This year a new race, the Grand Prix of Las Vegas, is on the championship calendar and many are looking forward to this premiere with great interest. That is understandable: this city itself has a special appeal with its specific fame and the circuit there should look very picturesque, since the race will take place in the dark and under artificial lights.
For the first time, the Liberty Media company is acting as a promoter and organizer of the Grand Prix and is investing huge amounts of money in the construction of the city circuit, and Australian photographer Kim Illman, who recently visited there, told how it is going .
He made a 10 minute video, and it looks like a tour of the track, starting at the pit complex. The building has already been constructed, but work continues on the adjacent site.
They’re also not done yet on another of the circuit’s key infrastructure facilities: the Paddock Club, according to Illman, is impressive in size, because this is Las Vegas!
In the paddock area, a long row of rooms will be set up where the teams and their guests will be located – all of this, as expected, is located opposite the pits. The team garages are the most spacious compared to comparable facilities at other circuits.
Illman shot the following shots in the guest area, which is located on the upper floors of the pit building. Everything also looks quite luxurious, and the author of the video recalled that the price of a ticket, which gives the right to spend the weekend not in the stands, but in more comfortable conditions, exceeds $ 10,000.
But this complex is the only permanent building on the circuit, and everything else is temporary structures that are erected before the race and then demolished.
We can also get a first idea of the configuration of the racing ring, along which the installation of grandstands will continue. Much of the circuit runs through the streets and roads of these parts of the city, some of which had a very dubious reputation, but local residents believe that thanks to the arrival of Formula 1, the situation should improve.
Kim noticed that the farms on which hundreds of spotlights of the lighting system are mounted are only on one side of the highway, but according to calculations this should be enough for everything to be clearly visible and for the television image to be displayed properly. of the required quality.
The track is quite narrow in places: at the exit of Turn 5 the width is only 12 meters, and in other parts no more than 15 meters.
The grandstands surrounding Turns 6 and 7 offer excellent views of Las Vegas’ famous landmark: the Sphere, the world’s largest spherical screen, consisting of 1.2 million LEDs, which cost more than $2 billion to build. But according to Kim, he saw what it looked like at night, and it seemed to him that in the dark it all glowed too brightly, i.e. can make it difficult to follow the events on the highway itself.
One of the most impressive sections promises to be a long straight stretch along Las Vegas Boulevard, and the speeds there will be very high, 300 km/h and higher. Cars also speed past the famous Caesars Palace casino.
There are numerous very high standard hotels in this area and it appears that they still have rooms available for the race weekend, which can also be explained by the exorbitantly high prices. For example, four nights at the Paris Hotel in a double room will cost about $1,700 – the price in the video is stated in Australian currency.
While road work is underway on various parts of the route, much to the dismay of local residents. But if the Las Vegas Grand Prix goes rosy in all respects, as the organizers obviously hope, then this will partly justify the temporary inconvenience.
Towards the end of the ten-minute video, the author wondered to what extent the very late timing of some November weekend sessions in Las Vegas, which was inconvenient for the American public, was justified. Qualifying starts in New York time at 3 am on the night from Friday to Saturday. In Europe, however, it will already be morning.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
