The first-ever Las Vegas Grand Prix race weekend got off to an inauspicious start late on Thursday night: Eight minutes into the first practice session on the track, something akin to a manhole cover—sealed over by asphalt—was pulled loose by the massive downforce power of the cars’ purpose-built aerodynamics, and hit Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari car while it was traveling at more than 200 mph. “He said, ‘I hit something,’ and we were quite scared about him because he was struggling to breathe,” the director of Scuderia Ferrari, Frédéric Vasseur, tells me the next night in his office at the team’s local headquarters. “When the car came back 20 minutes later, we discovered that the car was completely destroyed—and even when Carlos came back, he was a bit shocked; Carlos said he was not able to speak.”
It’s something Sainz’s Ferrari teammate, Charles Leclerc, almost seemed to predict when I spoke with him the night before and asked about racing in a new city, on a new course basically carved out from the heart of the infamous, neon-lit Las Vegas Strip.
“You never really know what to expect in the first few laps you do, because it’s a normal road most of the time,” Leclerc says. “You don’t really know how much dust there will be on the track, and where are the bumps, and all of these kind of things that can change with normal road cars going on them. So there’s always some uncertainty.”
After working through the night with Ferrari engineers and mechanics in a furious, last-minute attempt to repair the damaged car in time for Saturday night’s race—and navigating a frustrating penalty imposed by the sport’s governing body, essentially for having to use a replacement part to fix something that was either an act of God or a fault of the track infrastructure—Vasseur spoke his unvarnished truth about the impossible situation at a press conference, whereupon the host then attempted to pivot to a cheerier subject.
“I was in this mood,” Vasseur says. “And then the guy said, ‘Ah—could you do a summary of the season?’ I said, ‘No—fuck that.’"
Around the same time, Max Verstappen—the sport’s intermittently humorless world champion three years running, who’s already been declared the champion a third time after a dominating 2023 season—called the Vegas race “99% show, 1% sporting event.”
“I understand fans need something to do around a track, but it is more important to make them understand what we do as a sport,” he continues, a day later. “Most come to just have a party, drink, see a performance. I can do that all over the world—I can do Ibiza and get completely shit-faced and have a good time.”
Leclerc seems to understand this take, but from the other side of the coin, as it were. “I came here three years ago with all of my best friends,” he tells me, “mostly to party—and we had an incredible time. I love Vegas. Obviously we’re here now for a different reason—but the hype around the race is what makes it so special. It make it more fun.”
After the Wednesday night opening ceremony festivities, which featured everyone from Kylie Minogue and Andra Day to John Legend and Keith Urban, along with all the drivers gathered together, Verstappen had already said: “For me, you can skip this… We are just standing up there, looking like a clown.” Twenty-four hours later, he’d step into his car in a racing suit designed in homage to Vegas-era Elvis.
If I learned anything from my three days spent at the rococo heart of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, it’s this: If you’ve got a problem with clowns, best stay away from the circus. The city of Las Vegas—along with its armada of hotels, resorts, and casinos, along with the owners of Formula 1—has spent billions of dollars and many years building to this moment, and they were ready. My accommodations at Wynn included three days of Paddock Club passes—which came packed in a large box with two tiers of pull-out drawers, each of which contained various laminates, individually arrayed in presentation boxes, delivered to me by an attendant wearing white gloves. When I checked into my room, a large chocolate sculpture was waiting on the desk, and individual treats—from more chocolates to Ladurée macarons, to race merch and a Chinese pineapple cake from the resort’s Wing Lei restaurant—were presented at regular intervals. Lewis Hamilton was pouring his new nonalcoholic tequila at one of the bars downstairs and opening a pop-up shop of his +44 Murakami apparel collaboration around the corner; The Chainsmokers were DJing one space, Calvin Harris and Diplo another. As for the paddock itself: It included a wedding chapel replete with an Elvis impersonator to marry you, if you so wished. (Several couples did, including 1997 F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve, who was taken by surprise by his girlfriend, Giulia Marra, as “Elvis” sang “Here Comes the Bride.”)
The race also featured Formula 1’s first-ever red carpet, which was kicked off by Vegas stalwarts Donny Osmond and Wayne Newton, who were followed by everyone from Patrick Dempsey—who stars in Michael Mann’s wondrous Ferrari movie, for which Wynn hosted a special screening the day before the race—to Cara Delevingne (who, while a fan, tells me she was seeing her first F1 race in person), will.i.am, Casey Affleck, Lindsey Vonn, Paris Hilton, and soccer legend (and Ferrari fan) Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Also here: Brad Pitt (currently playing an F1 driver in a feature, slated for 2025, that’s been being filmed at stops along the F1 circuit, including here), Justin Bieber, Lupita Nyong’o, Usain Bolt, Kylie Minogue, Axl Rose, David Beckham—who, when I press him for his rooting interest, played the diplomat and simply says, “Everyone”—and Star Wars auteur George Lucas.
Of course, the most fascinating place to watch the race is from inside the teams’ garages, a clandestine space (no photos allowed, so that other teams can’t easily learn the secrets of a rival) where you can witness almost balletic precision work from scores of exquisitely trained mechanics, engineers, fabricators, and pit crew (some of them wearing team helmets adorned, intriguingly, with the Rolling Stones’ famous tongue logo). In the Ferrari garage, above the few dozen working on the ground in Las Vegas, a screen shows the live feed from another room at Ferrari world headquarters in Maranello, Italy, seemingly straight out of NASA Mission Control, which is manned by 40-70 other specialists and communicates data learnings and strategies to the Vegas garage. (And if you’re getting the sense that this is a sport with a high barrier to entry, yes: Four sets of the brake pads Ferrari uses, for example, will set you back more than $300,000, while there’s a separate room in the garage used to store various racing tires, each of which is zipped up in its own custom-heated insulated casing, with any fluctuations in temperature regularly noted. If you’ve seen wine, or balsamic vinegar, being aged in mindful reverence, it’s like that, only with rubber.) At the beating heart of it all, of course, are the two cars, which, in the hours before races, are like patients on an operating table, carefully but constantly tended to, soothed, adjusted, tweaked, pampered.
During practices, the garage is a fascinating place to appreciate the skill and high-functioning technical mastery of a high-end Formula 1 team. During a race, the garage is a place to stress, agonize, listen, hope, worry, and silently pray. Then again, who knows? Perhaps other teams’ garages are joyful places of carefree abandon—but this is Scuderia Ferrari. If you don’t know Formula 1, you likely still know Ferrari; you may have some sense of its place in Italian pride, heritage, mythology, and self-image. In short, it’s a lot.
“Ferrari is always in the spotlight for their history,” Leclerc tells me. “And when you are driving for Ferrari, that puts you in the spotlight as well. That brings added pressure.” I ask him what it’s like to race your heart out against a fierce competitor like Verstappen, particularly when his Red Bull team seems to have a technical advantage in the current iteration of their car. “Of course there are certain expectations around the team, which sometimes are a bit more difficult to manage,” Leclerc says. “But we are a team at the end, and we’re all working together in order to try and catch up. Max is doing an excellent job, of course, but this is extra motivation for us. We all absolutely love what we do.”
Growing up racing in Italy, Leclerc—he’s 26 now—was nicknamed il Predestinato at the age of 15. “It basically means my destiny was to be a racing driver,” he says. “I’ve dedicated my life to racing since I was five years old, and it’s always been my dream to be part of Ferrari. This is all I ever wanted to do, and I’ve got a smile on my face whenever I come to the track.”
As for the race itself: By the time 10 pm on Saturday night rolls around, any thoughts of Thursday night’s manhole troubles seem far, far away; at the Wynn, every time I left my room and entered the main floor, the energy seemed to be multiplied tenfold. People were dressing (and undressing, in classic What happens in Vegas mode); and out in the Paddock Club and the Ferrari garage, engines roared. Verstappen appeared to intentionally run Leclerc, who had pole position, off the track at an early corner (a move he later blamed on lack of tire grip); some high-speed skirmishes left cars spun the wrong way on the track and, eventually, crashed out (when another driver appeared to force Verstappen off the track, Verstappen could be heard on the team radio voicing his displeasure: “What a stupid idiot!”); unlike at too many so-called street courses, we saw plenty of overtakes and dogfights. What seemed to be Leclerc’s race to lose turned into Verstappen’s race to win when, suddenly, amidst the tense stillness of the Ferrari garage, the force field known as Rihanna—in a heavily embellished, oversized leather coat and sleek, slim sunglasses—accompanied by A$AP Rocky, sidled up alongside the assembled crew and put on their team-issue headphones (through which we can listen in on team communications). My first thought was that the two have perhaps never had less attention paid to them by so many people in such close proximity, so occupied was everyone else by the tasks at hand. My second thought was that they appeared to be the only people in the garage having immense fun, so occupied was everyone else by the tasks at hand.
In the end, the race was thrilling, a gripping debut, with Leclerc pulling off a last-lap overtake to steal back second place. At long last, the garage erupted in applause and the kind of tension-releasing cheers that suddenly pierce the air. Somewhere along the way, Rihanna and Rocky snuck out, but the rest of us poured out into the pits and cheered for Charles. (This, despite the fact that when I last spoke with him, he told me that “Second or third is not a position that I’m interested in. I want to win more than anything.”)
Minutes—maybe even seconds—after all the hoopla dies down, the temporary, modular Ferrari garage, which takes three days to put together, is already being torn down and put into shipping containers as a film crew from Drive To Survive captures footage of a gaggle of Ferrari mechanics reliving the race together. (The Brad Pitt Formula 1 film—working title Apex, tentatively scheduled for 2025—has also been filming here, and elsewhere on the circuit.) The following day, they ll all board a plane and fly nearly 20 hours to the year s final race in Abu Dhabi. In the race for second place among constructors (Verstappen s Red Bull team has first place locked up), Ferrari currently trails Mercedes by four points, so there s a lot of pressure for a strong finish.
Back at Wynn, the afterparty at the hotel’s supper club, Delilah, was the kind of full-capacity hot ticket that briefly caused crowd-control issues. As I rolled up at around 1:30 am, Axl Rose seemed to be walking away almost unnoticed. Zach Braff put Casey Affleck into a (playful, I guess?) headlock before the two left, then returned; inside, Justin Bieber, Leonardo DiCaprio, Karlie Kloss, Ashley Graham, Tobey Maguire, Brooklyn Beckham, James Harden, Sofia Vergara, Jon Hamm, Shaun White, Caroline Wozniacki and her husband, David Lee, Lil Baby, Balthazar Getty, and Odell Beckham Jr., danced the night away to a DJ set from Questlove. Finding myself drinking Red Bull and locking in on a Talking Heads groove with Flava Flav and a cowboy-hatted Kimball Musk at 2:30 am wasn’t the clarion call to my bed that it should have been—but getting Rickrolled (to a remix) at 2:48 absolutely was.
On Sunday morning, the view from my window shows that last night’s racing circuit is already this morning’s civilian-issue, regular street. I head downstairs for a late brunch—everyone here’s having a late brunch, save for the few here who are clearly still sparking up last night’s tinders—at the Wynn’s SW Steakhouse. A waiter delivers my wagyu steak and eggs and tops off my coffee. “If you need absolutely anything at all, my name is César,” he says, a tall man in a black suit with a tag spelling out his name in large block letters: JULIO.
Now it’s getting dark, and it’s time to head 59 stories downstairs again and take my dinner at a table alongside the three-acre man-made lake, where every 30 minutes an enormous Kermit the Frog will emerge from atop a “performance waterfall” the size and shape of a movie theater screen dotted with 5,500 LED lights, and sing “Minnie The Moocher.” The circus, it seems, has left the town—but the town does just fine on its own.
