After a spend of nearly half a billion pounds and more razzmatazz thrown at a Formula One race than ever before, something as simple as a loose manhole cover derailed the sport’s return for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Back in the early 1980s, essentially a car park acted as the circuit for the then Caesars Palace Grand Prix.
This time, along what must be one of the richest stretches of roads in the world, Vegas’ famous Strip, the concrete around the manhole cover in question broke down and was sucked into the base of Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.
First practice was cancelled and second practice was delayed by two-and-a-half hours to 2.30am local time, with disgruntled ticket holders forced to empty the stands an hour earlier “due to logistical considerations”. Some had paid thousands of pounds for the privilege to see eight minutes of running.
For the sport’s owner, Liberty Media, which has made cracking the United States their No1 priority, it was about as calamitous a return to Vegas as imaginable.
A closer look at what happened to Carlos Sainz as he was forced to stop out on track 🔴 pic.twitter.com/uCNTGSFOBr
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) November 17, 2023
The whole build-up to the race has felt like a massive public relations exercise at times. For F1, it was a total and utter PR disaster. The only blessing was that neither Sainz nor Esteban Ocon, whose Alpine was also damaged, were hurt. To add insult to injury, the damage and replaced parts earned Sainz a ten-place grid penalty for Sunday's race.
The sport’s major players went into damage limitation mode as quickly as possible. Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff was particularly punchy to those daring to criticise the manhole derailment and how it could have been avoided.
Speaking in the team bosses’ press conference shortly after the incident, Wolff insisted: “That is not a black eye [for F1]. This is nothing. We have a free practice we are not doing, and no one is going to talk about it tomorrow. It is completely ridiculous that you are speaking about a f***ing drain cover that’s been undone.”
Wolff may well be right that conversations around Las Vegas in F1 will move on tomorrow and that this will be a mere footnote to the third race weekend in the US if it proves plain sailing for the rest of the weekend.
But, as it stands, it is the worst possible start to the penultimate grand prix of the 2023 season. One only has to look at the sponsors’ names across the various teams’ cars, as well as F1’s own advertising hoardings, to see how important the US market is to the sport.
Long before this moment, F1 and the US have had an uneasy relationship. Former puppet master Bernie Ecclestone spoke this week of his regret at his inability to crack Vegas with two races there four decades ago.
In all, F1 has raced at 12 different venues in the States. While the pair of Caesars Palace Grand Prix were a low point, they were comfortably eclipsed by the United States Grand Prix of 2005.
Back then, Michelin’s tyres were deemed unsafe, so only those on the Bridgestones — a mere six cars in total — were given permission to race. Spectators booed and beer cars were thrown onto the track.
There were echoes of that along the Strip as one disgruntled fan shouted: “Get those goddam cars on the road.”
American sports fans tend to be unforgiving. They are at their most enamoured with F1 right now. Races in Austin and Miami were sell-outs, and the viewing figures for the last series of Netflix’s Drive to Survive were up some 40 per cent in the US. The sport’s lawmakers were doing their best to brush this off as a mere blip, but behind closed doors they will be worried about the impact on their beloved American market.
A loose manhole cover is not necessarily new in F1. It has happened at the likes of Monaco and, most recently, Azerbaijan in 2019.
But it seemed an amazing oversight that all of an estimated 30 to 40 manhole covers were not checked over and over and over again to ensure they were safe, even when put up against the immense suction created by an F1 car flying over the top of them.
As Martin Brundle put it succinctly: “Very embarrassing. It’s a well-known problem. I’m surprised that this kind of thing wasn’t sorted out beforehand.”
Brundle did, however, wrongly predict that practice would not resume. It did eventually, in something of a race against time before local roads reopened at 4am. A far from ideal Vegas return.
