(car engine revving)
- Las Vegas, the city of sin,
the place I lost $80 on penny slots.
Earlier this year, F1 announced that in 2023
F1 cars will be racing under the lights on The Strip.
At first this seems like an awesome idea.
For all its faults and debauchery,
Vegas is one of America's favorite cities.
But if Vegas is so great for racing,
why was this idea a flop when F1 tried it 40 years ago?
What do we lose by adding another North American race
to the calendar?
And why does F1 keep traveling to street circuits
and not purpose-built race tracks?
What's the real cost of racing in Las Vegas?
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- Let's first address the elephant in the room.
The original Las Vegas F1 circuit at Caesar's Palace
was one of the worst tracks in F1 history.
In 1981 F1 introduced the Caesar's Palace Grand Prix.
Nah, not the American Grand Prix
or the Las Vegas Grand Prix,
Caesar's Palace Grand Prix was the official name.
If that doesn't already sound like an obvious cash grab,
just wait.
The course was a, let's say uninspired layout
in a parking lot, that looked more like an auto cross
than the most expensive motor racing series in the world.
The flat track had some decent overtaking zones
but didn't really fit the spectacle
that the sport was known for.
Even though the race was run in October
the Nevada desert was still the Nevada desert.
One of the hottest places in the world.
The underprepared asphalt of the parking lot track
made for some unbearable temperatures,
for both cars and drivers.
Brabham driver Nelson Piquet
notably suffered from heat stroke throughout the weekend.
And so many other drivers and cars were affected
by the heat, that only half of the 24 qualifiers
finished the race.
That's an insane amount of attrition.
The exposed nature of the track also meant that desert winds
would blow sand all over the course,
seriously affecting grip in certain areas.
1982 Was even worse
with air temperatures reaching 100 degrees.
Of the 36 cars that were flown out to Vegas,
only 12 finished the race.
Sounds pretty bad, right?
Who the heck would wanna try this again?
Well luckily for 2023,
not all of these problems still exist.
And F1's new Las Vegas proposal
seems to fix a lot of the others.
While sand on the track was a really big deal in the 80s,
it's something that F1 teams
are more used to dealing with now.
Races like the Bahrain Grand Prix have similar issues
and it can make for some really great racing.
Also, Las Vegas doesn't look like it did in the 80s,
when the casinos used to literally butt up
against the desert.
The city is now surrounded by a lot more infrastructure.
And this time around the track isn't a parking lot parade.
The new proposed layout will wind its way around the city
with the main straight being the Las Vegas Strip itself.
Wanted a spectacle? You've got it.
F1 cars will be screaming down The Strip at night
under the lights of all the casinos.
And the fact that it's a night race
also fixes the heat issue.
So it's a win, win, win, right?
(Nolan sighs) Well, I'm not 100% convinced.
A street circuit comes with a lot of compromises.
It's definitely cheaper than building a brand new facility
like Circuit of the Americas,
and we've seen other street circuits like Baku,
Jeddah and Miami serve as ways to get F1 to new places
without having to build a track.
Everything needs to be built up quickly
and torn down just as fast when the event is over.
And the biggest conceit of a street circuit
is that it needs to fit on the streets themselves.
Las Vegas, like most US cities, is built on a grid system.
Most existing corners are 90 degree left or 90 degree right.
Combine that with the fact that Las Vegas
has pretty much no elevation change,
and circuit designers have had to get a little creative
to make this work.
You can already see the compromises that need to be made.
For instance, the Las Vegas Strip
might be the centerpiece of the event, but surprisingly,
it's not the start/finish straight, that's out here.
This little stretch is about 325 meters
or to put that in perspective,
150 meters shorter than the straight at Monaco.
They need 160 meters just to fit all the cars on the grid.
So we're talking about a rundown to turn one
that is 165 meters max.
Pole sitter Kevin Magnussen
will barely have gotten up up to speed by turn one.
The point is that F1 doesn't always fit neatly
into a given city.
F1 has to be very choosy about which cities play host
to street circuits,
and I think that they might have screwed up a little bit
with Vegas.
'Cause if you look at all other cities
that host F1 on their streets,
you'll see that they have one thing that Las Vegas does not.
Water. (water splashes)
The street circuits in Monaco, Miami, Jeddah, Baku,
Singapore and Valencia are all coastal.
And it's not just for seaside views.
There's a practical reason not to have a street circuit
that's landlocked.
Let's look at the closest street circuit
to the Donut offices, Long Beach.
It's used for IndyCar, F1 used to run there as well,
and it runs along these portside roads of the city.
For one thing, these roads are sweeping and curvy
because they're built to follow the water's edge.
No straight line grid system here.
But one other thing you notice
is that these roads aren't the main roads of the city.
Not many people need these roads to work or commute
or to run their business.
Long Beach has a much easier time shutting down these roads
to let IndyCar race on them.
A few years ago, I went to the NYC ePrix for Formula E,
and it isn't in New York.
It's in an old shipping area of Brooklyn called Red Hook.
Not exactly a tourist hub.
But in Las Vegas, F1 wants to run down the main road,
the world famous Las Vegas Strip.
Can you imagine how many people's daily commutes
are gonna be affected by this track?
I mean, in a town like Monaco, you know what you're in for.
The Grand Prix there is just as famous as the town itself.
And Monaco is the exception to most F1 rules anyway.
But Vegas doesn't really care about F1.
Vegas is famous for not caring about any event
that comes to it.
During a large event like the Consumer Electronics Show,
if you're only a few city blocks away
you could have no idea it's even taking place.
And now you want this city to shut down half its roads
for a race that doesn't even feature an American driver?
Sounds like a hard sell for the residents.
But despite the inconvenience to locals,
I think most residents will enjoy a race in Vegas.
And if they don't, let's be honest,
they're gonna have very little say in the matter anyway.
But you know who probably does have a lot to say?
The casinos.
The Las Vegas Strip is home to over 30 major hotels
and casinos.
All of which will be massively impacted
by a bunch of race cars blocking their driveways.
Now, I have no idea how exactly the deal
between Liberty Media and the City of Las Vegas
is supposed to work, but I'm guessing that the casinos
are definitely involved.
18 Of the casinos on The Strip
are owned by just two companies,
MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment.
But in Vegas, one company might own
and operate the casino business,
while a totally separate company owns the real estate.
Companies like VC, Dreamscape and Blackstone
own most of the actual facilities and buildings
relating to the casinos you know.
Geez, 2022 man.
Even the casinos have to pay rent
instead of owning property.
It's rough out there.
But what this means is that F1 and Liberty Media
have dozens of big stakeholders that they need to appease
to get the Las Vegas F1 race off the ground.
The casinos stand to make a lot of money
from the influx of wealthy tourists coming into town.
And if they feel like something about the proposed plan
favors a competitor instead of them,
they're gonna raise a stink about it.
I guarantee, on race weekend some casino
is gonna try and get a grandstand lowered or something
because it blocks the view
from their sold out VIP pool deck, it's gonna happen.
So F1 is gonna have to build a brand new track,
make it fit in a city that isn't well suited for it,
and appeases about a dozen huge companies
that all wanna make more money than the other.
And while I don't doubt that F1 can do it,
I gotta ask, what does this cost?
And I don't mean how much money does this cost.
I mean, what do we lose for this to happen?
With Formula One's rising popularity,
parent company Liberty Media
has been adding more and more races
to the calendar every year, while at the same time
introducing a yearly cost cap to the sport
and lowering the allocation of parts that a team can have
in a year without incurring penalties.
Drivers, team bosses and engineers have been vocal
about the stress of this new schedule.
And because of all that,
I don't think we're gonna be adding an extra weekend
to the F1 calendar of next year.
So that means to add Las Vegas
we have to lose a track, right?
No problem.
What about the hotly contested Jeddah Corniche Circuit?
A track that many drivers call too dangerous race on
and many fans object to,
either on the basis of Saudi Arabia's human rights policies
or the likelihood of oil refinery bombings
during the weekend. (Nolan sighs)
Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
Jeddah has a contract with F1 until 2025.
Many other tracks have multi-year contracts as well.
In fact, the only current tracks that don't have agreements
to host F1 next year are Monaco, the Red Bull Ring,
Paul Ricard in France, Spa and Mexico.
So which one do we lose?
Monaco is pretty famous for having the least passing
of any race during the season.
And they have some weird rules they have grandfathered in,
like having their own TV crew for the weekend,
but Monaco is also synonymous with the sport.
Maybe it's most famous race.
And drivers still love the challenge of it.
The Paul Ricard circuit has been criticized
for generating boring events in the past as well,
but last year's race was great.
And with the new cars being able to follow closely,
this track is poised for a really good battle in 2022.
Plus, we got two French drivers
and a French team on the grid,
so we kinda need a French Grand Prix.
I doubt we'll lose the Red Bull Ring
because Red Bull has their own team
and wouldn't wanna lose the chance to race
at their home track.
So that leaves Mexico, a great track with a wonderful crowd,
and Spa, one of the most legendary circuits on the calendar.
Which of these venues is gonna get cut?
I don't envy the people that have to make this decision
because I don't think there's any winning here,
unless they just add Las Vegas as an extra race.
I've got praises and criticisms
for each of these at risk tracks.
But what I don't wanna see is for F1
to cut the one with the least money.
But if they don't cut a race, then team budgets
and parts allocations will be spread even thinner
than they already are.
What that means is that with the rising demand
for more races, we could see a future
where F1 chooses to race at more street courses
over tracks with longer histories in the sport.
And as much as I'd love to have a race
that I can literally drive to, I don't want it
if it means losing the tracks
that helped get me into the sport in the first place.
Thank you very much for watching. What do you guys think?
Which track would you wanna see cut for Las Vegas?
What do you think about hosting a race in Las Vegas?
Are you gonna go?
Tickets are probably gonna be pretty expensive.
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