How star-studded Miami Grand Prix reveals F1's direction of travel

“You’re here for the Formula 1, huh?” Angel, GP Racing’s Uber driver, doesn’t miss a trick as he threads his Honda CR-V along the I-95 Expressway, deftly avoiding the polarised extremes of Miami traffic: bovine doziness at one end, throttle-blipping, lane-swapping perma-frenzy at the other. “I looked at tickets on resale, they’re going at $1000 minimum – for Saturday…”

Miami sprawls for miles in all directions like a Sim City game gone rogue, a predominantly low-rise horizon bounded by the sea to the east and petering out into the Everglades National Park to the west and south, where the wetlands stand as an obstinate impasse to the further pouring of concrete. Little wonder the denizens of the city’s highways are seemingly in either no hurry at all to reach their destinations, or hell-bent on re-enacting scenes from The Fast & The Furious. Angel is an outlier in this territory although, in the coming days, GP Racing is destined to be conveyed by some interesting characters – including one dressed like an extra from Sons of Anarchy who responds to a dawdling police car baulking him by leaning on the horn with his right hand while flipping the officers off through the open window with his left.

All year round, tourists flock to this metropolis on Florida’s southern tip to enjoy the art deco architecture of South Beach, the miles of sand and seemingly endless sunshine; and tens of thousands of college students gravitate here during the infamous spring break, a scene now so debauched that Miami Beach’s mayor declared a state of emergency last March. Few popular entertainments have captured the look, vibe and ethos of their setting quite so well as the 1980s TV series Miami Vice, in which a pair of incongruously well-dressed detectives tackled the city’s seedy underbelly – while scooting around in Ferraris. Famously, the Daytona driven by Don Johnson’s character was a fake (how perfectly Miami!); after receiving a cease-and-desist notice from Ferrari, producer Michael Mann negotiated a pair of real ones, since Enzo Ferrari was apparently a fan of the show.

“I proposed that they let us use the new Testarossa,” Mann later told The Hollywood Reporter, “and that I needed it in white to fit in with the Miami palette.”

The Miami Grand Prix is a more high-profile affair than F1’s last visit to the Sunshine State, for the inaugural US GP at Sebring in 1959. F1 has struggled to crack America since the world championship’s inception in 1950, when the inclusion of the Indy 500 as a points-scoring round failed to spur much interest on either side. Its subsequent tour of US racing venues is a sorry tale of absent crowds, bankrupt promoters and F1 shooting itself in the foot. Even the now-profitable US GP at the Circuit of The Americas barely washed its face for the first few years: former F1 ‘ringmaster’ Bernie Ecclestone famously told COTA chairman Bobby Epstein, “I don’t care so long as your cheque clears”.

Now Formula 1 is on the verge of shoehorning three US races onto the calendar, since Las Vegas will be joining Miami next year. Netflix’s Drive to Survive is popularly held to be responsible for transforming America’s F1 apathy into appetite. That’s certainly how it appeared on Angel’s radar: like many new fans he binge-watched the show while business was slack during the early months of the pandemic. While many long-time fans declaim the artifice involved in cutting-and-shutting reality to shape a TV-ready narrative, it’s putting bums on seats and sponsorship stickers on cars. Miami, a city knowingly high on the tackiness factor, is part of that thrust. Get ready for the spring breakification of F1.

F1 heads to Las Vegas from 2023 which means a third US race on the calendar alongside Miami and Austin

Photo by: Liberty Media

Ahead of the race weekend Bloomberg published a sneering op-ed headlined “Formula One Finally Found a Way to Get Americans to Care”, whose contents were as hit-and-miss as the headline writer’s rigour with regard to capitalisation. The subhead encapsulated where the author was going: “The posh, stodgy European sport has been transformed for the US with a hit Netflix series, race car drivers on Twitch, and a Miami-meets-Vegas overhaul – and it’s working.”

Real estate magnate Stephen M Ross originally envisaged the Miami Grand Prix on a street layout around Bayfront Park in the downtown area, with the famous art deco residences of South Beach almost within sight over Biscayne Bay. Residents and local authorities saw that off so ‘Plan B’ took shape around the campus of the Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins NFL team, both owned by Ross. It is 13 miles north of Miami itself, in Miami Gardens, one of the cities-within-a-city which makes up this sprawling metropolis. Here Ross has also faced opposition, for this is a majority African-American area whose leaders objected to the development on the grounds that the community would receive disproportionately low rewards from hosting the grand prix – just 5% of the revenues from an event which is now expected to make a loss in its first year.

As we idle in stop-start traffic a mile or so from the stadium, we pass identikit low-rise shopping malls fringed with fast-food emporia, half a dozen Bitcoin ATMs, and the Miami-Dade Police Department’s professional compliance bureau. The media accreditation centre is in a partitioned-off area within a 24 Hour Fitness gym, the denizens of which cleave to Clive James’s memorable description of Arnold Schwarzenegger looking like “a condom stuffed with walnuts”. Out front, around the access roads to the parking lot, a line of cars and trucks snakes towards a drive-thru Starbucks, the attached walk-in café of which is closed owing to the non-arrival of today’s food delivery. GP Racing bags the last blueberry muffin in town.

Although the circuit is temporary, much of the infrastructure added for the GP will be permanent and that desire fed in to the circuit design, which went through a number of iterations

Not quite in the shadow of the Hard Rock Stadium itself, the F1 paddock swelters in 31C heat and oh-the-humidity. Not that this has put off the hordes wielding VIP passes: not since the pre-pandemic days has the paddock heaved with humanity thus, eyeballs swivelling in the hope of sighting a celeb. And the chances of that are high. In recent days Lewis Hamilton has been photographed playing golf with Tampa Bay Buccaneers and seven-time Superbowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady, a guest of Mercedes along with Star Wars creator George Lucas and former first lady Michelle Obama. Charles Leclerc hung out with the Marlins players before their Major League Baseball match against the D-Backs on Tuesday night, playing catch with outfielder Avisaíl Garciá pre-match and swapping shirts with second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. In the McLaren garage James Corden is larking around with a curiously garbed Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Michael Jordan, the Williams sisters, Paris Hilton, LeBron James, Ryan Reynolds, Renée Zellweger, and Matt Damon are just a few of the stars also expected to swipe through the gates, with former Miami Dolphins NFL star Dan Marino handing out the trophies.

Motor racing is not unknown to Miami. There’s an oval in nearby Homestead, scene of NASCAR and IndyCar races in recent decades. From 1983-1993 Bicentennial Park, near the originally proposed GP site, hosted IMSA sportscar races – whose competitors included local drug smugglers Dale and Don Whittington, later busted in the CIA’s ‘Operation Sunburn’. But while this is very much a VIP grand prix – the majority of trackside stands are hospitality enclosures rather than bleachers – it’s being heavily promoted, from signage in the airport to roadside billboards and wall-to-wall TV coverage in the run-up. Such tickets as were on sale, as well as those channelled straight to corporate entertainers, were snapped up quickly.

The inaugural Miami GP attracted a star-studded entourage as F1 booms in the US

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Although the circuit is temporary, much of the infrastructure added for the GP will be permanent and that desire fed in to the circuit design, which went through a number of iterations. The pits were originally envisaged as a temporary facility to be located by the plaza entrance from North West 199th Street. Venue owner Stephen Ross decided a permanent structure which could serve other purposes for the rest of the year would offer a better return on investment. The pit/garage complex was relocated along the north flank of the stadium and will accommodate local food outlets during football games, for instance.

From inside the track it’s very difficult to envisage the day-to-day existence of much of the site as a car park. This was a deliberate decision on the part of the promoter: nobody, least of all the current commercial rights holder, for which the Miami GP has been a much-prized goal, wanted the event to be freighted with reminders of the infamously jejune Caesar’s Palace circuit. To keep good neighbourly relations the organisers planned the surfacing work in stages, particularly where it would involve closures of Don Shula Drive and Carl F Barger Boulevard, public roads which traverse the campus and offer access to the nearby I-95. They also tried to be creative in terms of the trackside furniture and hospitality enclosures… with polarising results.

When news of the so-called ‘fake marina’ overlooking Turn 7 percolated through social media it was inevitably greeted with derision by those regarding affairs from afar. It was lampooned on site, too, although a Sky Sports reporter who was caught being photographed while pretending to swim in it was given a fearful dressing down by security. During GP Racing’s track tour we’re informed that each of the boats was transported carefully, overnight, from the harbour so as to minimise disruption on the roads. No wonder the organisers were on the defensive.

“We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” says Miami GP COO Tyler Epp when asked if the area will be remodelled with a real water feature come 2023: “It was always meant to focus on the customer experience, and I’d guess I’d say that if our customers and fans tell us this isn’t a good experience for them, maybe we’ll think about working through that. We certainly respect people’s opinion but, at this point, that’s not what we’re hearing. The marina is a fantastic area and we’ve got great feedback from people who have been in that place.”

Besides rogue TV reporters, security has to be mindful of another invasive species: green iguanas which generally inhabit the nearby Snake Creek, but which also enjoy climbing the many trees which have been planted to ‘greenify’ the campus. Ross was adamant that none of the trees should be cut down to accommodate the new track, so on a nightly basis iguana wranglers are despatched to ensure none of the lizards (which can weigh nine kilos or more) have taken up residence in the trees which overhang the circuit.

Despite the eye-watering ticket prices, the Miami GP was still a huge pull for fans at the track

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Tacky though some elements are, the Miami GP experience is in keeping with the vibe of the city and with Liberty Media’s stated aim of imbuing each race weekend with a Superbowl-style distinctiveness. It hasn’t impressed the former commercial rights holder, though.

“They’re producing Formula 1: American Style,” harrumphs Bernie Ecclestone. “It may well be that it’s good, because so many stupid things come out of America and everyone’s happy, but it wasn’t the way I ran things.”

That might be true, Bernie, but things aren’t what they were: they’re what they are. And, while costs have escalated to the point that the inaugural Miami GP won’t make a profit – and well-publicised misfires in hospitality early in the weekend might make corporate entertainment a harder sell next year – perhaps this event acts as a pointer to F1’s future. A direction of travel in which the racing comes to the city rather than expecting fans to trek to purpose-built venues miles from anywhere.

“Bernie can mouth off all he wants,” says Greg Maffei, Liberty’s CEO. “But the reality is, everybody wants in now.”

Stars like NBA legend Michael Jordan packed out the paddock and grid in Miami - a sign of things to come?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images