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.