The Original Las Vegas F1 Race Was a Complete Mess

Nelson Piquet felt like hell. The flu or something. Worse, his neck was out of whack from running counterclockwise laps in a high-downforce car around a freshly minted Formula 1 circuit in the desert. The guy from Caesars Palace offered some relief in the form of world-champion boxer Sugar Ray Leonard’s masseur. That’s one good thing about holding Las Vegas’s inaugural grand prix in the parking lot of a casino: You can’t beat the amenities.

Preparations for the 1981 Caesars Palace Grand Prix had come down to the wire, with a 2.26-mile circuit built in a blinding 45 days, placed on a 75-acre plot of car park and scrubland between the Las Vegas Strip and Interstate 15.

“It was just bare concrete around a dust bowl,” says F1 historian Nick Garton. “It looked like Bahrain did when they were still building it.”

Still, with 54 feet of track-surface width, 14 turns, and a 45,000-seat stadium alongside, the circuit was FISA approved and ready to go. It’s what you’d expect an Eighties casino boss and $7 million ($23 million today) could pull off in under two months. Back then, Caesars Palace reigned over the Strip. Splashy events like the Ali-­versus-Holmes bout a year earlier brought high rollers, and high rollers brought dough.

The race was important for F1 too. It marked the final challenge of the 1981 season, deciding the drivers’ championship in a points battle that was hairsplittingly close and is still perplexing to consider more than four decades later.

Back to Piquet. In a 90-minute session, the masseur, accustomed to a boxer’s steely physique, bruised the slight driver’s back. Now he feels worse than hell. Heading into the race, the 29-year-old Brazilian driver for the Brabham team trailed Williams driver Carlos Reutemann by a single point. Even before Piquet’s injuries, the smart money had been on the Argentine to edge out Piquet for the championship.

Reutemann “was the most consistent performer through the year,” Garton says. “The car was well proven and well developed. Everything was in
his favor.”

There’s another wrinkle, a French one, named Jacques Laffite. A few weeks earlier, Laffite, driving for Ligier, had come from qualifying in 10th position to win the Canadian Grand Prix, collecting nine points for first—totaling 43 entering the season finale—and putting him in contention for the championship with Reutemann (49) and Piquet (48). (At the time, championship points were allocated to first through sixth places as nine, six, four, three, two, one.)

Before the Vegas race, Laffite had irritated organizers by telling Milan’s La Gazzetta dello Sport that the Vegas circuit was a “ridiculous go-kart track” and the grand prix “a joke.” Caesars Palace responded to the paper with a multimillion-­dollar lawsuit for “derogatory and irresponsible remarks,” according to the Los Angeles Times. That seemed to put the issue to bed.

Others were more sanguine, including Ferrari driver Gilles Villeneuve, who, according to the Times, said the track surface was “particularly good.” Williams boss Frank Williams, not known as a mincer of words, praised the “absolutely superb circuit” that was “extremely demanding on both car and driver.” The ground truth would be told on race day: Saturday, October 17, 1981.

On Friday, amid unseasonably cool weather, Reutemann put his Williams on pole, with teammate Alan Jones just 0.174 second behind. Piquet, still smarting from the boxing-grade massage, qualified fourth, and Laffite was down in 12th.

“Of the three of them,” Garton says, “Reutemann just looked completely in control.”

Race day brought warmer temperatures—and a turnabout. At the start, Jones jumped into the lead at the first corner and accelerated away, “leaving Reutemann to be swamped by Villeneuve, [Alain] Prost and [Bruno] Giacomelli,” Alan Henry wrote in his post-race report for Motor Sport. ­Reutemann “just went backward,” Garton says. He landed in fifth by the end of the first lap. Piquet dropped to eighth after a rough start but fought hard to regain position. Laffite ran seventh, his championship hopes a mathematical long shot.

As the race continued, the pack order fluctuated.