Street Circuits, am I right...?
The Las Vegas Grand Prix is the latest to have teething problems
If you follow Formula 1 or motorsports in general, you have probably heard about the calamity of the first practice on the new Las Vegas street circuit. Even if you aren’t a fan, you’ve probably seen something on the news or your social media feed as it has crossed over from sports to mainstream media.
Just nine minutes into the first practice for the race, the first moments of payoff from a year-long construction project drawing the ire of thousands of residents and tourists alike, the red flag flew, and two multi-million dollar race cars were ruined. Why? The concrete surrounding a water valve cover failed under the incredible vibration and suction of state-of-the-art Formula 1 cars racing over it at top speed. Ouch.
Of course, the “internet” has quickly lambasted anyone involved in creating the event and circuit as idiots for failure to foresee such a thing. I saw the phrase “shitshow” on my Instagram feed more than a dozen times.
Street circuit races have their fans and detractors, and they are often a mixed bag of success and failure. Any time you take public roads and convert them into a high-speed race track, there will be less than optimal aspects. From the construction and paving efforts necessary to create a suitable (we hope) race surface that disrupts local traffic leading up to the event to the required road closures and disruption to daily routines during the race weekend, there will be unhappy people.
The best race organizers can do is put on a show that is good for the fans and the race teams so that all of the pain leading up to the event is evened out by the revenue, attention, and excitement the race creates. I have seen this happen live and in person as someone who lived a few hundred yards away from the course layout for the inaugural Music City Grand Prix.
For the most part, I have to say that the organizers of the Nashville race have done an exceptional job of mitigating inconvenience to residents and tourists while building the course each year. The event has never been perfect, and the surface started life as almost too rough to race on but has been refined each year. But as much as there are many parallels between the cities, Nashville is not Las Vegas, and Indy Car is not Formula 1.
Las Vegas will not get a pass on anything for a race that has cost around half a billion dollars to produce and is watched by nearly one hundred million people worldwide. So far, things are off to a very rough start. We will probably never know precisely why the utility cover did not stay in place. I have to assume that each one on the circuit had been mapped out and welded or otherwise secured before cars hit the track because that has been a standard practice for street circuits for some time. But things get overlooked, and this was either a minor oversight or an unforeseen issue that led to an outsized impact.
It is certainly not the first time a street circuit has had similar issues. Most recently, in the 2019 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, a similar drain cover was dislodged and damaged George Russell’s Williams car during practice. Other street circuits in Formula 1 and other race series have had similar issues with utility covers and potholes. Not to mention problems with the curbing a few weeks ago in Qatar that required a change to the track layout.
Canceling the first practice and substantially delaying the second had follow-on effects, making the news as security was seen removing spectators from seats they had paid thousands of dollars for. The scheduled security shifts had ended because the delay had pushed the schedule to the right. Without adequate security, the organizers had to close the track, removing all fans from the stands for the final practice session.
For anyone on the outside looking in, this is a disastrous start to the inaugural event. Even for experienced event organizers, this is so far from how you want a race to begin it’s hard to see how they will recover. But I’m sure they will, and by the end of the weekend, I hope the race lives up to the hype and is worth the effort and inconvenience.
This is also a fantastic lesson and gut-check moment for all other cities that host street circuit racing, whether preparing for their second race (Chicago) or close to the fiftieth event (Long Beach). I especially hope the organizers of my hometown Music City Grand Prix have been watching (and I know they are) because while the 2024 race will be the fourth one, it will have an entirely new layout through the city and one that poses very similar problems to that of the Vegas race.
Due to construction beginning on a new football stadium for the Tennessee Titans, the original track layout cannot be used for the next three years. At the 2023 race, the organizers unveiled the new course that will race through the heart of downtown Nashville including the famous lower Broadway area, home to the neon-coated bars, Honky Tonks, and hotels.
The track will close several downtown city blocks containing apartment buildings and hotels. I initially wasn’t sure how this could work as people living and staying in the area “inside the track” will still need to be able to go to work or move around outside of downtown. But Vegas solved similar problems with massive temporary bridges built not for pedestrians but for regular traffic to go over the track. Using the same system, I can see how the track can be closed, and the people living/staying in the closed area can still come and go as they need, but it will require a lot of work.
Also, several streets that will see Indy cars racing on them for the first time are in terrible condition. I drive them weekly; they are bad, with numerous potholes and broken, uneven asphalt. Significant paving work is required before the event while serving as critical residential and tourist traffic routes. With less than a year to the race, I feel it needs to begin soon to avoid what we see in Vegas now.
At least the Music City Grand Prix won’t have to deal with the schedule issues Vegas has, which are so convoluted and odd that I won’t even begin to get into it here. If you want to read about why the racing doesn’t start until midnight Eastern time, you can Google it; there are plenty of rants, I mean articles covering that topic.