LONDON: Next week’s inaugural Miami Grand Prix already seems like Formula One’s model of Super Bowl with an enormous buzz and celebrities clamouring for the most well liked tickets on the town, in accordance to McLaren boss Zak Brown.
The American stated his crew have been the most important patrons of hospitality for the May 8 race across the Hard Rock Stadium, house of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, however demand far outstripped provide.
“It’s going to be awesome. I’ve been here six years and I’ve never seen demand or buzz for a grand prix like I’ve seen for Miami,” Brown, whose background is in sponsorship and advertising, informed Reuters.
“We can simply double our hospitality and we’re already the biggest hospitality purchaser in Miami … it rivals the Super Bowl so far as ‘are you going to the Miami race?’.
“I’ve been around F1 for 20 years and I’m used to going to grands prix but I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The race is the fifth spherical of the season and, with the long-established race in Austin, Texas, one in all two within the United States this yr. In 2023 there will be three with Las Vegas debuting.
Brown stated McLaren had 1,000 visitors, together with A-list celebrities, coming over the course of the weekend and would have a McLaren House in addition to Paddock Club hospitality and grandstands.
“Having been around the Super Bowl, where there’s the football game and then there’s the halftime celebs and shows, this feels like the Super Bowl,” he stated.
The Miami metropolitan space has hosted Super Bowl 11 occasions, greater than anyplace else, with six of them on the Hard Rock Stadium and the newest in 2020.
Austin drew the most important F1 crowd of the season final yr, with a complete three-day attendance of 400,000, and Brown stated the Texas observe had performed a giant function in constructing the game’s reputation in a area of key significance to Formula One.
So too had the acclaimed Netflix docu-series ‘Drive to Survive’, credited with bringing in new and youthful audiences to a championship that after struggled for air time in a market dominated by US sports activities.
Brown stated he noticed no signal of the bubble bursting.
“Now you’ve got Vegas the sport’s never been healthier and more exciting,” he stated.
“If you look at the corporate partners on our car, half of our car are US-based companies. So US-based companies are now actually starting to get behind it. I think we’ve got a long way to go.”
The American additionally performed down failed authorized makes an attempt by some native Miami Gardens residents to attempt to cease the race on grounds of disruption and bodily hurt from noise ranges.
“Welcome to America,” he stated. “The headline I noticed was type of persons are afraid they’re going to go deaf. I don’t even have headphones on within the storage.
“The amount of exposure and economics that’s going to be brought to Miami … is going to be a far greater contribution to a much larger audience than X number of people that don’t want to hear the sound and probably never heard a Formula One car.”
Source : channelnewsasia.com
