The Miami Grand Prix Knows What It's Selling

When adding a second Formula 1 race in the U.S., Liberty Media had just about any city and track in the country available to them. They ignored every pre-existing opportunity to zero in on a temporary track built around a parking lot in Miami. From a racing fan's perspective, it is an obviously bad choice in the country that still races open wheelers at tracks like Road America, Watkins Glen, and Laguna Seca every year. It's not necessarily one of the country's signature cities, either; If you go down the list of American metro areas by population, Miami comes in behind Will Smith's less secret first home of Philadelphia at just eighth. No, F1 came here because the entire city markets itself the same way Formula 1 does: As an ambitious luxury product worth traveling from anywhere in the world to see.

Like Monaco, Miami is on the F1 calendar for the glamour. Or at least for the glitz. Liberty knew that Miami was a city its most exclusive guests would happily travel to, but, more than that, they knew it was a city its most powerful sponsors would happily leverage for the promotional opportunities that make sponsoring F1 a viable business model. That made the first draft of the GP a Super Bowl-like event, not in significance but in opportunity for corporate partners to show their very best to their very best clients. That meant the influence of the weekend went well beyond the Miami Gardens track, but don't miss the track's part in this. Miami is built on competing exclusivity, perhaps the core feature of the circuit.

The Miami International Autodrome, the official name of the semi-temporary circuit designed to be deconstructed and rebuilt every year around the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, is all about bringing that exclusivity to every corner of a track. The Autodrome is not only built around luxury experiences, it's built around a wide variety of competing luxury experiences. The Paddock Club is the heart of it all, a $13,000-a-ticket experience that drew surprisingly negative reviews. Then there's individual team hospitality structures scattered throughout the track, including the Red Bull hospitality section I attended with Acura. Then you have Hard Rock's temporary beach in turns 11, 12, and 13, complete with mermaids in pools and elevated cabanas watching over what turned out to be the most difficult corners of the track. Grandstands are scattered throughout, of course, including those with an optimal view of pre-race activities like concerts and Martin Brundle's now-traditional celebrity mistake. All of these things give different sorts of fans, customers, and clients a unique experience they can tell people scattered in other corners of the track is in whatever way superior to what they were offered. Only one section has a convincing argument that their experience is one-of-a-kind, though: the marina.

The inaugural Miami Grand Prix will be remembered as the race with the fake water. Not the race with the sellout crowd, not the most-talked-about day in F1's history in America, not even the race where Max Verstappen wore a football helmet on the podium. If you build one fake marina with painted water for dry-docked boats in the middle of a corner, you've branded yourself as the race with the fake water. The absurdity of it all was a joke online, but on the ground it was a source of pure joy. There's a novelty to it in person, the place being so shamelessly fake that you knew even the wealthiest clients had to be in on the joke. At an event where the main sense is that everyone is trying to impress everyone else, the concrete marina felt like some of the most genuine fun available. There are boats, the boats are parked in a parking lot, and F1 cars are going around that parking lot. It's not Monaco, but it's a good time.