Today, Explained - F1: Gears and Loathing in Las Vegas

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Formula 1 spent half a billion dollars to return to Las Vegas. Jalopnik’s Elizabeth Blackstock explains how a lackluster season and this weekend’s nothingburger race threaten F1's American dreams. This episode was produced by Isabel Angell, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Formula One returns to Las Vegas this weekend for the first time since 1982 and apparently F1 has dropped somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars to convert the strip into a race course. And what does half a billion dollars get you? Last night, just nine minutes into a practice run, Carlos Sainz hit a loose manhole cover on the Las Vegas strip, damaged his Ferrari, and the entire event ground to a halt. Ferrari's team principal, Frederic Vasseur, was inconsolable.

I think it's just unacceptable for the F1 today. But the company man interviewing Vasseur tried to console him anyway. Ferrari Fred, it's Vegas, baby. Vegas! Fred, can we just reflect on the area? It's not just Ferrari, Fred. Max Verstappen, the reigning champion, told Reuters this Vegas event is 99% show and 1% sporting event.

Ouch. Formula One's America problem. Coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained. today explained my name is elizabeth blackstock and i am a motorsport journalist and author elizabeth

how'd you get into formula one a question i ask all people i meet i have been into formula one for almost 10 years now i I grew up with NASCAR. I was born and raised in Michigan, so my whole family was in the auto industry. NASCAR was kind of like the homegrown sport for us. And I saw the movie Rush that came out in 2013 about the 1976 Formula One season. And it was like the perfect combination of my interests at the time, which were like 1970s music, cars, and Chris Hemsworth. I can beat this guy, trust me. He's consistent, dependable.

Will he put his life on the line the day that really matters? From that point on, I was like, I need to know everything about this sport. I need to watch the races that are happening live. I need to know everything about the history of it. When I was 18, I moved to Austin, Texas, told myself I'll just go to one Formula One race and get it out of my system because there's a track out there in Austin. And I got out of that race and was planning with a friend to go to Europe the next year. God, it's been so long now since that first race. For people unlike you, for people who have no idea what Formula One is,

for people who only drive to, like, get to the mall or something, what exactly do they need to know about this sport? Man, Formula One is one of the oldest sports in terms of motorsport that exists. Jumping into an early lead is Juan Fangio, number one. In the early, like, 1930s, the prototype for Grand Prix racing, it was just a lot of rich dudes who could afford cars and wanted to go fast with their buddies. And since then, we've created it into one of the top cutting edge of technology and motorsport. This is a kind of racing series where you will never see a car like this on the road. That's a lot different than NASCAR, which is based roughly on the bodies of different Fords or Toyotas that you can actually go out and purchase. Formula One might have Mercedes as

a sponsor and a team, but you will never see a Mercedes that looks like the Formula One car because it is open wheel, open cockpit. It's intense. It's glitzy. It's glamorous. It is essentially the top tier of motorsport. And of course, because there's so much money in this sport, it makes perfect sense that it's coming to Las Vegas this weekend. Where does the story of this race start? So in about 2020, obviously the COVID-19 pandemic kind of hit the world. We were all sitting inside watching TV. A lot of people were introduced to the Netflix series Drive to Survive for the first time. I highly recommend it. Formula One is brutal.

It can get tough. It can get ugly. What a race! Amazing! You can be the hero today but forgotten tomorrow. Everybody's different, but the best ones can step up. And when sports started to come back, Formula One was actually one of the first forms of motorsport that was available. There is good news coming out of the world of Formula One as racers dust off their cars and get underway with the Austrian Grand Prix.

The British Formula One Grand Prix will go ahead in July. I knew a lot of people in America who were just like, yeah, whatever, I'll tune in and watch this. Suddenly America turned out to be this beautiful, growing audience here. And the powers that be in Formula One are American. It's Liberty Media. The president and CEO of Liberty Mutual. Media, but anyway. Which owns SiriusXM and a couple of other little entities here in the United States.

And they were like, oh, amazing. We've got this interest finally. Let's capitalize on it. And Las Vegas has always kind of been top of the list for Formula One. It kind of epitomizes the glitz and the glam of the series. I think it also embraces a little bit of the tackiness. I think that Formula One probably doesn't want to admit that it has, but it does. And so it first started being in talks in about 2021.

We heard the rumors. And then it was announced that we would have this race at the end of that year. Formula One racing is coming to Las Vegas. I can't wait to see this street with Formula One cars traveling 200 miles per hour down this Las Vegas strip. Give it up for Formula One tonight in Vegas. We know we haven't even had a single race there yet on that circuit, and they've already signed a contract for the next 10 years. Wow.

So they placed their bets on this track and this race, and they did it in a very big way. Okay, so that's the sort of buildup. And how's the execution been? The execution has been a little interesting. Every new race is always a process of learning, but there are a lot of added difficulties with the fact that this race is taking place

on the Las Vegas Strip itself and around the surrounding areas. So they've had to repave most of the roads. Months of construction on the 3.8 mile course through the heart of the city has caused traffic headaches for residents and for tourists. They've built grandstands. They've drained fountains. All of the healthy, established, mature trees in front of Bellagio, Las Vegas, were cut down in the middle of the night for the Formula One race. They've, you know, kind of pissed off some locals in the process just because of the massive facelift that they've given the city.

It is a nightmare driving to work. I am not able to take my stepdaughter to middle school in the morning. They're making all the money, and then we're just going to keep losing money. Another thing that Formula One has run into in setting up this race is the weather. And I know that probably sounds very silly, but it didn't actually occur to the powers that be in Formula One that it will be cold in the desert at night in November. Wait, like they didn't they didn't check what the weather was like at night in Las Vegas? That is absolutely correct. How much money does this event cost?

A lot of millions of dollars. We'll be in it for $600 million. And they were just like unconcerned. So it came out a couple of weeks ago that as they were putting this plan together for this race in 2021 it never occurred to formula one management to actually look into what the situation would be like um and earlier this season there was a race in qatar that was actually dangerously hot drivers were passing out in the cockpit they were throwing up in their helmets um physically they were struggling i don't feel well man are you retiring mate and the following race was the u.s grand prix in october and i was speaking to several people

associated with formula one while i was there covering it on the ground and they were wondering if las vegas would be similar and i had to announce that is not how the desert works here uh it is going to be it's going to be cold we're going to be having the opposite issue where like instead of everyone just like jumping out of their cars and getting into ice baths we're going to be wanting to like wrap them up in the tire blankets and keep them warm and what does it mean for the actual race if the weather's cold does it matter it does matter the the race if the weather's cold? Does it matter? It does matter. The tires that Formula One has developed, there are special compounds that are only raced in this sport,

but they're not designed for weather this cold. If you've ever tried to drive on ice, that's essentially what you're going to be getting with these tires. In order to get heat into them, they have to get warmed up. That's what's going to make them sticky. We believe this is the lowest grip level that we've seen. It's the coldest that we've seen in decades, probably. And so getting the tires working is going to be interesting. Are at least F1 fans excited about this? Well, I think there's kind of a mixed sentiment among F1 fans.

The response that a lot of traditional European fans have had to the growth of F1 in America has been quite negative. I mean, they just kind of assume that Americas are all honkies and like should only watch NASCAR. So there's been kind of this pushback from the beginning about the fact that America has three races and other countries don't have multiple. I'm excited. But that's mostly because I've been covering the evolution of this event. And I'm really excited to see how finally it exists on the track. Because there's been so much speculation and not a lot of it's been good. Since we're talking about Vegas, Elizabeth,

I have to ask, even as a fan, as a city where people go to gamble, if you had to bet, would you say this is going to be a success or more of a failure? I would go ahead and bet on it being more of a failure. I think because Formula One has already invested so much time and so much money and intends to race there for a decade, I think they're kind of looking at it as a way to say, okay, this first year will be our learning curve. There's a lot that they already can learn from based on the way that things have gone. But I just don't think this first year is going to play out quite as well as they are hoping it was a very similar situation in Miami where the traffic was bad the track there

is built around the Miami Gardens Dolphin Stadium so a lot of locals were who were against that stadium in the first place were against Formula One coming in there was so much disruption and especially when you consider that this is historically a community of color, Formula One didn't quite understand the concerns of the area that they were hosting the race in. I just, I think the Vegas situation has so many other variables that even Miami didn't have that we're going to, I'm trending toward it being a little bit of a chaotic problem. So box, box, box, box, box, box, box, box. America's been a bit of a problem for Formula One for a minute now. Elizabeth has more on that when we are back on Today Explained comes from Ramp.

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Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario it's me sean ramos from today explained back with elizabeth blackstock who's been writing about formula one and Las Vegas for Jalopnik. She told us that these United States have been a bit of an issue for Formula One for some time now.

Formula One has been historically a very European-based series. And from the very first year that this series existed in 1950, it has been trying to figure out how to break into the American market. In the early days, that meant having the Indy 500 on the calendar, despite the fact that no F1 driver ever really went out there to race on it. And since then, it's been a series of trying and kind of failing to find a home in the United States. They had tracks in upstate New York. They had a street circuit in Long Beach. Then they went through this terribly misguided period where they were just dumping street races

into places like Dallas in the middle of summer. But the drivers needed ice and cold drinks as the temperatures climbed to 100 outside the car and 140 inside. They suffered from the track, which was a mess. The State Fair Park circuit crumbled like cheese. But, like, Americans are so passionate. We have a deep love of sport.

We have a deep passion for all things, you know, that get our blood going, that get our blood pumping, that we get excited about. And Formula One really wants to take advantage of the fact that Americans are here. They're willing to kind of spend money, but there's just been so many issues kind of getting a foothold here in the United States. We finally kind of got that thanks to Drive to Survive. In Formula One, it has to be always good characters and bad ones and heroes and antiheroes. So I'm on the dark side. and bad ones and heroes and anti-heroes. So I'm on the dark side.

The fan base has grown so much and it just has been such untapped potential so far. Okay, so Drive to Survive sort of resets Formula One's relationship with the United States. What happens next? What's their first big moment after this TV show? So the 2021 Formula One season was the first one that a lot of fans got into after they watched Drive to Survive. So a documentary obviously is a little bit manufactured to create compelling storylines,

but the 2021 season, like you couldn't have written that one if you wanted to. Modern Formula One has been defined kind of by dynasties. So there's usually a team and a driver who will be very successful during a certain period of time. That's because that driver and that team capitalized best on a rule set that was available. So from, you know, 2014 until 2020, Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes were absolutely dominant. The world championship record is equal. Lewis Hamilton wins the Turkish Grand Prix and is a seven time champion of the world. That was because they got that formula right when it came to the new style of engines and the new style of car that was introduced.

That's for all the kids out there who dream the impossible. 2021 was the very last year of that regulation set. And Red Bull Racing came out of nowhere to challenge Mercedes for the title. Max Verstappen was its star driver. For the first time on U.S. soil, Max Verstappen wins the U.S. Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton has to settle for second. And here he came to break the kind of Mercedes dominance that we had seen and to take that championship in the last lap of the last race.

Of all the drama, of all the controversy, of all the magic moments in Formula 1 in 2021, it comes down to this. And at this moment, the championship can only be won by one. And it's going Dutch in 2021. Max Verstappen, for the first time ever, is champion of the world. Yes! Yes! Okay, so a crazy 2021 for F1.

Even better than what you saw in Drive to Survive. Has it remained super exciting in the years that followed? It has not. Formula One in 2021 introduced a brand new rule set. We have then gone kind of back into that sport of dynasties. Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen got the formula right. They've been absolutely dominant for the first time in f1 history it's 10 wins in succession a perfect 10 out of 10

for max verstappen as he wins the italian grand prix and if you look at this season the championship has been wrapped up for about a month already you are a's another issue Vegas is facing is, you know, we already know Max Verstappen is the world champion. There's nothing super compelling on that front. And that's, you know, part of a greater issue that America has been having with Formula One is that it's not as exciting as it was. So, wait, you're saying that this whole thing that we've been talking about this entire time, this big Formula One event in Las Vegas, is totally inconsequential to the sport? Absolutely. You know, Formula One has really hyped it up of, like, who's going to be second? Who's going to be second? Who's going to be second?

But it's like, we already know. If you're going to place a bet on who's going to win this race, it's going to be Max Verstappen. What is that doing to like popularity and ratings of this sport? They have just fallen. I mean, it's been a dramatic problem. Formula One released some statistics. I believe that social media mentions of Formula One have dropped 70% over the course of this season just because of that amount of dominance. Even longtime F1 fans kind of hate seeing the same guy win everything.

It's frustrating when it is a foregone conclusion. Yeah, it sounds like playing Mario Kart with the homies would be more exciting at this point. Honestly, you are not wrong. In America, obviously, like, we love the underdog story. We want to see people, like, fight from the back. We want to see competition. We care a lot less about being on the forefront of technological innovation. And so that's kind of put us off of that. Formula One's response is that we're just not smart enough, I think, to understand it. Yeah, it's it's like it's rough out there.

That's no way to get a new market. responding to your sport. And he told me no, that, you know, America, yes, it is different, but his sport is different. So he sees no reason to change kind of the marketing structure to, you know, appeal better to an American audience. And I think that is just such a, it's such a narrow mindset. I think one of the biggest things that I noticed and have noticed at these races is, you know, I went to Miami in the first year and I like I come from pretty like humble backgrounds. I was pretty poor when I was a kid and I could I was so out of place in this paddock that was filled with celebrities and like fashion and designer labels. And I was like, this isn't, I don't relate to this. And I know that a lot of other people

who are watching don't either. And if I can feel out of place in this garage area, in this paddock, after having done this for over almost a decade now, I can't imagine how a new fan must feel, you know, kind of seeing the fact that they have such little value for this audience, which I find very, very fascinating. If they just toned it down a little bit, if they were willing to laugh at themselves, if they were willing to not

take everything so seriously, I think it would have such a better impact, not just in America, but around the world and the other audiences that are still left untapped. You know, hearing you say that makes me wonder if Vegas could be a good thing for this sport, because Las Vegas, famously a playground for the rich, the middle class, even the poor. I mean, yeah, you can stay at like the fanciest hotels on the Strip or you can stay off the Strip and like go get married for like $200, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

I think part of the issue somehow with Vegas this year, Formula One has managed to alienate both the ultra rich and like the average Joe who would be buying the tickets. The tickets pricings were so expensive. No one could really afford to go unless they were super rich. But Formula One doesn't quite have the profile to attract people willing to spend $5 million for a big swanky weekend. The tickets have not sold out. At the time we're speaking, there are still tickets available.

I think there's a lot of room for growth next year as they kind of renegotiate those ticket prices to be that prestige product that, you know, obviously people want to be involved in F1 because it is kind of like swanky and high class. But also you still need to like get people in the door and I think as they continue with this race that will be the biggest problem that they have to tackle. I'm excited to see how it all plays out like on the ground in person. I hope it's not a mess

but I kind of do hope it is as well. Well, I hope you have a good time out there and you know, bring a jacket because it gets cold at night. Oh, absolutely. I am prepared. I don't know about bring a jacket because it gets cold at night. Oh, absolutely. I am prepared. I don't know about them Europeans, but I'm ready to roll. Elizabeth Blackstock, she's a motorsport journalist.

You can read her work at jalopnik.com. Our show today was produced by Isabel Angel. We were edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by David Herman. Special thanks to Bird Pinkerton, who wants everyone to know that Williams is the best F1 team. We'll take your word for it, Bird.

Today Explained is the best daily news team. We're rounded out by Halima Shah, Abishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, John Ahrens, Victoria Chamberlain, Siona Petros, Patrick Boyd, and Rob Byers. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi.

Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. Our Noel King is Noel King. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is part of Vox, which is totally free. Thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. Join us at vox.com slash give. Thank you. It's called a motor race, okay?

Sorry? We went car racing.