Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Miami ready to showcase F1's glitz and glamour

- By Jenna Fryer

Post Malone asked to play on Saturday, wanting raceday free so he could party at this year’s mostantici­pated-see-and-be-seen sporting event this year.

Formula One, one of the hottest entertainm­ent properties in the world, roars into Miami this weekend as “Drive to Survive” hits South Beach. The inaugural Miami Grand Prix is here-and-ready to dazzle a United States audience, which has at last caught wind of the glamorous, globe-trotting series.

It’s been mostly NASCAR around these parts the last two decades.

IndyCar goes up and down. F1 is so distant, on television at the most sleepchall­enging times, and so much glitzier than anything the general American race fan can afford or relate to.

F1 races in Australia and Azerbaijan, in Monza and Monaco, and Singapore, as well as Saudi Arabia. Its drivers face moral dilemmas — when they race in countries with questionab­le human rights records and deplorable restrictio­ns. A missile struck a refinery in March during an F1 practice in Saudi Arabia and drivers kept at it, while flames and smoke poured into the sky several miles away.

They raced the next day. And though it’s just so very different from what American race fans are used to — Netflix and its behindthe-scenes docuseries have captured a new audience.

Tom Garfinkel, vice chairman of the Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium, is part-owner of the Miami race. He began chasing a second F1 stop in the U.S. — alongside Texas — in 2017.

What’s finally been created is a three-day event — five if you count the parties leading into the events — that is the most hypedHard Rock has seen in some time. The cheapest entry point was a Friday general admission pass for $300, and suites never even went on sale to the public because Garfinkel had more than 5,000 deposits of $5,000 each through early inquiries.

The U.S. went four years without an F1 race after the series pulled out of the Indianapol­is Motor Speedway in 2007. The series was revived in 2012 in Austin, Texas, and the explosion of “Drive To Survive” helped that race grow into a three-day festival, which last year drew more than 300,000.

Garfinfkel’s group capped Miami Internatio­nal Autodrome capacity at 85,000 so that those “on the campus” can truly sample some of that fabulous life captured on the Netflix show.

The track was originally proposed to be built in downtown Miami, but instead was replanted 15 miles north to incorporat­e Hard Rock Stadium.

South Beach will be open all-night and the F1 campus will be the-place-to-be, during a busy week, which also has two Miami Heat and Florida Panthers playoff games each in the area.

The “campus” includes a man-made beach and marina. If Post Malone heads to — say — the Yacht Club to catch the race, anyone with a campus pass can follow him all the way to the first floor. There’s a VIP experience on the third floor and Garfinkel has created an exclusive playground filled with the sexiness of F1, which has caught America’s attention.

“The celebrity attendance is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Garfinkel said in an interview with The Associated Press. “This is the Grammys meets the Oscars meets the ESPYs meets the Allen & Co. event,” he said of the annual billionair­es’ summer retreat.

“It’s CEO’s, entertaine­rs, famous athletes, the heads of private equity and real estate and industry,” he said. “Miami is a curator of culture for a lot of things — art, food, this is the center of hospitalit­y — and we are expecting people to enjoy all of that, while viewing the the highest form of motorsport in the world.”

Garfinkel’s motorsport­s roots date to his start as executive vice president at Chip Ganassi Racing.

He was part-owner of a NASCAR team, when he was a team CEO in Major League Baseball, and now he runs billionair­e Stephen Ross’ sports properties.

Their vision for Hard Rock was to make the Dolphins’ home a global stadium, and as Garfinkel chases games in the 2026 World Cup, he will cross a major goal off his list with Sunday’s race.

Miami pushes the U.S. to two events in one F1 calendar season and a 2023

Las Vegas night race down The Strip was announced in March — swelling the next schedule to three U.S. stops.

Over half the IndyCar paddock was headed to Miami this weekend, including Pato O’Ward, a Mexican resident of Texas, will be celebratin­g his 23rd birthday as a McLaren ambassador and coming off a win Sunday.

Former F1 driver Romain

Grosjean, a Miami-area resident, is a race ambassador; four-time Indianapol­is 500 winner Helio Castroneve­s lives in Ft. Lauderdale, and Alexander Rossi, who won the Indy 500 the year he moved from F1 to IndyCar, will attend with his fellow competitor­s as a fan.

“I’m just excited for Formula One and America. It’s been a long time coming to have multiple races in the states; it’s a big country and there’s no reason not to have three,” Rossi said. “There’s going to be a lot of first-timers there and I think they’re going to be treated to an unbelievab­le show.”

That was the idea behind this weekend’s final product. Initial interest lists collected 300,000 names of interested ticke-buyers, but in capping the number the first-year event has high demand on aftermarke­t sites; a pair of seats on the start/finish line are listed for just less than $14,000 each.

F1 is hot and Miami is ready to show it can keep pace with the cars screeching 198 mph around the concerts and the beach party and the popping of champagne from the yachts inside the marina.

“We do have a lot of high-end hospitalit­y and luxury suites and people spend a lot of money for very high-end tickets,” Garfinkel said. “We wanted to make sure this is a fantastic experience. Open the map. Do you want to go to North Campus and have Harry’s pizza? Do you want to take a gondola ride to the racetrack? Do you want to go see the yachts or the DJ’s? People are going to be able to experience the racetrack from different places in different places, that’s what we tried to create.”

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