Fake marinas and A-list celebrities turn Miami into F1’s ‘Super Bowl’
Florida track has become the place to be seen as motor racing’s expansion into the US market keeps gathering pace
Formula One copped a bit of flak last week when images of a fake man-made marina on the inside of one of the turns on Miami’s new track emerged online.
The pictures, of a few yachts hitched to trailers in an area barely big enough to swing a cat, let alone a few A-list celebrities, prompted online ridicule. So trashy. So vulgar. Like a knock-off version of Monaco (as if Monaco was not vulgar).
But it looks as if Formula One is going to have the last laugh. Tickets to this weekend’s inaugural Miami Grand Prix sold out in 40 minutes. The cheapest three-day grandstand seats were priced from $640 (£509) while three-day hospitality tickets cost up to $10,000.
“I’ve never seen so much excitement and demand for hospitality, from sponsors, or buzz for a grand prix. Ever,” Mclaren chief executive Zak Brown said. “We had one of the largest hospitality buyers in Miami put in more than double the number of requests we could fulfil. And that was without even trying.”
Brown, an American himself, albeit from Los Angeles, reckons the race, which is based around the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium, is going to become “Formula One’s Super Bowl”. An event to see and at which to be seen. While Leclerc’s battle with world champion Max Verstappen will be the main event – unless Mercedes can perform a miracle and provide Lewis Hamilton with a machine capable of fighting for victory – every team has a VIP list stretching out to the Florida Keys, with the likes of Travis Scott, Martin Garrix, Snoop Dogg and Calvin Harris all set to descend on the city for star-studded parties. Every self-respecting golfer with a mansion from Fort Lauderdale to Boca Raton will be there, too.
Speaking of golf, Hamilton is teeing it up with NFL legend Tom Brady at an IWC Schaffhausen event at the Miami Beach golf club today. It is going to be that sort of week. “The celebrity element is going to be… what in America we’re all used to seeing at the Super Bowl,” Brown says. “That type of demand. That type of ticket value, that number of celebrities. It’s going to be awesome.”
That last statement is open to debate. There are those fans who prefer their F1 a little more traditional; who would rather hear the sound of roaring V10s echoing through the Ardennes than watch various celebrities preening themselves on the back of stationary yachts in fake marinas – there will also, apparently, be a beach created by the Hard Rock Club, which itself features resort-style pools and bars. But F1 is not for turning.
Owner Liberty Media has struck on a good thing with the United States and it is going to drive it all the way to the bank.
The Miami race is one of two on US soil this season, along with the autumn race in Austin, Texas. Next year it will be three when the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, taking in the Strip and many of Sin City’s most famous casinos, takes place.
There have been false dawns before, of course, where F1 and the US are concerned. No country has had as many F1 race venues as the States, which held its first world championship round at Indianapolis in 1950, albeit under Indy500 regulations.
Since then F1 has visited Sebring (also in Florida), Riverside in California, Watkins Glen in upstate New York, Long Beach in California, Las Vegas in Nevada, Detroit in Michigan, Dallas in Texas, Phoenix in Arizona, Indianapolis again, as well as Austin. None quite managed to crack the States, although the energy at last year’s Austin race was on a different level; a sign that the sport had truly arrived. Brown has no doubts about that. A combination of the socalled Netflix effect – the phenomenal success of the fly-on-the-wall Drive to Survive series – plus more depth around the general television coverage in the US, along with more sophisticated marketing and social media activity from teams, and a more engaging battle at the front of the grid, has, he says, made all the difference. “You put all that together and we’ve gone from, ‘We really need to get America on track’ to, ‘It’s there’. Now we just need to let it grow.”
F1 is braced. As is Miami, with a reported 35,000 hotel bookings and an estimated $400million boost to the local economy each year of its 10-race contract. Never mind the vulgarity of the man-made marina and “MSC Cruises Yacht Club”, the qualms of F1 purists, or the complaints of local residents in Miami Gardens, a predominantly black neighbourhood where the Hard Rock Stadium sits and around which has been constructed the Miami International Autodrome, a 3.36mile circuit which mostly snakes around parking lots and freeways. Nothing, it seems, can stop this juggernaut. Miami is about to send F1 in the US stratospheric.