Inside the quirks of photographing F1 in Las Vegas

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold… And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas…”

As our flight banked around the neon-speckled sprawl of Sin City I wondered once again if I was the only person arriving for the Las Vegas Grand Prix having not read (or pretended to read for social media grandstanding purposes) Hunter S Thompson’s ‘classic’ gonzo novel Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. I gather it concerns the author following a commission from Sports Illustrated magazine to cover the annual Mint 400 off-road motor race, but then blowing out the job in a blizzard of narcotics
and booze. Apparently, it’s “a savage dissection of the American dream”.

Well if there was anyone skiving in favour of “heinous chemicals” and mescal this weekend then I didn’t see it, although a handful of journos dutifully followed in Thompson’s wheeltracks by driving from Los Angeles… not that a tatty rental Chevy Spark would hit 100mph of course. And at least one of them got stuck in a random 5am traffic jam in the desert on the way back to
LA, hardly the stuff of which great gonzo reportage is made.

Perhaps I was less excited than some because I’d been to Vegas before. But there were still a number of firsts here for me. I’ve never photographed a wedding before, certainly not one officiated by an Elvis impersonator. Just how
did this happen? Maybe the fragile grasp on sanity had broken after all…

When you de-plane at Harry Reid Airport the first thing that strikes you through the glass, apart from the usual accusing stares of the people waiting to get on, is the number of slot machines. From the moment you arrive until your final departure, Las Vegas is a precisely tooled machine for continuously lifting money
from your wallet.

One more thing: the carpets. Wherever you may roam it’s either a collection of wacko patterns or a writhing mess of coiled lines, like a giant-scale game of snakes and ladders without the ladders. Is the intention to get you wired and a little bit dizzy, losing all sense of time and space – especially inside the windowless casinos where the lighting is set to perpetual midday?

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Reminders that you were in Las Vegas were never far away

There was a lot of cynicism ahead of the event, and plenty of people working in Formula 1 quietly expressing low expectations – in a low-profile way, of course, because financially there was a lot riding on its success. Max Verstappen probably best expressed the tension between positivity and negativity. He alternately loved and hated the Vegas experience, as if he had a roulette wheel in his brain.

Clack! The ball lands in the black. The track’s rubbish and soulless, the so-called fans are only interested in getting loaded and neither know nor care about F1, everything’s fake and plastic, I can’t wait to go home. Clack! The ball lands on red. Whoopee! I’m gonna wear that Elvis-style racesuit and sing Viva Las Vegas when I win.

PLUS: When F1's heavy-handed charm offensive has left a bad taste

Las Vegas is a land of make-believe. I have to say it repels me – it’s really not my kind of place, I prefer cities that have grown in a kind of organic way, developing their own distinctive character. Plus I don’t gamble and I don’t party. I came here in 2012 on a road trip to Austin, we had four days allocated for it and after one I thought, “I don’t need another three days here.”

One of the Autosport journalists and at least two F1 drivers found the ‘Do Not Disturb’ door hangers aren’t a binding instruction here

For me, Vegas is a city trying to be everything for everyone, a sort of Disneyland for adult entertainment. There’s even a shooting range near the circuit where you can discharge anything up to semi-automatic assault weaponry.

Speaking of which, since the mass shooting at a music festival in 2017, when a guy opened fire on the crowd from his 32nd-floor suite in the Mandalay Bay, the hotels now conduct random searches of guest rooms. One of the Autosport journalists and at least two F1 drivers found the ‘Do Not Disturb’ door hangers aren’t a binding instruction here. Imagine being Charles Leclerc, roused in the small hours to find a burly security guard at the end of your bed demanding to toss your room for concealed firearms…

Ferraris, racing and racketeering

Las Vegas does have a quirky history and a longer association with cars and motor racing than you might think. Forget the two ratty
grands prix around a car park in the early 1980s.

PLUS: The story of the hotel car park that hosted F1's first two trips to Vegas

Casino pioneer Bill Harrah was a famous car collector and favoured customer of Ferrari, though not so much that Enzo would grant his wish of building him a four-wheel drive car. Harrah ended up building his own, getting his people to graft the front of a 365 GT onto the body of a Jeep Wagoneer.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Las Vegas is a precisely tooled machine for continuously lifting money
from your wallet

The Mint 400 off-road race that takes no more than a page in Thompson’s book – after watching the start they retire to the bar and see no more of it – began as a publicity stunt for the Mint Hotel and its annual deer hunters’ contest in 1967. Two glass-body dune buggies set off to establish a record for off-road travel, heading from
Las Vegas to Lake Tahoe (another famous gambling den) and one of them became the winning deer hunter’s prize. The following year the idea transformed into what became the
Mint 400, a Baja-style off-road race through the desert.

Nothing might have come of it but for the early involvement of famous US racer Parnelli Jones, soon to become a short-lived F1 constructor. Once he entered, practically everyone else followed. The action might have taken place in the desert but the pageantry focused in downtown with a parade down Fremont Street ahead of the start and a presentation for the winners at the end.

Fremont Street, considered the second most ‘historic’ road in Las Vegas and home to the famous Golden Nugget casino, was a staple of Vegas iconography until the mega-casinos grew up on the Strip to the south. Appropriately enough, the area is home to the National Museum of Organized Crime And Law Enforcement, aka The Mob Museum.

Sin City’s development is shot through with the influence of organised crime syndicates and their high-profile buddies, including Frank Sinatra. The 1947 murder of Bugsy Siegel – builder of The Flamingo, Las Vegas’s first ‘resort’ casino – is one of the true-crime genre’s great unsolved mysteries. The Flamingo became the template for the glittering one-stop gambling shops that line the strip
today. But, while the likes of the MGM Grand, Wynn’s, The Mirage and New York New York are squeaky-clean, tax-paying businesses, the first flush of resort casinos were built on foundations of hot money from organised crime and the notoriously corrupt teamsters union.

Vegas began to clean up through the 1960s and the man largely credited with this is reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. This wasn’t quite the Hughes as portrayed by Leonardo di Caprio in the movie The Aviator. No, this was where the character arc went after the credits on Scorsese’s film have rolled, Hughes on life’s great off-ramp, frail and morphine-addicted.

Flush with cash after selling his stock in Trans World Airlines for $500m, Hughes effectively fled California to avoid paying higher-rate income taxes on the windfall. He was a fittingly bizarre individual for the Vegas scene, renting the entire top two floors of the Desert Inn and reputedly arriving incognito – in a private ambulance – at midnight one day in November 1966, along with a vast stock of Kleenex and tinfoil.

Legend has it the famously germophobic Hughes wore tissue boxes on his feet instead of shoes, would only defecate into jars and bottles because he thought the sewage system fed directly into the drinking water supply, covered the windows of his penthouse with tin foil and didn’t set foot outside the Desert Inn for the entire four years of his residency. He’d originally booked for 10 days.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The Las Vegas strip has a fascinating history, plenty of it shady

When management demanded he check out, Hughes bought the entire place for $13.2m and went on a buying spree with the rest of the TWA swag, snapping up dozens of other casinos and the local TV station, the latter so he could dictate what late-night films it showed. He also bought local politicians and tried to influence policy, demanding rock festivals and Communist entertainers be outlawed and the tax on petrol repealed.

The Mint 400 only happened because Hughes let the organisers use his land. And the Desert Inn had another connection with local motor racing because the former owner, Cleveland Syndicate racketeer and bootlegger Moe Dalitz, also built Stardust International Raceway. In its heyday, the likes of Bruce McLaren, Denny Hulme, John Surtees and Jackie Stewart did Can-Am races here. The prize money was exceptional. So too, apparently, was the profit from the skimming and money laundering which went on behind the track’s public façade.

It would have been interesting to visit the site – but what was once an otherwise barren location outside city limits is now a housing estate.

Not going out

The Las Vegas Grand Prix will probably take a while to mature into a stalwart of the calendar like Singapore has. Well, it’s got a 10-year contract. There are those who say Las Vegas is the new Monaco – perhaps it’s closer to the mark to say it’s the new Singapore.

It felt like we were sneaking out to use the streets in the small hours when it wouldn’t be a bother to the majority of the casino customers. Perhaps it was the absence of support events that contributed to it not really feeling like a grand prix ‘event’.

That very much feels like a grand prix while you’re there, rather than a race tacked on to a big marketing bonanza. There’s an atmosphere to it. Here it felt like we were sneaking out to use the streets in the small hours when it wouldn’t be a bother to the majority of the casino customers.

Perhaps it was the absence of support events that contributed to it not really feeling like a grand prix ‘event’. On Saturday I popped out to Walgreens on the Strip for supplies and the whole area – footpaths and the roads – was rammed with people and cars just five hours before the race. It was as if our event occupied some parallel dimension.

In Singapore the race was disruptive at first – I remember the taxi drivers complaining about it constantly – but everyone got used to it. And in terms of business, it grew in stature, like Monaco rather than a potential replacement for it, a place where the great and the good came together to do the deals for the next season.

We ended up not going out much because the track hours were so antisocial.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The antisocial hours meant Hone didn't see much of Vegas

I knew a lot of people eager to ‘do’ the Strip. There are so many shiny, glittery things competing for your attention: the fountains outside the Bellagio, the rollercoaster on top of New York New York, the fake gondolas and canals inside the Venetian, the half-scale Eiffel Tower with one leg sticking through the roof of the Paris. And of course the Sphere, the 18,600-capacity entertainment venue featuring the world’s largest wraparound
LED screen.

It was designed by Populous,
the company which oversaw Silverstone’s 2011 reboot. U2’s 36-show residency was ‘on pause’ through the grand prix weekend – like quite
a lot of the musical entertainment – but
the LED screens on the so-called ‘exosphere’
were deployed to glam up the trackside view during track sessions.

All of this was going on while a lot of Las Vegas residents were asleep, of course, hence we didn’t get very far. On the Thursday, for instance, when the problem with the drain covers delayed practice, we didn’t finish work until very late… trudging back in to our hotel-casino at 5am we naturally just hit the bar, where we stayed until 10am. I hate seeing daylight while on the sauce…

We didn’t even go out for dinner most days – typically we ate at the track and then came
back for half-price Modelos at the bar. Quite
fun in itself but not quite the absurd excess portrayed in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
I suppose it’s a natural side-effect of this
being a bizarre environment: we’re here to work while the vast majority of people coming through the doors are here to play.

Putting on the glitz

You might think this would be an easy race to shoot, given the photogenic Las Vegas built environment. But actually it was a huge challenge because from ground level you can’t see any of that. So from the minute we hit the ground the chase was on to find places where we could get an elevated perspective, looking down on the cars and the wider surroundings.

It was unusually dog-eat-dog. We always
share the breaks we get, for instance, the helicopter in Melbourne, and reciprocal arrangements form. But here some agencies weren’t willing to share and I won’t be forgetting that… What the organisers should do is follow
the example of Jeddah and Baku – they’ve identified places around the track, usually hotel rooms or offices, which show off the best of the circuit and you just put your name down for
them at a particular time.

Learning where you wanted to go was one problem to solve, another was how to get
there. Again, this is something that will develop in future editions of this race as we get used to
the infrastructure. In Monaco you soon learn what escalators to take, what lift to get in,
and so on, to get to where you need to go.
It becomes second nature.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Finding an elevated position to shoot from that would showcase the Vegas skyline proved a challenge

Understandably there was a lot of emphasis on how it looked on TV and for trackside spectators – and the occupants of the crazily expensive hospitality suites. Here there was no mistaking where you were: Donny Osmond performing the national anthem was as kitsch but compelling as you’d expect. I thought he was dead!

The opening ceremony, where the drivers sort of popped up out of these elevated platforms, waved to the crowd and then disappeared back down again, wasn’t to the taste of all of them (Max, again, complained of feeling like a clown before Red Bull told him to shush). Kylie Minogue was up there for longer than Lewis Hamilton. But it was entirely in keeping with a city where stage magicians Siegfried and Roy successfully plied their trade with a variety of big cats for the
best part of 35 years.

Then of course I shot my first-ever wedding. On the Saturday morning, there was a guy
going round the paddock saying, “Someone’s
going to get married in the chapel.” No mention of who it might be but the idea of seeing one of these freakshows with an Elvis impersonator seemed irresistible.

It’s probably unfair to judge the event based on this first visit. It will get easier to move around as we and the organisers learn to optimise arrangements

So I got there and it was Jacques Villeneuve. His fiancée was there with the television cameras rolling, saying, “I planned all this – surprise!” Jacques took it very well. Jock Clear, his race engineer at Williams and BAR, was his best man. And if Jacques wants a copy of the pictures we can negotiate a fee. Slightly disappointingly, the Elvis impersonator didn’t perform the ceremonials ‘in character’.

There’s quite a lot for the promoters and Formula 1 to digest after this inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix. It’s probably unfair to judge the event based on this first visit. It will get easier to move around as we and the organisers learn to optimise arrangements. People will venture out, take in some of the sights elsewhere on the Strip.

Dare
I say there will be less negativity. The scene
with fans being kicked out on Thursday night
and given merch tokens in lieu of refunds
wasn’t a good look. Neither was the obviously undersold hospitality capacity. All of these fed in to the too-cool-for-school crowd instigating a pile-on because they’d been waiting for an
excuse to knock the event.

One thing’s for sure: Formula 1 has skin in
the game and is committed for 10 years. Love it or hate it, you won’t be able to ignore it. Bring your own giant bats…

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Seeing Jacques Villeneuve get married by an Elvis impersonator in the Las Vegas GP chapel made for a surreal experience