The much-awaited Las Vegas Grand Prix is only a week away and many expect that the race in the Sin City will be one of the most iconic ever seen in F1 history. F1 have invested over $500,000,000 to have a race in Las Vegas and the hope is that this event will be highly profitable for them. However, despite all the hype surrounding it, a report from GPBlog suggests that the Las Vegas GP might disappoint in terms of the number of people that attend the race.
According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, only around 105,000 people are expected to be in the city for the race weekend. An even smaller number would be actually present in the grandstands with the newspaper claiming that only 20,000 to 30,000 people have grandstand tickets for the event.
If the estimates are correct, this would mean that Las Vegas would unfortunately be crowned as one of the least visited races in the 2023 calendar. As per a report by Statista, the Bahrain GP had the lowest attendance last year with 98,000 fans visiting over the course of the race weekend.
As of 2023, the Bahrain GP saw 99,500 fans, only 5,500 less than the estimated amount of people set to visit Sin City for the F1 weekend. With the F1 market growing considerably in the US, Liberty Media would surely have expected their third race on US soil to have gathered a larger crowd.
To put Las Vegas in comparison with the other US races, Austin saw an attendance of 432,000 throughout the race weekend. Meanwhile, the second race in Miami saw around 270,000 flocking in to see their favorite drivers battle it out on track.
Highly-priced Las Vegas GP tickets backfires on F1
There have been numerous reasons why Las Vegas might fail to attract the crowd that they are expecting for the race. The biggest issue remains the exorbitantly high-priced tickets which have already backfired on F1. With people refusing to buy the tickets at sky-high prices, several thousand tickets have gone unsold and F1 authorities and resellers are now looking at losses.
To minimize these losses, these tickets are now being sold at highly discounted rates. Back in August, the cheapest tickets for Saturday’s race were priced at $1,645. As of now, the same ticket is priced at $1,087, a discount of around 38%. Hotel prices around the venue have also gone down by around 58%.
