Formula One’s chief executive Bernie Ecclestone has revealed that a blockbuster race on the streets of Las Vegas is “ready to go” and an unlikely ally could hold the keys to getting it off the grid.
In an interview with Britain’s Independent newspaper Mr Ecclestone revealed that he is in discussions with a group which is planning the race and confirmed that the track would include The Strip. This world-famous road runs through the center of Vegas and is lined with some of the most renowned casino resorts including the Bellagio and Caesars Palace. “Vegas say they are ready to go and it would be on The Strip for sure,” says Ecclestone.
A senior source in the United States racing scene says that F1’s track designer Hermann Tilke has visited Vegas several times to design the layout of the course which demonstrates that the project is at an advanced stage. “Tilke has made a couple of site visits. I knew that if he had gone along there must be something to it,” says the source.
The news took the F1 community by surprise but it shouldn’t have. Earlier this year Mr Ecclestone was said to be in talks to bring F1 back to the city of Long Beach in California where it last raced in 1983. The plan was reportedly being driven by Chris Pook, the motorsport manager who founded the original Formula 5000 race in Long Beach in 1975.
In February it was claimed that Mr Ecclestone had written to Bob Foster, mayor of Long Beach, to say that “Formula One is interested in returning to your city.” It led some to jump to wild conclusions without first analysing the situation.
It came on the back of F1’s return to the US, after a five year absence, with a race in Austin, the capital of Texas, which began in 2012 and has been well-received. However, it also followed the failure of organisers in New Jersey to get the green light for a Grand Prix on 3.2 miles of public roads facing the magnificent Manhattan skyline.
New Jersey’s Grand Prix of America was announced with great fanfare in October 2011 but has since been dropped from the F1 calendar twice. Mr Pook was a special assistant to the project and he was up against a huge hurdle. This was laid bare last year in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper which revealed that the organisers lack the $100 million required to finish work on the track.
This was far from an ideal backdrop for the plan to bring F1 back to Long Beach which doesn’t even have the cachet of a location like New Jersey let alone Vegas. However, it didn’t deter some from making sweeping statements about it.
In May last year F1 sports blogger Joe Saward made the bold claim that “F1 is going back to Long Beach. I don’t have to justify that belief or come up with evidence.” He added that “there will be three Formula 1 Grands Prix in the United States by 2016. The United States GP in Austin, the Grand Prix of America in New Jersey and the Long Beach Grand Prix in California...There is much negativity about the prospects of New Jersey and Long Beach...I would not listen to the naysayers.”
The plans for both races have since bitten the dust. The organisers in New Jersey have admitted defeat and the 2015 calendar, which was released in September, was the first since 2012 not to feature the race. Likewise, in April, the authorities in Long Beach agreed to extend the IndyCar Grand Prix in the city until at least 2018. The following month they even announced a deal to bring the Formula E electric racing series to Long Beach in its inaugural season next year. F1 was not on the agenda.
Speculating that F1 will race in New Jersey and Long Beach in 2016 is far from the first flawed prediction made by Mr Saward as Forbes has previously reported. However, it was an easy one to avoid.
The reality is that if Mr Ecclestone says there’s a race coming in Long Beach, he’s probably close to a deal somewhere else and this is a lever in a different negotiation. Ever the dealmaker, Mr Ecclestone never says anything about projected races without there being a reason to say it. When he says something like this, he’s like a great magician shouting ‘Abracadabra!’ And you should not look at where the flash-bang has gone off. In this case the real flash was not in Long Beach but 280 miles south-west in Vegas.
Mr Ecclestone is well-aware that Vegas is a perfect fit with F1’s glitz, glamour and the gigantic sums of money which flow around the series. It last raced in Vegas in 1982 on a track in the Caesars Palace parking lot. The makeshift nature of the course failed to get support from within the series and it was abandoned after two races.
IndyCar then took over the event, transforming the track into an oval configuration, but it too was dropped after just two seasons.
The Champ Car World Series staged a street race in Vegas in 2007 but the track did not include The Strip. The race didn’t return when the series merged with IndyCar in 2008 and, since then, racing in Vegas has been confined to the 1.5 mile speedway oval located 15 miles north-east of The Strip. The speedway hosts NASCAR’s Kobalt 400 and in 2011 was the site of a fatal accident involving IndyCar driver Dan Wheldon.
As the speedway is located in the outskirts of Vegas it doesn’t show off the local landmarks and the series racing there doesn’t make a statement by taking over the town. A Grand Prix on the streets of the city would have much more of an impact.
Perhaps the best example of the promotional pull that The Strip can have came in January. This is when the new Formula E car was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas and the location was carefully chosen. After the covers had come off the car it was taken on its first public demonstration which was a run down The Strip. Photographs of it made it into most of the major newspapers around the world.
A race on a street track which includes The Strip would put F1 on the doorstep of the world’s wealthiest entertainment magnates and would dramatically boost its visibility in the States. The race in Austin showed F1 the potential to be had from breaking into the lucrative US auto racing market which is dominated by NASCAR.
F1’s television audience in the US, where it is broadcast on NBC Sports, grew by 1.7 million viewers to 11.4 million in 2013 and accelerated a further 93% over the first 11 races of this year. However, it still trails the audience for IndyCar on the same network by 5%.
A Grand Prix in downtown Vegas would almost certainly propel F1’s audience in US beyond that of its closest rival as it would give the race a backdrop of landmarks which are recognisable all over the country. However, the operators of those landmarks are well aware of this and that is the biggest obstacle in the way.
In the mid 1990s local businessman Tommy Baker spearheaded plans to host an F1 race on the streets of Vegas and down The Strip. However, it eventually hit the buffers after several resorts on The Strip apparently balked, fearing that the track would limit casino access. The decision roughly coincided with the project losing a key team member who happens to be one of the most powerful figures in Vegas. He is the last person you would expect to find on the management team for an auto race.
The team member who dropped out was not a veteran of auto racing or the auto industry but is instead an entertainer who has shaped modern day Vegas perhaps more than anyone else. He is 55 year-old billionaire Guy Laliberté, the co-founder of avant-garde circus troupe Cirque du Soleil.
Mr Laliberté left his home in Montreal aged just 14 and set out on a life of street performing. He ended up starting a circus group which turned traditional performances on their head. Animals were out and instead, Cirque’s shows place a heavy emphasis on world-class contortion, acrobatics and juggling. However, what really separates Cirque from its competitors is its surrealism. Its shows have bizarre brand names, dramatic lighting, striking stages and surreal characters such as an inflatable snail and a silent ringmaster who holds an umbrella and has no head. It is a world away from an F1 track but Mr Laliberté is at home in both environments.
I first met him in the paddock at the 2002 US Grand Prix in Indianapolis and it soon became apparent that he was part of F1’s furniture. He seemed at ease with drivers and team bosses alike including all the power-brokers from Michael Schumacher to the McLaren team’s chief executive Ron Dennis. Laliberté even hosted a gala party for the F1 fraternity at his house in Montreal whenever the Grand Prix came to town. The guests included his closest friends from racing - Mr Ecclestone and his family - and it is through knowing them that he came to be involved with the plans for a race in Vegas.
Mr Laliberté’s fascination with F1 began in his teens and, unsurprisingly for someone who has led such an unusual life, his interest in the sport didn’t begin in a typical fashion. He was a racer himself but preferred ice to asphalt.
“When I was a teenager I was doing a lot of snowmobile racing in Quebec and Gilles Villeneuve was winning all the snowmobile championships. I met him two or three times on the snowmobile racetrack,” Mr Laliberté says of the Canadian icon who became one of Ferrari’s most loved drivers despite his untimely death in 1982. It led to Mr Laliberté losing his contact and friend from F1. Since he was spending so much time touring with Cirque, Mr Laliberté had to settle for watching the races on TV and buying tickets to go to his home race every year. However, his company’s success soon brought him back into the F1 fold.
In 1994 Mr Laliberté opened Mystère - his first permanent show for Cirque. It is located in Vegas’ Treasure Island hotel which was opened in 1993 by casino impresario Steve Wynn. The avant-garde extravaganza sees acrobats soaring around the stage in spinning cubes and gymnasts performing stunts whilst jumping between metal poles. It became an instant success and it wasn’t long before the magic of Mystère caught Mr Ecclestone’s attention.
“In 1996 I met Bernie in Montreal for breakfast on the Sunday morning at 8 O’clock and the introduction was done by the guy who was trying to organise the Las Vegas Grand Prix,” says Mr Laliberté. “Bernie had visited Las Vegas a couple of months before and met Steve Wynn, my partner, and Bobbie Baldwin. He saw the show Mystère fell in love with it, really liked it, his family liked it and the introduction was done.”
Mr Laliberté was soon thrust into the world of F1 race promotion. “When I had breakfast with Bernie, we chatted about basically two things: firstly he said, ‘you’re an entertainment person and obviously you’re very successful in Vegas. We have a team there who are trying to put on the Formula One race, would you like to join them?’ And, especially in terms of the entertainment involved with it, he said to me, ‘you should get involved in the company.’ So I threw a little money and we started the relationship there.
“The second thing we discussed is I told Bernie at that time that Ferrari were putting on the market an F50 and I said, ‘by any chance do you have any contacts to get me an F50,? It’s my dream car.’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of that.’ Then 48 hours later, I received a letter and phone call from Ferrari North America saying: ‘You must have great contacts because you’ve been allocated a car.’ So that’s how I met Bernie.”
Mr Laliberté soon realised that the team in Vegas would struggle to pull off the race and he pulled out. “My reporting to Bernie on the Vegas Grand Prix was that I had my reservations about the people on the team and eventually I stepped out of it,” he says. It is little surprise that resorts on The Strip opposed the plan to host the race after it had lost such a powerful ally.
Cirque now has eight shows in Vegas and they play to more than 9,000 people per night comprising 5% of the city’s visitors. It makes Mr Laliberté an even more powerful force in Vegas now than he was in 1996. He is worth $1.8 billion according to Forbes and in the past 18 years he has become an even closer friend of Mr Ecclestone and his family. They have invited Mr Laliberté into their homes and attend the opening party of his Cirque shows when they play in London every January. In contrast, back in 1996 Mr Laliberté had only just met Mr Ecclestone.
It means that it is now much more likely that Mr Laliberté would stand by the bid to bring a Grand Prix to Vegas, not least because he has seven more shows which would benefit from it. Given that Mr Ecclestone says that a race using The Strip is “ready to go” it wouldn’t be a surprise if it already has Mr Laliberté’s seal of approval. He is likely to be supported by another of Mr Ecclestone’s friends.
Since Mr Ecclestone first met Steve Wynn nearly 20 years ago the two have also become close contacts and the casino magnate has been seen at many Grands Prix, most recently in Monaco in 2012.
It is not yet known precisely who is involved with the race promotion team in Vegas but it is clear that there is one. Highly respected US motorsport correspondent Steven Cole Smith reported yesterday that “an investment and management group is deeply involved in bringing a Formula One street race back to Las Vegas.”
Critics claim that “Vegas gets 39 million visitors per year. There are 150,000 hotel rooms in Vegas, occupancy runs at 84 percent. The downtown area lags behind The Strip but occupancy is still 75 percent. It does not need F1.” However, the very same argument could have been applied to London when it made its successful bid for the Olympics.
The critic fails to take into account the fact that boosting visitor numbers isn’t the only reason for a race. In the case of Vegas, it would allow the hotels in the city to dramatically increase their rates over the period of the race.
The same has happened in Austin where last year daily rates at four star hotels averaged at $1,125 during the four days of the race according to travel website Expedia. It has contributed to F1 generating an estimated economic impact of more than $500 million for Austin since 2012. No doubt this will not have been lost on the authorities in Vegas who are up against other cities and countries in the increasingly competitive tourism marketplace.
The other allure for Vegas is that, unlike in 1996, F1 is now the world’s most-watched annual sports series with 450 million television viewers last year. It would be priceless promotion for a city which lacks major international sporting events.
“Vegas would be a fantastic addition to the F1 calendar and would be successful for so many people involved,” says F1 sponsorship agent Zak Brown. “It’s a great fit for the F1 brand and would draw a lot of interest from sponsors in one of the most important strategic markets for F1 - America. Vegas as a city would benefit greatly from F1’s fan base who no doubt would spend a lot of money that weekend.”
Former F1 champion Damon Hill says that the biggest question is whether the city center track would do justice to the location. “They like their entertainment in the States so you could probably double it to two races and it would be great, maybe not right next to each other in the calendar though...I would just hope they make it a great track. They have got to be challenging circuits. It’s great to have them in city centres but not if they are too easy.”
Tavo Hellmund, who founded the US Grand Prix in Austin and the Circuit of the Americas track where the race is held, makes the point that “Vegas would be a great place for a Grand Prix and it is one of only two cities in the States that does not have to worry about cannibalising a market, since every weekend is a big weekend with a different crowd. The other being New York.” Although Vegas is on the cards, a Grand Prix in the New York area seems a lot less likely.
“In the end there’s a million countries that would like to have an F1 race but they can’t afford it,” says Mr Ecclestone. He adds that the sport is on track to have more races than ever regardless.
Next year Mr Hellmund is bringing the Mexican Grand Prix back to F1 after a 23-year absence and this will push the calender to its current record of 20. In 2016 the Grand Prix of Europe in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, will be added to it and Mr Ecclestone says “it’s more likely that it will go over 20 with Baku than we lose a race.”
Mr Cole Smith adds that a Grand Prix in Vegas “would likely not be any earlier than 2017, since Mexico City is debuting its new F1 race next year. But sources say that a 2016 date for Las Vegas, while optimistic, is not impossible.” All bets are on.
