR to Formula 1 in a quest to cheer on the absolute fastest cars in the world. The engineering feat of it all appealed to him. 

“The guys working on this are like rocket scientists. They could be solving the problems of the world, but they’re out there trying to find an extra 10th of a second,” Woodley says. “I was hooked.”

His first race was the Montreal Grand Prix, where he expected to encounter something wholly different from what he was used to here. “NASCAR’s very blue-collar, not upscale. And Formula 1 had that upscale feel, but you could still bring a cooler full of beer into the stands, which is fun, right?”

When the Las Vegas Grand Prix was announced in 2022, Stefano Domenicali, CEO of Formula 1, said it would be a “truly spectacular celebration that has never been seen in our sport before, in the greatest arena on Earth.” Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton said the event would be “pretty hardcore” and McClaren driver Daniel Ricciardo, who was in the last year of his contract, said, “I was gonna retire. I will not no more.” 

Woodley pounced, buying four front-of-stretch tickets for about $2,500 a piece. “They did a good job of creating hype and FOMO,” he tells me. “And I guess I fell for it.”

After breakfast, I make my way over to the Wynn to watch one of the week’s more garish displays of wealth: a Sotheby’s luxury-car auction held in the resort’s space-age Awakening theater-in-the-round. James Corden plays host to more than 500 invited guests, among them a number of obscenely rich car aficionados bidding for Porsches and Lamborghinis, some of which aren’t even legal to drive on U.S. streets. The auctioneer is lowered from the ceiling in a gold and glass chamber, and the cars rise from beneath the floor and rotate on an illuminated platform. The star of the show is an actual Formula 1 car, the very first Mercedes that seven-time champion Hamilton ever drove. The car is undriveable, save for on a special track and only with a service agreement with the Mercedes F1 team to keep it operational. Bidding goes on for more than a half hour.

Eventually only two bidders remain, one who sits among us in the round (who’d previously won an auction for a $52,000 handbag for his wife), and another on the phone from his private jet somewhere in the air. The final bid is $17.1 million. As I leave the theater, I overhear someone say, “I thought there was supposed to be a recession.” Yeah, man, there is. This is why.

I decamp from the Wynn for Circus Circus, which is across the Strip from the Wynn geographically but on another planet financially. While the Wynn sold a $1 million package, Circus Circus is the popular spot for those looking to park an RV near the water hookups out back.

This also makes Circus Circus an ideal spot for Guy Laliberté, the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, to set up his own RV camp. Down in the shadow of the towering and brightly lit Circus Circus and Resorts World signs, in a thicket of shrubs and trees, Laliberté assembled “Frooogs Camp,” his own personal mobile village of hand-painted RVs, which he takes to Black Rock City, Nevada, for Burning Man each year. This weekend, Frooogs Camp is here because Laliberté is also famous for throwing what he calls “the one don’t-miss party for Formula 1.” His exclusive invite-only events host celebrities, political leaders, and drivers themselves in cities all across the globe, from the storied Jimmy’z nightclub in Monaco to his private estate in Montreal. 

For Laliberté, this weekend is decades in the making. In the Nineties, Formula 1’s then-CEO Bernie Ecclestone asked Laliberté to look into the prospect of bringing Formula 1 to Vegas. “Bernie back then didn’t really either think about or believe in the American market,” Laliberté says.

I swing by Frooogs Camp on my way to go see Jack Harlow at the Cosmopolitan, making my way down a winding trail to find a circus-style tent circled by RVs and food trucks. Inside the tent, hundreds of Laliberté’s friends and family sit at tables around a stage, whooping it up for carnival-style performers. A man named Brett Loudermilk swallows swords (and flirts with doing the same to the largest dildo I’ve ever seen); a woman named Anna Silva holds her leg next to her head while her husband Alfredo throws daggers into the wall all around her; a burlesque dancer named Banbury Cross pours champagne down her bare body then sinks to the ground to lick it up from the floor. The crowd rises to their feet and cheer her on with vigor. Jack Harlow, eat your fucking heart out. I stick around.

“I kind of use this camp to test ideas and provoke a little colorful environment in this city of light,” Laliberté says. “I like to be a little misfit in this environment.”

Laliberté is the perfect person to talk to about F1’s American gambit. Once a Québécois street performer, he’s brought a European-style of entertainment to U.S. audiences, and not in the usual places like New York or Chicago. It was here in Vegas that Cirque du Soleil’s seed found its purchase. Starting with the show Mystére in 1993, Cirque du Soleil grew over the next 30 years to dominate the Vegas entertainment industry once defined by lounge acts and comedians, and became a billion-dollar enterprise.

“It’s part of the ethos of Vegas to go and get those big events,” he says. “They’re trying everything. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

BACK AT THE TRACK, the sound of the hydraulic drills reaches a crescendo as the teams prepare the cars for qualifying. Outside the paddock building, Formula 1 had built a structure housing a pop-up MGM casino complete with slot machines and a roulette table, as well as a wedding chapel named Race to the Altar, where a ceremony is currently underway. “We’ve legally married two couples here in the paddock,” says Elvis impersonator and wedding officiant Brian Mills, before donning his shades and performing “Love Me Tender” for the bride and groom.

But the mood turns serious. One by one, drivers exit their team’s offices and cross over to their garages. Drivers for top teams like Red Bull and Mercedes are accosted by media and fans. Hamilton, by far the sport’s biggest star, sprints to his garage, an intense stare fixed on his face.

Amid all of the driver fanfare, a crowd has formed around Will Buxton, with fans mugging for selfies and autographs. The on-air commentator for F1 TV, Buxton has become a celebrity on par with the drivers thanks to his role in Drive to Survive. I ask him about his thoughts on the Las Vegas Grand Prix. “I think the scale of what they’ve achieved, this pit building, for example, is one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen in Formula 1. The most important thing to factor into all of this is it’s Year One,” he says. He thinks that Las Vegas is the perfect next step for F1. “The whole city feels like it’s a fan zone because that’s just Vegas normally. It’s a massive adult playground. It feels like a theme park anyway.

“Whether you’re someone that’s loved racing your whole life or someone that’s just got into it through watching Netflix, one thing I’ve loved about racing my whole life is it always felt like a community, something niche. And now this niche is big.”

In the East Harmon Fan Zone, I mingle with fans from all over, a sampling of this growing club. A couple of young women from Dallas who only got into F1 this year: “Well, I really like the cars. They’re like a small rocket.” A couple from L.A. who got hooked on Drive to Survive in 2020: “I’ve watched every race for the last three years.” A father and son from New York who frequent Vegas but have never been to an F1 race: “We’re on the last turn coming into the street, so it’s cool seeing the cars whip down that last turn. You get the different smells of rubber and the sparks.”

As I make my way through the crowd to watch the final qualifying race, I hear the name “Checo” chanted. That’s the nickname of Sergio Pérez, Red Bull’s other driver alongside world champion Max Verstappen. Pérez is a native of Mexico, and a six-time Grand Prix champ, but he’s second fiddle to his teammate, who drives the same car but finishes far ahead of him week after week. Still, this is southern Nevada. Pérez enjoys the same thing Mexican boxer Canelo Álvarez does when he comes to Las Vegas for a fight: a friendly crowd. I’m surrounded by a group of fans in Red Bull shirts who demand I yell “Checo number one!” I oblige.

But Checo does not finish number one. He finishes a disappointing 12th, not even good enough to get in the final qualifying session. The home-field favorite will have a lot of ground to make up tomorrow starting from 11th place. His teammate, the unstoppable Verstappen, will start in second, behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. As people make their way out of the grandstands, I hear cries of “Anybody but Max!”

SUNSET PARK IS A large and bucolic public park southeast of the Vegas airport. As I wander through it on race day, about 200 members of the Mongols motorcycle gang gather for a picnic, their bikes lined up as far as the eye can see. In the pavilion next to the Mongol party is the event I’m here for: a group of European motorsport fans gathered for a pre-race barbecue. Welcome to Las Vegas, mates.

The host, Andy Austin, owns a condo in the MGM Signature, and when he noticed his terrace overlooked the track, he thought about renting his place out for the weekend for $22,000, since he wasn’t an F1 fan: “Because I don’t know how to bet on it,” he explains. But when he realized his European friends and colleagues were interested, he extended an invitation. “We have the perfect spot for this. We are looking on seats that go for a thousand bucks per day,” says Remco Sonderen, who’s here from Amsterdam.

 “Everything in Vegas is bigger. I wouldn’t necessarily say better, but it’s bigger, more extroverted. So the race is also more of a show,” Sonderen says. “Americans are more competitive. You are raised ‘Be the best you can be.’ And in Europe, we say, ‘Doe Normaal,’ just do normal. Try your best to see where your limits are. And if you reach that limit, then you know where you are.”

It strikes me that if the Las Vegas Grand Prix is undergoing some version of this testing your limits, they’ve found them. They’ve made life miserable for locals, destroyed a car, got themselves sued by their own fans, and kept hundreds of thousands of people trapped in a labyrinth surrounded by $80 T-shirts and the Blue Man Group. Hunter S. Thompson could dream up nothing weirder. But to hear these European fans tell it: Good, now you know where you are. And where you are is Las Vegas.

THAT NIGHT THE MOOD at the racetrack is more acutely excited than before. If the Las Vegas Grand Prix is, as Verstappen and others characterized it, all a show, then this is the big climax. The red carpet is out, and Ryan Reynolds, Rihanna, and A$AP Rocky roam the paddock. Bad Bunny makes a beeline for the hospitality suites. Shaquille O’Neal wanders around the pit lane trying to figure out how to get access to the starting grid. At a normal F1 race, there might be one A-lister who shows up and gets the ultimate VIP treatment: to hang out in the Red Bull or the Mercedes garage with the team. Here, there’s a celebrity guest in every garage. The organizers distributed to media a list of celebrities in attendance that was 72 pages long, from Jimmy Kimmel Live’s Guillermo to Brad Pitt.

What really makes the atmosphere feel more electric on race day, though, are the fans. It’s 10 p.m. and they arrived having already tied one on for the most part. The race reported a capacity crowd of 315,000 on track. And across town the surge in visitors is noted — for better and for worse. The concentration of tourists in the walled-off racing area along the Strip has kept people from venturing downtown. Plaza Hotel & Casino CEO Jonathan Jossel claimed on the City Cast Las Vegas podcast that the Plaza had one of the slowest weekends since Covid. Ross Mollison, producer of Absinthe, one of the top shows in town, wrote in an open letter that they suffered compared to the same weekend in past years. Other high-profile shows, from Penn & Teller to Barry Manilow, simply went dark for the weekend.

But at the high-end properties, it’s a different story. The MGM is seeing its highest-grossing weekend ever. Stories circulate around the racetrack that the table-games dealers at the Cosmopolitan made more than $300,000 in tips the night before. And Wynn CEO Craig Billings said his company had more requests for credit and money wired to the cage than ever. 

High rollers like these don’t watch from a grandstand seat. They have access to the Bellagio’s exclusive Fountain Club, where caviar and champagne flow for the 3,600 guests who forked over more than $11,000 per ticket. A woman named Devon from Woodlands, Texas, is one of those ticket holders, but she gave up her seat at Fountain Club and opted instead to watch the race from the Paddock Club Suite, which sits above the finish line. Here, too, a ticket affords you all the wagyu steak, lobster, and sushi your belly can fit. Fans like Devon huddle around space heaters outside and pull chairs along the terrace rail for the best views of the racetrack one could get.

Devon says her husband bought the tickets to entertain clients, but neither of them had ever watched Formula 1. They binged Drive to Survive to prepare. As they got more into the show, they got more excited about the race — and decided to use the tickets themselves. “We ended up bringing our family instead,” she says. When I ask her where her husband is, she has no idea: “Probably down there with a driver or something.” Ah, the good life.

When the lights go out and the race begins, there’s a huge cheer, the uncorking of a year’s worth of anticipation and anxiety in one moment. Nine months ago, it seemed an impossible feat of civic engineering and corporate muscle to make this race happen. Two nights ago, it felt as if it may all unravel. But now the cars are off, and there’s nothing, not even the outcome of the race, left in doubt.

Almost immediately, perhaps because of a lack of tire grip from the cold late-night desert temperatures, or perhaps from an oil spill caused by an antique car brought onto the track before the race (more pageantry to fuck up the motorsport, naturally), the cars slip and slide along the first turn and nearly cause a pileup. Later, on lap three, Lando Norris loses control of his McLaren on turn 11 after hitting a bump in the track and careens into a wall at top speed. (He was taken to the hospital though unharmed.)

Going into the race, it was assumed everyone was competing for second place behind Verstappen, but after he forces Leclerc off the track in the first lap, Verstappen is given a five-second penalty. Then on the 25th lap, when Verstappen attempts to pass Mercedes’ George Russell, the two collide, which brings a safety car onto the track and gives Sergio “Checo” Pérez the opportunity to pit and change tires, and maneuver himself into position to challenge for the win. 

On the 32nd lap, Pérez uses his drag-reduction system, which is like a turbo button that F1 cars can only use on certain sections of the track. It helps Pérez rocket past Leclerc on turn 14 and take the lead, and the fans lose their ever-loving minds. “Checo number one!” It may have been the bet I placed on Checo to win earlier that day, or it may have been my cloyingly American need to see underdogs prevail, but I lose my mind along with them. 

Among the fans cheering for Checo is David Woodley, who has also placed a bet on him to win. After describing his first night as a “shit show,” Woodley’s love for motorsports is rekindled anew tonight. “They give you champagne as you’re walking in,” he says. “Food was all free. I had four lobsters.”

Woodley recalls his first Grand Prix, in Montreal, where at the end of the race, fans broke out their own bottles of champagne. “I was just in the normal stands,” he says. “They started pouring it in glasses. I thought, ‘That doesn’t happen at NFL games.’ ” It felt like something too sophisticated to happen in America, but here he was toasting bubbly in Vegas.  

I tell Woodley that I think this might be what really makes Las Vegas the right city for Formula 1. Nowhere else in the world does a better job of making everyone, no matter where they are on the social ladder, feel just a rung or two higher, even for only a moment. It may be smoke and mirrors, but so is Formula 1. “We call ourselves backpackers to billionaires,” Liberty Media’s Wilm tells me. “That’s our fan base.” It may have taken Vegas and F1 a long time to find each other, but Liberty seems to want to make it permanent: It signed a 10-year deal with the city and is already selling tickets for next year’s race. Despite the stereotype of Formula 1 fans as champagne-sipping fancy pants, the truth is the petrolheads and car junkies are legion, without class or station. Champagne-sipping car junkies, but legion all the same. 

By the time I arrive back at the paddock, Pérez has given the lead back to Leclerc. By lap 40, Leclerc gives the lead up to Verstappen, and everyone knows it’s a race for second. Verstappen wins his record-setting 18th race this season, with only one more to go.

I wander back to the rear of the paddock area, where the garages for the bottom-tier teams sit across from the makeshift wedding chapel and casino. Down at that end, there’s no press, no gawking fans or paparazzi, no hubbub to speak of. There’s only crews for the also-ran teams, in jumpsuits and helmets, standing around watching the race on a big screen while they take smoke breaks. As the fates of their racers become clear, they extinguish their cigarettes, bid adieu to the Elvis impersonator who shared his lighter with them, and wander back to their garages. Another day at work, another curtain call.

As Verstappen crosses the finish line, where Justin Bieber waves the checkered flag, Verstappen sings “Viva Las Vegas.” Perhaps he’s having a laugh at the fans, perhaps with them. It doesn’t matter. He’s the unstoppable three-time world champion of racing. His team, Red Bull, had already won the Constructors’ Championship, which comes with an estimated $140 million prize, not even enough to break even for the team’s expenses this season. NASCAR, this is not. The rich get richer. The house always wins.

As Verstappen, Checo, and Leclerc make their way to the Bellagio for the podium celebration, fireworks erupt from high atop seven of the Strip’s massive casino towers. On the roof of the Aria, 60 stories above, Jon Loreto, a large bald man about 40 years old, stands guard by one of the launch sites with a hose, spraying down the rubber roof in case anything goes awry. He’s a pyrotechnic designer with the company Pyrotecnico, and one of the designers of this show — one of the biggest the company has ever done. Planning the show took months and required coordination between more than 50 people on the roofs of seven casinos. Each rooftop is its own operation, all happening in a tightly constrained area, and timed with the race. “You don’t have a lot of room to make errors,” Loreto says. “There’s no second chances.” 

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t travel with the crew to shows like this. He’s from a small town in rural Pennsylvania, and before this trip he’d only once been on an airplane. “I don’t even like to go to Philly,” he tells me. Pyrotecnico’s creative director, Rocco Vitale, invited Loreto along because he knew he loved F1. 

On race day, one would think a seat on the roof of the Aria, 600 feet in the air, would beat Andy Austin’s balcony or the Paddock Suite by a country mile. But instead of seeing his first live F1 race up close, Loreto watched it on his phone while listening to the cars roar by below. Up to this point, the experience had been simply overwhelming. “I don’t know if Vegas is for me,” he says. Formula 1, however, this sport of noblemen and aristocrats, makes sense to him. He didn’t need to have a $17 million car or even a $2,500 ticket and all-you-can-eat lobster to understand what was cool about this sport. It wasn’t the glitz and the glamour. It was the cars. The cars go really, really fast. The stakes were as high as the roof of the Aria. One mistake and your car could be a fireball. Do everything right, and you’ll fly. It’s high risk, high reward. And that, not the singers and dancers and movie stars, is the real show. The racing, for fans like Loreto anyway, delivered. 

As the racing show finishes, and Pyrotecnico’s show begins, Loreto is surrounded by explosions of colorful embers and sparks. When the crowd finishes its cheer, Loreto looks over the edge and takes in the city. “That was pretty spectacular,” he says.

“I don’t know if I fit in here. But if they do this race again, I’ll come back.”