It’s “lights out” at the start… or better yet “lights on” across the Las Vegas Strip as the Formula 1 circus comes to town. With this being Vegas, qualification gets started Friday night at midnight local time (PST), with race set for Saturday night at 10 p.m., when viewers in places like Europe will wake up to 20 F1 cars streaking down Las Vegas Boulevard.
Formula 1, the once insular, don’t bother attending if you can’t afford a suite at the Four Seasons European-based racing series, has been on an American onslaught. Colorado-based Liberty Media bought Formula 1 for $4.4 billion back in 2017, and had plans for growing the business, especially in America.
Shares of Formula 1, trading under the tracking stock ticker FWONK, have a market cap of over $14 billion, though the stock is down 16% year to date.
Nevertheless, Liberty’s gamble on the US, and in particular Vegas, where Liberty has spent a whopping $600 million to develop for a 10-year race deal, appears worth taking.
“I expect the revenues of this weekend will approach $500 million or perhaps even more, but not only do we expect to make money in Vegas, but it’s an enormous growth vehicle for the business overall,” Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei told Yahoo Finance. “New sponsors like T-Mobile and AmEx [have joined] because of Vegas; we have the opportunity on Saturday night to show a whole lot of fans around the world a new element with the night race down the strip, it's going to be iconic.”
Las Vegas will not only be spectacle, but in Maffei’s eyes it will be the new crown jewel for US racing. After experiencing a huge boom in the US fueled by the Netflix F1 show “Drive to Survive” and the pandemic effect of millions of captive viewers, ratings have come down a bit, with one report showing a 9% drop in 2023. Red Bull driver Max Verstappen’s domination of the 2023 season hasn’t helped either, with the outcome of most races pretty much known before the checkered flag comes out.
Despite this, Maffei pointed out there’s still room for growth.
“You can look at engagement across all sorts of platforms, TikTok, all other social media platforms — the United States has now become our largest market,” he said. “In the space of four years, a recent study showed we've taken the average age down four years, and the new fan base is about 40% female. So we've got a variety of fans who interact with us in [an] enormous number of ways. And we continue to grow that audience and touch them in new and different ways every day.”
Maffei acknowledges there have been growing pains getting the Vegas track and paddock area set up for the race, and residents and workers on the Strip have been complaining for months about it.
Liberty and Maffei apologized this week to the city and residents for the disturbances, but in the end, said the city will come to see the race as big positive.
“I think Vegas will like this a lot. It will be the largest sporting event ever done in Vegas. Bigger than the Super Bowl, bigger than anything they have ever had, and we're seeing injecting something like $1.2 billion in the local economy.”
The NFL may have something to say about that, especially with the Big Game coming to Las Vegas this February.
The one advantage the NFL has over Formula 1 at this point is an accessible sport, one that everyone from Main Street to glitzy Rodeo Drive can appreciate, and enjoy passionately. That’s the goal for Maffei and F1 too, a sport that’s seen as aspirational, but not totally inclusive.
“We now have a fan base which is much more broad, much more widespread. I've been told by many parents that they amazed that their teenage child gets up early on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning to watch qualifying or watch the race, maybe the only thing they're willing to get up [and do],” Maffei joked. “I'm ecstatic we have the growth and young fan base and ecstatic that we have the growth in our female fan base. It's wonderful.”
Lewis Hamilton, seven-time world champion and icon in his own right, being the first racer of African and Grenadian descent to win the title, is a huge ambassador for the sport. He’s also a big fan of the US and sees the Vegas race as something worth watching — even if it will start after midnight East Coast time on Saturday.
“I hear there’s a lot of people complaining about the direction Stefano [Domenicali, F1 chief executive] and Liberty Media are taking, but they’re doing an amazing job,” Hamilton said.
“I’ve seen the movie 'Casino' like 1,000 times,” he joked, adding, “It’s very surreal to be here. Very exciting. Such an incredible place. Great energy, great buzz.”
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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