As the dust settled on the 2023 Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, one thing became clear: Despite all of the frustrations in the build-up to the race and all of the chaos during practice, the event was a success. Fans packed the stands for what turned out to be one of the most compelling races of the year, and many of the worst-case-scenario fears held by locals didn’t come to pass. However, F1 shouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief quite yet.
I was on-site for the LVGP weekend and spoke to as many people as I could, be they locals working in the service industry or fans who had traveled to soak up the atmosphere of a city transformed into, effectively, a Formula 1 convention. Everyone echoed a similar sentiment; the event wasn’t as bad as anyone expected.
“I was so impressed by the whole thing,” a Vegas local and Uber driver named Matt told me. One of Matt’s friends offered him free tickets to the event that had been provided to said friend’s car dealership; despite having no interest in motorsport and admitting his skepticism of the event as a whole, he found himself walking away a fan.
“If you’d talked to me before this race, I’d have been right there telling you I hoped it failed,” he told me as he drove me to the airport. “The construction, all this road work — it’s made our lives hell all year long. But seeing the race, I was like, ‘OK, I get it.’”
A variety of factors helped Matt change his mind. In the build-up to the race, he told me, F1 and race organizers really didn’t communicate with the locals in the area, which he felt resulted in a doom spiral as everyone came to expect the worst. Rumors of bad tippers, snobby foreign fans, and extreme race weekend congestion left Vegas locals gritting their teeth as they waited for their city to fall apart. That moment never came.
“I kept waiting for, like, the apocalypse, but mostly it was just kind of annoying,” Matt said of the race weekend itself. “I can look at it now, and I’m like, okay, the hard part is done. All the roadwork, the construction — we don’t have to do that again. It’s just, no one ever came to us to talk to us all year long.”
That significant lack of communication was a recurring theme with every local I spoke to. A casino bartender named Meaghan told me that she hadn’t been provided with any information about the event until the Wednesday of the race weekend. It wasn’t until that morning that she was prepped on how to arrive at work during road closures and what to expect during the weekend.
“We kept asking, what’s going on, what’s going to happen, what are we supposed to expect,” Meaghan said of herself and her coworkers. “Our bosses couldn’t answer because F1 wasn’t answering their questions.”
What would have helped?
“We just wanted our questions answered,” Meaghan said. “You know parent-teacher conferences, where you can go in and ask what’s going on at your kid’s school? I wish we’d had something like that. A couple town hall meetings or something. We had all these concerns, and we couldn’t get answers out of anybody.”
As far as the weekend itself went, Meaghan told me that, aside from a few customers who stiffed her on a tip, she was mostly pleased with how things had transpired — at least, once she finally understood more about the event.
“Vegas is a great city to host things, right? We have conventions and festivals all the time. F1 was just such a different thing because of how big it was, how much of the city it took over,” she explained. “I don’t think we overreacted or anything. We just couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone about why things were happening the way they were.
“People who haven’t lived here, they just don’t get it. Imagine someone went and cut down all the trees at your favorite park. Imagine covering up your city’s biggest landmarks. Imagine suddenly it starts taking you two, three times as long to get to work, all for this thing you’ve never heard of, and the people shoving it into your city just ignore you the whole time. You’re going to be pissed. You have a right to worry.”
I heard that same sentiment time and again. On my way from the airport to my hotel, my Uber driver told me he’d been forced to pick up rideshare work because the pizza shop where he worked had lost so much business due to road closures and construction that the owner regularly closed early.
“It’s just kind of this hole-in-the-wall type place, and we were open, but I just don’t think anyone could figure out how to get inside,” he said. “It’s stuff like that — F1 says it’s going to bring all this money into town, but it’s not actually making it to the small businesses that are getting screwed over most. And it’s like, family-owned, right? [F1 isn’t] going to give a fuck about, like, Mom and Pop and their five employees. They’re not listening to anyone but the big property owners.”
By the end of the weekend, many locals I spoke to had revised their concerns in light of what they felt had been an acceptably run event. The new concerns were minor: altering traffic light patterns near rideshare locations, for example, or starting on-track action earlier so that fans were still in the mood for some gambling after the race. Few people were plagued with the existential dread that had darkened the mood ahead of the Grand Prix.
“I was expecting all this disruption and all these rude fans, because that’s all we heard about,” Matt said. “We never really heard anything from F1; it was like [the series] didn’t care, and that left a nasty taste in our mouths. It if had just taken time to talk to us and answer our questions, we would have calmed down.”
Yes, the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix went better than expected, but if Formula 1 wants this event to continue throughout its proposed 10-year contract, it needs to get more involved with the local population. It needs to clearly communicate with the people whose livelihoods are impacted by its presence. The locals need to be heard, and F1 needs to work to accommodate their concerns. It’s the only way the event can survive.