It’s Saturday night in Sin City, 9pm local time. One hour until lights out. Walking out of the media centre, across the car park of the Tuscany Suites and Casino, and up through the various security checkpoints, you arrive at the highly coveted, yet strangely downplayed open space that is the Formula One paddock. Halfway down, between the garages of Aston Martin and Alfa Romeo, lies the grid access lane: a portal to the forthcoming chaos.
There is a chill in the air. A cool 15C temperature which, predicted all week, is about to play havoc with tyres in the 50 laps ahead. A pause for breath and then the steel-faced American bodyguard gives the go-ahead. On you stroll, pretending you belong here. Welcome to the curiously flummoxing experience that is the F1 pre-race grid.
And this is not any old grid. This is Las Vegas: F1’s newest super-venue, where no multimillion-dollar expense has been spared (save a manhole cover or two). In the near distance are 20 cars all lined up in order, with at least a dozen mechanics and engineers per car. And in the gaps in between stands everyone else – the VIPs, the executives and the media – relishing or reeling in the madness of it all. Forty minutes until lights out.
Effectively, there are two choices as a grid bystander: stay at the front of the pack, scrummaged in the melee to catch a glimpse of the A-listers, or head speedily to the back of the start-finish straight to rise up for air. Your route? By any means necessary. Down the middle, tiptoeing down the sides, most likely a zigzagging of both. Aston Martin owner Lawrence Stroll trots down alongside his wife to the back, where his son Lance starts in 19th. He exchanges a joke with Sky Sports grid walk pioneer Martin Brundle: “Don’t bother me today!” he says. Brundle, sporting a striking dark blue jacket for Vegas’s F1 reincarnation, laughs as he awaits his cue from a producer in his ear. This is his terrain.
