MIAMI – The second act is always the hardest. The organisers of the Miami Grand Prix know that all too well ahead of this weekend’s race on the circuit which snakes around the Hard Rock Stadium.
That venue is key to what the circuit is doing differently to evolve the event this year. After being squeezed into the area outside the northern part of the stadium last year, F1’s paddock is now on the Dolphins home field. On Thursday, F1 drivers joined Dolphins stars such as Jaylen Phillips in an NFL-inspired combine event on the same field they will host rival teams come August this year.
“The vibe’s pretty sick so far,” McLaren’s Lando Norris said later that day when asked what he made of the feel of it all.
Miami can confidently boast to have done something no other race on the calendar can offer to its fans – an opportunity to replicate what Netflix’s cameras have so successfully done with ‘Drive to Survive’ by lifting the lid on a paddock which so often sits out of sight of most who watch or attend a race. Entry to the stadiums grandstands are included with a general admission ticket.
“It’s a very unique thing we bring with this GP,” Tyler Epp, the president of the Miami Grand Prix, told ESPN ahead of this week’s showpiece race.
“We have a state of the art facility here and the desire was to use it as much as we could.
“That access is bringing the campus pass fan, the general admission fan, inside the world. It’s trying to bring a bit of the Netflix effect into the event.”
Work on converting the area on the pitch from a state-of-the-art facility hosting a tennis tournament to a tightly-packed F1 paddock started in just hours after Daniil Medvedev lifted Miami Open trophy on April 2., exactly a month before team personnel first arrived for the grand prix. A team of over 1,000 people worked on the changover and not even historic rainfall in the weeks between both events stopped the transformation.
The result is spectacular, with 12 units (10 for the teams, and one each for F1 and the FIA) spread around the field. Fans can watch the F1 paddock below and, crucially, can do so in the shade, something which many fans complained was hard to find in 2022 when the inside of the stadium was closed off to the general public and used solely for marketing purposes.
The move to make something unique is smart when you are part of F1’s growing calendar. Austin’s Circuit of the America’s, which has hosted the U.S. Grand Prix…
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