It is the hottest ticket in town, a truly A-list event even by America’s star-spangled standards.
When the lights go out for Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix, Formula One will officially roar into a new boom-time era. It will be the era of billion-dollar drivers, night races in Las Vegas and record TV audiences. No wonder Porsche and Audi now want to get in on the act. The F1 scene has always been glamorous, always been awash with money, always been a high-end commercial playground. But the inaugural Miami race will take it to another level.
For race day, there will be a crowd of 85,000 at the track which runs through the campus of the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium. The cheapest tickets in the stands have a face value of $500 but are reselling for $2,500. But it is in the hospitality areas where the numbers become eye-watering.
If you can drum up nine pals, then the 10 of you can rent a cabana at the Hard Rock Beach Club, close to turns 11-13, for $65,000. Access to the Paddock Club, Formula One’s traditional hospitality area behind the team garages, for race day is now costing in excess of $15,000 on the black market.
And those sorts of prices, experts say, will make the Miami Grand Prix a sporting occasion to rival the Super Bowl in terms of revenue. According to the highly-respected Sports Business Journal, it will rank alongside the Monaco Grand Prix and the one in Austin, Texas, later this year, as the most lucrative race on the F1 calendar.
The headline sponsor, Crypto.com, already has a $100million, five-year sponsorship deal with Formula One and the Miami Grand Prix will have five more commercial sponsors - Gainbridge, Hard Rock, JP Morgan, Red Bull and MindMaze - all paying in excess of a million dollars. Top teams such as Mercedes and McLaren are inviting 1,000 guests each while the company in charge of public catering at the event reckon spending per head on race day will be in excess of the $167 figure recorded at the Super Bowl in Los Angeles earlier this year.
The race, which will start at 8.30pm British time on Sunday, is expected to attract a host of big-name sporting stars, celebrities and tycoons. You can be fairly sure that David Beckham will be on the premises. A lot of the unprecedented demand and interest has been sparked by the Netflix documentary series Drive To Survive, which has been a massive hit in the United States and is currently in a fourth season.
A few drivers are not happy with how they are portrayed, but it has given Formula One the official breakthrough it so desperately wanted in the States. In 2023, there will be three races in the States, with the championship returning to Miami and to the Circuit of the Americas in Austin but also going to Vegas for a race under street lights in November.
And when you have made it in Vegas... you have officially made it. Boom-time for Formula One is go, go, go.
