Cell service was spotty. The on-site ATMs were balky. Yes, traffic was heavy after the race. And that’s pretty much the extent of the problems with the inaugural United States Grand Prix at the new Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. So many things that could have gone wrong didn’t. Remember this day; odds are there will not be such a close-to-perfect race as this one again for a very long time.
Certainly there were some minor issues with a brand-new circuit that had been completed at a fever pitch—track management likely bought every square inch of sod in central Texas to try to cover the rocky soil, and where they couldn’t, they laid a carpet of stringy green material with grass seeds in it. Why they didn’t take a hint from India for its first race and just spray-paint everything green showed commendable restraint.
And while the race-day crowd of 117,429 was just shy of the hoped-for 120,000, Saturday’s audience of 82,710, and Friday’s crowd of 65,360—easily the biggest Friday crowd in F1 this year, thanks to heavy rain at Silverstone—were well above projections.
Other predicted problems simply didn’t happen. The fans began arriving for the 1:00 PM race as early as 7:00 in the morning, thus spreading out the arrival times to the point where traffic was never that bad. Not so with the mass departure, but it was still manageable. And rumors that all the area roads would be closed, thus preventing local property owners from selling parking—$15 to $60, it appeared—also didn’t happen. If you wanted to pay to park close, you could. If you wanted to take the shuttle buses, you could. Celebrities abounded, but there must have been at least three clones of Matt LeBlanc, TV’s Joey from “Friends,” because the guy was there every time you looked up.
And then there was the race. Although Hermann Tilke’s firm engineered the track, founding partner Tavo Hellmund and 1993 500-cc MotoGP world champion Kevin Schwantz had firm hands in designing it, and the layout is consistently interesting and challenging, with excellent sightlines from a variety of outposts. Teams initially criticized Pirelli’s tire choice, suggesting the hard and medium compounds had too little grip, but both tires proved durable enough for a one-stop pit strategy and the medium compound became quite racy in the closing stages of the race.
And F1 and race organizers got a dream podium: three world-champion drivers, three different manufacturers, and a popular on-track pass by winner Lewis Hamilton over then-leader Sebastian Vettel. Fernando Alonso placed third. (One interesting note: F1 media centers do not allow the presence of public-relations representatives. So the loud applause when Hamilton overtook Vettel could only have come from these cream-of-the-crop journalists, right? Such a puzzling reaction doesn’t happen in the media centers of any U.S.-based series, where journalists at least try to maintain an air of impartiality.)
Even the weather, clear and in the 70s, cooperated. After the race, founding partner Bobby Epstein, the central financier for the $400-million project, wandered the paddock, looking both giddy and slightly shell-shocked. He and his staff not only pulled it off, but with aplomb.
Now, on to next season, and the full schedule that includes Grand-Am, American Le Mans Series, MotoGP, World Endurance Championship, and Australian V-8 Supercars. Will those races go this well? Probably not. But the glow from the first Formula 1 race in Texas since the disaster of Dallas in 1984 won’t fade for a long, long time.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/caranddriver/blog/~3/4rthgGRBHqE/
Marc Gené Elmer George Bob Gerard Gerino Gerini Peter Gethin
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