The “biggest sporting event of the year on the planet”, as Christian Horner and the organization sell the Las Vegas F-1 Grand Prix that takes place this weekend, has started out as the “biggest fiasco” of the great circus. The first day’s show was inappropriate for a discipline with the history and pedigree of F-1: a loose manhole cover damaged at least three cars, including Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari, forcing the first practice session to be suspended. , delayed the second to 2:30 in the morning and the public was evicted from the stands… so the rehearsal was behind closed doors.

It is the bill of shame that Las Vegas has had to pay in its return to F-1 forty years after that ephemeral GP Caesars Palace that lasted two editions (1981-82)… Aside from the economic waste to condition the streets on a track homologated by the FIA ??for cars to compete at 300 km/h: 400 million dollars was projected by the owner of F-1, the American company Liberty Media, which would be the expenses of the event, although the executive director of the GP of Las Vegas, Steve Hill, estimates that “more than $100 million” has been spent on the urban layout alone that runs between iconic locations on the Strip such as Caesars Palace, the Bellagio and the Venetian, and the bill amounts to “ more than 650 million dollars before thinking about all the people they employ…” A fortune to make Las Vegas the most lavish GP of the 2023 F-1 World Championship, where competition is the least of it.

“I feel like a clown,” said Max Verstappen when he was surrounded by music, light shows, neon and noise. Noisy. Dazzled by the show, some ignored the most essential thing in F-1: safety. How is it possible that the manhole covers (in an urban, street surface) are not sealed before cars circulate that are sucked into the asphalt due to the ground effect?

It took just ten minutes for a cover to pop off “from a water valve on the circuit” – according to the official FIA statement –, with bad luck hitting Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari. The car, evidently, was destroyed with the lid embedded: chassis, engine, battery… To make matters worse, having to change a large number of components for a reason beyond the control of the driver and the car, Ferrari asked not to be penalized with the loss. of positions on the grid, but the stewards paradoxically gave him ten positions… The victim must also pay punishment.

“We have completely damaged the monohull, the engine, the battery… We have ruined Carlos’s session and it has cost us a fortune. This is unacceptable for Formula 1,” lamented a very angry Frédéric Vasseur, the boss of Ferrari. Which was not the only team affected, since the jumping sewer also damaged the chassis of Esteban Ocon’s Alpine and Guanyu Zhou’s Alfa Romeo.

Evidently, the first training session (at 8:30 p.m. local time) was suspended, as the workers rushed to properly seal the 120 manhole covers spread over the 6.2 km of the urban route to avoid more scares. The work took longer than expected, and the second session, scheduled for midnight, had to be delayed until 2:30 in the morning… and without an audience in the stands.

That was the other pearl of the day: the fans, who had paid tickets for $1,500 for three days (twice as much as in Austin), were only able to see the cars for ten minutes. After waiting for four hours, circuit security agents evicted them. The reason: Las Vegas labor law establishes that you cannot work on the circuit after 1:30 a.m. So the ninety minutes of training were behind closed doors… as had not happened since the pandemic. Which the fans did not like at all.

Although there are always those who come out in defense of the great circus, like Toto Wolff, director and co-owner of Mercedes, who reacted angrily to a journalist’s question. “It’s completely ridiculous! How can you dare to speak ill of an event that sets new standards in everything? You’re talking about the damn drain cover, which came off. That’s happened before! It’s nothing, it’s the Libres 1!