The Las Vegas Grand Prix will have a support event for the first time this year with the addition of two Ferrari Challenge races.
Last year’s inaugural race on the Las Vegas Strip Circuit featured only Formula 1 cars on track, with the organizers trying to prioritize the effective opening and closing of roads and dealing with the logistics for the first time. In order to provide more action for fans, the Ferrari Challenge has been added to the schedule with races on Friday and Saturday nights, on top of the previously announced fan festival on Las Vegas Boulevard.
“We’re adding Ferrari Challenge,” Emily Prazer, chief commercial officer for F1 and Las Vegas Grand Prix, Inc., said. “So that will be coming, and we’re super excited about it. We announced the fan festival, which has gone down really well. We wanted to make sure we’re embracing the local community a bit more and educating the audience, particularly the Nevadans on what we’re doing around Formula 1.
“I know this is Vegas-related, but just generally speaking, [we want to] continue to educate the American audience on Formula 1. So having a free-to-enter event was something we thought would be quite good for us to hit those objectives.
“Equally, that’s where the support paddock will be, so just keeping it open, making sure people can come and understand what the purpose of a support race is, why we’re doing it, and then we’re also going to have an F1 Academy show run in the fan festival as well, just again so people start understanding just the broader F1 ecosystem and what support races do and bring to each grand prix. That’s the purpose of it.
“We took on the feedback last year of not having a support race. Obviously logistics last year were our number one concern, which again I think everyone understood, and so now we feel much more comfortable being able to extend the operating hours and the track activity. It was just a year one confidence thing, honestly, and now we’re feeling pretty good about it.”
The fan festival will take place on Nov. 22 and 23, and the 30,000 free tickets per day have all been taken up already alongside other events planned by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA).
“Tickets are taken, it’s a capacity of 30,000 per day,” Prazer explained. “Vegas is notorious that during major events, people flood there anyway. If you speak to anyone from Vegas — and the casinos as well — during a Super Bowl, it’s great that the Super Bowl was there, but they’re that busy during the Super Bowl anyway. So we wanted to take the spirit of that and have the city be as busy as possible if people aren’t necessarily coming to the grand prix.
“Which is why the LVCVA have also put on a festival downtown, so they’re doing more of a music-based [festival] downtown. We thought we have the land opposite the Wynn [hotel] anyway as part of our relationship with the Wynn, we’re putting the hot lap cars there, and the support race, so let’s turn it almost into an NFL experience-type opportunity, and make it free to enter.
“Obviously ticketing is for a security purpose, but hopefully it will just attract the locals and others to come and hang out.”