Of all the bad nights one can experience in Las Vegas, Formula 1 has had many of the worst. In 2023, the year the World Cup returns to Nevada, USA, more than four decades later, no one foresaw that the extravagance and obscene luxury projected by the casino city, and which led to the event being sold as the Super Bowl of racing, would end up becoming a great disappointment and a lesson in humility. Less than ten minutes into the first free practice, a poorly sealed manhole cover was sucked into the underside of Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari, and he had to abandon the session with the car half destroyed. After a thorough inspection, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) ordered the removal of all water registers to make them safe, a job which required extra effort from stewards and volunteers. The second training session only started at half past two in the morning, obviously, with the stands empty of fans, who were reportedly evacuated “for logistical and safety reasons”. The image was as strange as it was dramatic, very damaging if you take into account that it was intended to impress, but for other reasons. “What happened is simply unacceptable in F1,” said Fred Vasseur, F1 director. Stable. The worst possible premiere of an event that was always accompanied by some sensation or other, due to the obscene prices that were asked depending on the experiences, which in the end were offered at a rock-bottom price.
Well, two years after that embarrassment, another sewer has upset the agenda of the first training day of this year’s edition, which could leave the championship ready to be resolved, in favor of Lando Norris, next week, in Qatar. On this occasion, it was the suspicion of a loose covering at turn 17 of the track, as reported by Alpine and Haas, that caused the red flag 20 minutes from the end of testing, which was resumed a quarter of an hour later, once the point of conflict had been verified. Despite this, the stewards stopped again a few minutes later, suspecting that the accident had not been completely resolved. Two new ones coitus interruptus in a city that aspires to be the scene of the greatest show on earth and comes across a detail as prosaic as a sheet of steel. In any case, Norris leads the standings, with a margin of 29 thousandths over Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes), half a second over Max Verstappen (ninth) and eight tenths over Oscar Piastri (14th).
The accident prevented us from making a film even remotely focused on what the timing of this Friday (early Saturday morning in Spain) might hold, much less on Saturday’s race (5pm Sunday in Spain, Dazn). The conditions of the track, with an infernal cold (about ten degrees in the air) which greatly reduces the grip of the tires and increases their wear due to the grain size —some bubbles generating on the surface—, add a bit of intrigue to an end of the year that has everything, with three title candidates that could become two depending on how the reigning champion behaves in these next two days, in a Las Vegas Grand Prix that is still the perfect metaphor of a city with lots of glitter, noise and kilometers of neon lights, but with cracks under the asphalt.
