The Car Race That Ate Up Las Vegas: Locals Say They Can’t Wait Until Grand Prix Is Over This Week; Boosters Cite Tourism Dollars
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
The security worker at the Las Vegas Grand Prix fence and gate at Harmon Avenue/Koval Lane sat on a chair and was blunt about her thoughts about Formula One taking nearly four miles of public roads in the Strip corridor.
“I can’t wait until this is over,” the female security employee told LVSportsBiz.com. “This is not for locals, They can’t afford it. We already have NASCAR and a great track.”
Only a football field away on Harmon Avenue, an F1 worker strolling between orange cones and fencing gave his thoughts about what Las Vegas gets out of permitting Liberty Media’s Formula One to turn the iconic Strip and surrounding roads into a 3.8-mile race track: “Two billion dollars in tax revenues.”
Whoa nellie, $2 billion in tax revenues? This F1 worker obviously is a recent graduate of the Jeremy Aguero School For Sports Economic Impacts.
The truth is metro Las Vegas and Clark County will need several weeks to crunch the numbers to see how much sales taxes, hotel room revenues and occupancy rates are racked up for the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix.
The Thursday-Saturday event culminates with a Saturday 10 PM race with 20 racers driving 50 laps, or 192.7 miles, along a circuit that has thoroughly disrupted anyone doing business, commuting and traveling along the Strip and its roads just east of the world-famous boulevard of entertainment and gambling. The closed section of Koval Lane, a vital artery that runs parallel to the Strip, is scheduled to remain closed for a week after Saturday’s race.
F1 driver Max Verstappen, who has dominated the circuit with 17 wins out of 20 F1 races and has won F1 championships in 201, 2022 and 2023, has already said he’s not overwhelmed by racing in Las Vegas. He has mentioned the event in Las Vegas is more of a show than a car race. This comes from the Red Bull team driver who has won a stunning 43 times out of the last 65 races.
Las Vegas is an old pro at hosting visitors.
But F1’s race event is next level, drawing negative attention for overpricing race tickets, taking an elitist attitude toward taking over the most prominent road in Southern Nevada and causing more traffic headaches than any event in Las Vegas history.
It begs the question: if the F1 race is such a windfall in economics, why are so many workers dreading the event? Hotels are practically bribing employees to work by offering financial incentives.
Big events are typically staged in big venues.
But in this case, the venue is a closed, linear stretch of public right-of-ways that locals use to get to work that is now temporarily privatized for grandstands, suites and a canyon of fences and lighting mounts.
Social media in Las Vegas consists of locals posting videos of driving on the track and complaints that locals are turned off by the road interruptions and high ticket prices. Yes, the prices are dropping — $1,600 tickets are now selling for $1,000 on the secondary ticket market.
The bad publicity prompted Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei this past weekend to apologize to Las Vegas for disrupting life so much in the host market.
On Tuesday, workers were congregating around the pit building at Koval Lane/Harmon Avenue, the F1 paddock facility that is the event’s nerve center with race team garages, swanky suites and expensive seats. Here’s one such worker.
The opening ceremony for the race is Wednesday.
And of you’re wondering when the Strip will look itself again it’s going to take six to eight weeks.
