EMPTY PLATES AND TRACK LIKE ‘B&Q CAR PARK’
THERE may have been celebrities aplenty but not everything that glistened under the 30°C sun was golden. try the Paddock Club hospitality. If only you could. the poor service caused a massive stink because for fees of more than £10,000 per person there was a shortage of food so severe that crisis meetings were held at 7am on the last two mornings.
staff failed to turn up, and the teams have clubbed together to demand their money back. Mercedes had 300 guests in attendance, and all the other teams substantial numbers, so there are big bucks at stake here.
One problem, it seems, is that Miami Dolphins declined Formula One’s own well-oiled service, whose staff run the facility seamlessly all around the world, and instead took it in-house.
‘Everyone is furious,’ said one team insider. ‘People are staring at empty plates and scraped out serving trays within 10 minutes of such food as there is arriving.’
the track needs some work, too — as is usually the case at new venues. Hamilton criticised its tight left-right chicane at turns 14 and 15 as a ‘B&Q car park’. He called for it to be done away with.
His compatriot Lando Norris said the organisers had ‘winged it’ with the track, which required some resurfacing at turn 17 on Friday. Red Bull’s sergio Perez described the asphalt — laid on a purpose-built temporary configuration incorporating existing roads — as a ‘joke’.
All drivers complained of it being slippery off the racing line and so militating against overtaking. this searing heat only served to render the surface all the more glassy.
Miami Grand Prix boss tom Garfinkel, chief executive of the Dolphins, responded by promising changes for the years ahead. ‘We are evaluating the drivers’ comments to make sure we can improve, and we are open to changing whatever we need to do to make the track better.
‘I don’t know if we communicated well enough why the chicane exists. It was necessary to slow the drivers down because we don’t have enough run-off space.
‘But from talking to Formula One and the FIA, there is an opportunity to remodel this and make it better. We are also evaluating the surface, and we want to make that right, if needed.
‘If the drivers cannot go off the racing line, there is never going to be as much overtaking as we wanted.’
With the cheapest weekend tickets setting you back a budget-busting £875 and a supposed 80,000 crowd, you might think there would be a huge profit for the hosts. Not so, according to Garfinkel, such was the outlay on the event.
‘If you asked me six months ago, I would have expected to make money based on where the revenues were heading, but we are not going to make money this year,’ he said.
‘the expenses far exceeded our expectations but that is because we wanted to do everything first class. We want to do things right.’