AT&T provided flights from Washington, DC, to Las Vegas and accommodation so Ars could attend the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
LAS VEGAS—Formula 1 held the third annual Las Vegas Grand Prix this past weekend in the Nevada city. The race is an outlier in so many ways, and a divisive one at that. Some love the bright lights that make it appear to be set in Mega-City One or F-Zero. Others resent the rampant commercialism of F1 at its most excessive. And this time, Ars was on the ground, making one of our periodic visits to the series. The race we saw was something of a damp squib, seemingly leaving McLaren’s Lando Norris in control of the championship.
At least that’s how it looked when I left the track on Saturday night. Within a few hours, Norris and his teammate (and one of his two title rivals) Oscar Piastri were both disqualified for having worn away too much of the “legality plank” underneath the car—more on that in a while.
Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images I was a huge skeptic of the idea when the Las Vegas race was announced, but the first two events put on a good show. Year three was a little more dull, however.
Emblematic of the new F1
Unlike most Grands Prix, Liberty Media promotes this one itself. It spent half a billion dollars to get ready for the 2023 event, some of that on the pit lane and paddock complex, yet more on resurfacing the roads to the standards preferred by these thoroughbred racing cars. The track layout—which looks like a pig on its back—is typical of North American street circuits.
In other words, mostly long straights joined by slow, 90-degree corners. There are a couple of exceptions; technically turn 17 is the fastest corner in the series. Cars negotiate this bend at more than 210 mph (337 km/h) in the dry, although the drivers scarcely register it as a corner in such conditions. In the wet it’s a different story, and this year we got to see what that was like as heavy rain deluged the city in the days leading up to the race.
With so many slow corners, and a very long run down Las Vegas Boulevard from turn 12 to turn 14, the cars run in the same specification as at Monza, wearing low-profile wings and generating as little downforce as possible. The track surface doesn’t generate much mechanical grip from the tires at first—as the race weekend progresses, there is a significant amount of “track evolution” as daily road grime gets replaced with a layer of rubber deposited by the Pirelli racing tires.