Has there ever been so much excitement about a new Grand Prix than at the Las Vegas GP? We can’t remember. Despite the fact that the Dutch GP is three times busier than the American race, Liberty Media expects a billion-dollar profit to be made on the Las Vegas GP. Only problem for Liberty Media: the profits don’t all go to F1.
Greg Maffei is the big boss of Liberty Media, the organization that bought the F1 rights from Bernie Ecclestone in 2016. Maffei talks to the American newspaper The Independent about the upcoming race in Vegas. According to Maffei, approximately 105,000 spectators will attend the race weekend. Only the Bahrain GP was less attended this year. Less than 100,000 people showed up.
Despite the low number of visitors, the Liberty boss expects to make billions in profits from the Las Vegas GP. “We’re going to bring somewhere around $1.7 billion in profits to the region,” Maffei says. He’s referring to money for restaurants, hotels and casinos. The small number of fans who come to watch is not a problem, according to Maffei. It will still be “the biggest event in Las Vegas,” he thinks.
Why does F1 want the Las Vegas GP to succeed?
In most races, the circuit, city, state or country organizes the GP. In the Netherlands, for example, the circuit does it itself. F1 itself organizes the GP in Las Vegas. The money for the stands, a new asphalt layer, a new pit building and so on, comes from F1. In total, the investments would amount to 500 million dollars.
F1 naturally wants to recoup those investments. They are trying to do that with the ticket prices. The cheapest weekend tickets cost 2,000 dollars (approximately 1,900 euros) and the most expensive tickets are 8,000 dollars (approximately 7,500 euros). If we can assume the average weekend price of 5,000 dollars, F1 with 100,000 fans would break even on the investments.
Not everyone comes for a weekend and there are also people who pay for peripheral matters such as a visit to the pits, but now you have an idea of the income. F1 itself will not make billions in profit from the Las Vegas GP, but in terms of media attention it will in any case be almost impossible to keep up.
The Las Vegas GP will remain on the calendar for a while
That’s all well and good, that applies to the region because of the Las Vegas GP, but the residents had to suffer for a year. One year, streets were closed off because there was an F1 race. Maffei also thinks about this: ‘I would like to apologize to the residents of Las Vegas. We appreciate that they have so much patience and are willing to tolerate us.” He hopes that things will be easy in the future.
If the Las Vegas GP indeed turns out to be a billion-dollar profit for the region, then the ‘future’ that Maffei is talking about could take a long time. For the time being, F1 may continue to use the land in Vegas until 2032. This makes it the race with the longest contract after the Australian GP (2037) and the Bahrain GP (2036).
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