I’m asking him what the most ridiculous, only-in-Vegas thing he’s seen since arriving is – he’s yet to visit The Bellagio’s Shoey Bar, erected in his honour (“It’s cool, it’s gross. I’m proud!”) – when an Elvis impersonator walks past us, holding a chequered flag. It’s divinely cliché. Later, I find out that this particular Elvis is officiating the weddings at the paddock’s purpose-built Vegas wedding chapel, ‘Race to the Altar’: I duck inside just in time to see former F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve and his partner Giulia Marra taking photographs after tying the knot. The back wall is covered in roses; neon text reads, “Lights out, and away we go!” in a decisively brunch-restaurant typeface.
Everything in Las Vegas requires a certain immensity of spirit: a full-chested commitment to the grand, the loud, the too-much, the elsewhere-unimaginable. And despite the sourness of some in the racing world, I can’t help but think that’s the reason why Formula 1 finds itself right at home here. Perhaps we sometimes forget the sheer ridiculous marvel of a car going at 220 mph, when we grow used to seeing them on TV. “They sound like alien spacecraft going by,” a fan outside the aforementioned Shoey Bar says. He’s clutching a shoe with a plastic cocktail cup in it, a less-gross version of Ricciardo’s famous podium celebration. (People are queuing around the block for them, and you get to keep the shoe.) “It’s not a fucking normal noise at all.” By the time you hear it, and smell burnt rubber on asphalt, the car has already vanished from view.
What a Formula 1 racecar does shouldn’t be possible – and yet, like Vegas, it is. So with a roll of the dice, the Grand Prix’s fate changes, as if to spurn all who’d bet against it: Friday’s qualifying and Saturday’s race provide some of the greatest thrills and battles all year, an exhilarating moment for Formula 1 during a rather predictable season tied up by the most dominant car in the sport’s history. The cars roll into corners decorated with spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds; grid positions shuffle like cards, the advantage keeps changing hands. Three drivers – Verstappen, Perez, and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc – were well and truly fighting for first place. This was real racing to the very last lap, which there’s been a dearth of all year at the front of the grid. “For all those who said it was all about the show, Vegas proved them wrong,” seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton said to press, post-race. “This has provided a better race than most of the tracks we go to. Hats off to the people who ran the show.”
I don’t know what an alien spacecraft sounds like, but I do know the otherworldliness of Formula 1, of seeing and hearing those magnificent machines up close. As they ripped through the air in the city that never sleeps, the whole of Las Vegas seemed to come under their spell. It looked stunning from the aerial views people get to see at home, the cars under the Vegas lights. In real life, we were even more enthralled. People in the grandstands; people in hotel balconies, people in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven standing on the back of a dump truck, craning their necks above the barriers just to catch that split second where you get to behold something impossible. The split second where if you risk it all, you win.
