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Shop at Jay’ Market at 190 East Flamingo Road at the Koval Lane intersection east of the Strip.
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — It’s another day and another email blast from the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Today it was the entertainers who are playing the Nov. 20-22 race event, while other days the Formula 1 promoters fired off ticket deals like one that allows fans to stroll along pit row.
The Las Vegas Grand Prix have opened a fan-friendly plaza at its hub pit bulding off Koval Lane, reached out to students for karting activities and worked with Clark County to try and decrease the disruptions caused by the 17 weeks of installing and dismantling the 3.8-mile track that includes a healthy stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard.
It’s Year 3 of an annual sports event in the Strip corridor that began with a very rocky start in Year 1 in 2023 when there was literally no community outreach, ticket prices so high that the average price was the most expensive on the F1 tour and no overall blueprint to guide F1 on launching a major event that was approved by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) a mere year and a half prior.
The Year 1 disruptions in 2023 were so severe that four businesses sued Clark County and F1, alleging the race hassles cost them millions of dollars in revenues from customers avoiding the businesses due to headaches of the race’s track installation impacts.
One of the lawsuits filed by Ellis Island specifically zeroed on accusations that Clark County fast-tracked the Year 1 event in 2023, alleging county government workers cut permit approval corners to accommodate a race event in November. But only three months ago Ellis Island settled with F1 and even became a race sponsor.
Since F1’s race fiasco in Las Vegas in the inaugural year, the grand prix has cleaned up its act.
The Las Vegas Grand Prix followed the playbooks of the 2024 Super Bowl in Las Vegas, the NFL Raiders and the NHL Golden Knights to do typical outreach activities like interacting with the Las Vegas community with back-to-school freebies for students.
The Las Vegas Grand Prix also re-calibrated its outrageously high ticket prices from Year 1 to much lower price points for Year 3.
And the race also has an interactive map showing days and times of race track installation along Las Vegas Boulevard, Harmon Avenue, Koval Lane and Sands Avenue.
The more smooth, less choppy race logistics of 2025 raise a very simple but haunting question: Why did Formula One rush to stage its Las Vegas event in 2023 when so much of the event’s infrastructure from community outreach to more realistic ticket prices were out of whack. Locals sensed an F1 money grab, a over-its-head county commission that was starry-eyed by a dazzling international sports event and a race track installation that blew off local concerns and complaints.
But things have changed.
The legal clashes have nearly been eliminated as the lone holdout is Ferraro’s Ristorante outside the race corridor at 4480 Paradise Rd. Ferraro’s filed a lawsuit against F1 and Clark County in Sept. 2024.
Plus, the Las Vegas Grand Prix has a new president and CEO this year — Emily Prazer, a savvy F1 business executive with corporate partnership and sponsorship experience.
She spoke with LVSportsBiz.com five months ago after she was appointed to her new role and she’s a different personality than former Las Vegas Grand Prix chief Renee Wilm, who became the chief legal and administrative officer for F1’s parent company, Liberty Media Corporation in Centennial, Colorado, a Denver suburb.
Prazer issued a statement to LVSportsBiz.com Wednesday on how F1 learned its lessons from Year 1 and “would have benefited from more time to prepare the track and deepen our community ties.”
“There was no blueprint for an event like this, and our first year was a powerful learning experience,” Prazer said. “Looking back, we would have benefited from more time to prepare the track and deepen our community ties. However, the unique nature of this event meant we were building from the ground up, and those initial challenges provided our most significant learning opportunities.
“We’ve taken all the feedback we received—both in Year 1 and again in Year 2—and used it to make meaningful improvements,” she said. “As we look ahead to Year 3, we’re confident that we’re in a much better place, but we’ll never stop looking for ways to get even better.”
The LVCVA approved the initial three-year deal with F1 in May 2022, leaving Liberty Media a mere year and a half to pull off the stiff logistical assignment of closing lanes and roads to pave the route on the Strip and its surrounding race streets for the 2023 event.
It was not pretty.
Frankly, it appeared as if F1 was literally winging it as race promoters did not connect to the local Las Vegas community. There were no activations. The truth is that most cities would have told F1 to not come back for Year 2 after Year 1’s horrid local experience.
But as we have come to learn, Las Vegas is not most cities.
Officially speaking, it was the Clark County commissioners who oversee the Strip and gave the green light to F1’s race setup and road closures.
LVSportsBiz.com has since learned that at least one county commissioner privately acknowledged that the race’s first year in the Vegas market should have been in 2024 and not 2023.
At this point, Clark will host the two-hour road race for at least two more year in 2026 and 2027 and likely many years more because F1 has planted roots in the Strip corridor with a half-billion-dollar pit building at Koval and Harmon.
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