F1 CHIEFS have added never-before-seen features to the Las Vegas track to give fans the “best Grand Prix ever”.
The event will see an ice rink installed above the Paddock Club and the inclusion of the Ferrari Challenge.
The race weekend in November will also showcase the F1 Academy, and there is hope of adding the female-only series in the future.
An F1 Festival has also been set up to run on the Friday and Saturday which has sold out its 30,000 tickets per day.
Chief commercial officer for F1 and Las Vegas Grand Prix Emily Prazer has insisted that they are “excited” about this season’s race.
She said: “We know what we have to do before the grand prix this year.
“We’re adding Ferrari Challenge. So that will be coming, we’re super excited about it. We took on the feedback last year of not having a support race.
“Logistics last year were our number one concern, which again I think everyone understood.
“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. Ferrari also brings a crowd that loves Las Vegas as you’d expect.
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“So it’s a natural one for us to go after, and they’ve been incredible partners.”
Prazer has claimed that the plans are being tied ti make sure it is the “best Grand Prix ever”.
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Instead of breaking the bad news to him in a face-to-face meeting, boss Ron Dennis got his assistant to send Magnussen a short and impersonal email.
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She added: “We’re scaling back a bit as we want to focus on actually delivering the best grand prix ever.
“The casinos are adjusting what they were doing around the race.
“The Wynn, the Bellagio, they all did incredibly well, but the reason we’re doing festivals downtown is to enhance the average person coming to Vegas that weekend and not putting them off.
“I think the first year, none of us knew how the racing was going to turn out.
“So we wanted to overcompensate because we wanted to make sure that it was a full, until you see those cars go around the track and see what actually happens it’s very hard to just watch it on simulators going ‘oh, it’s going to be a good race’.
“We had confidence, don’t get me wrong. But when that came to life obviously for us everybody wanted it to be very Vegas-driven. And so do the partners in Vegas.
“They ultimately drive a lot of our mentality, the MGMs, Wynns, Caesars, they’re incredible partners, but you see how they market the destination.
“We said, ‘right, let us take it up 15 notches’, which I think we did in year one. But the intent is to scale some of that back.
“We felt that we did do too much, the Wednesday night was a one-off.
“I will never, ever be allowed to spend that amount of money again on a 30-minute show. We were nominated for an Emmy, but apart from that, it was a project in itself.”
Prazner has also spoken about the adding of an ice rink above the Paddock Club in a move that is not seen “anywhere else”.
She said: “We talk about Las Vegas within Formula 1 as almost like our little bit of an incubator that we get to try some different things and push the boundaries a bit more, because it’s Vegas.
“So we’re putting an ice rink on the roof of the Paddock Club in Vegas this year. You would never see us do that anywhere else.
“But the intent is like, ‘how do we create more of an entertainment proposition?’
“The idea is, honestly, that if you look at the size of the Paddock Club and making sure that you actually activate all the space, it was one of those of, ‘what do we do?’ It’s a lot of fun.”
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