When the Las Vegas Grand Prix Formula 1 race fires up beneath the night sky on Saturday, November 18, you can place a sure bet that more traffic will have traveled the road circuit during the day than when the F1 vehicles race that evening. Of course, that daytime traffic is a bit more pedestrian.
The new F1 circuit marks the first time the sport has come to Las Vegas in over four decades. The 3.8-mile track lives on roughly 3 miles of public roadway that must remain open in between race weekend events.
Along with the track comes a brand-new paddock building on 39 acres of land, the only permanent structure—other than the rebuilt roadway—that makes up the year-round presence of the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Here’s everything you need to know about the construction of this true street circuit.
Making the Circuit Roadway
Of the 50-lap, 3.8-mile track, only two sections are on private property—the pits in front of the new paddock structure and the area around the newly opened 18,000-seat MSG Sphere arena that rises 366 feet high and 516 feet wide with LEDs covering the outside—meaning the Las Vegas Grand Prix has remade roughly 3 miles of public roadway.
“It is a significant feat to take that public roadway and make it into a track,” Terry Miller, project manager for paddock and construction at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, tells Popular Mechanics. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the inclination of the roadway, it has everything to do with the asphalt and composition of the base.”
Crews went around the entire circuit—including the main 1.2-mile straightaway along the Strip before a left-hand turn near the Cosmopolitan Hotel—and tore up between 5 and 10 inches of existing public roadway. Then, they repaved in a dense base to support drivers hitting 212 miles per hour and to handle the centrifugal force of drivers cornering.
Miller says the dense base has everything to do with the bitumen and the binder and how the two mix. The teams conducted batch testing, looking at the oil content, amount of actual asphalt, density, and how it was pressed. The design was about both the asphalt and the machines doing the work to ensure appropriate density.
With a compressed base safeguarding the asphalt so it doesn’t ripple against the power of the cars, the top 1 3/4-inch of final racing surface must also be incredibly dense.
“It is an improvement to the public roadway beyond expectations,” Miller says. “This is a highly designed and specifically engineered mix.”
With the public roadway continually open to the public, crews continued grip testing on the surface as the race neared, ensuring they could burnish the top with a water-blasting system if they needed it to become rougher—a process that a driver of a regular vehicle wouldn’t notice, but those racing F1 certainly would.
However, the trickiest part with two sections of private roadway as part of the track is ensuring uniformity throughout the circuit. That’s why the team had to create an asphalt blend that can hit the right grip on both public and private roadways and be ready to burnish as needed.
Race officials didn’t do anything to change the profile or the curb-and-gutter system of the road; they simply improved the density of the asphalt on the second-longest street track on the calendar and third-longest overall. With just 14 turns—nine left and five right—it also has one of the fewest turns on the circuit.
The 3.8 miles of track comes with 7.6 miles of track barrier to create a safety fence between vehicles and fans. All around the track come 7,000-psi density concrete barriers 26 inches wide and over 3 feet tall (the typical construction concrete barrier is 2,500 psi). Each barrier must lock to the one next to it. And they all come with a steel cage debris fence inserted into the blocks with additional steel.
But being in the heart of the resort corridor, the Las Vegas Grand Prix won’t just set up the circuit for Thursday and Friday practices before the Saturday evening race and leave it be. There are 26 different positions where crews must open the track between the nightly sessions, allowing access to the public roads and resort properties.
And that means even on Saturday, with a practice having run the night before and the big race scheduled for later that evening, the Las Vegas Grand Prix circuit will serve as public roadway.
“Traffic might actually be worse during the day,” Renee Wilm, Las Vegas Grand Prix CEO, tells Popular Mechanics.
When the F1 cars do take over the space, they’ll travel on just one side of the roadway to not interfere with the median, but it still ranges to almost 50 feet wide.
“A lot of city circuits you don’t see that with the curves and roadways,” Miller says about the straightaway and speed. “We have some pretty significant straightaways and overtaking is going to be pretty exciting.”
Wilm agrees, saying the iconic moment of cars zipping down the Strip with the Bellagio fountain in the background is something the sport hasn’t yet seen. At the same time, the 14-turn track has plenty of intrigue and an additional two straightaways.
“We designed the circuit around the city with the key highlights we wanted as a backdrop to our race. It is a challenging track, and the drivers are going to enjoy driving it,” Wilm says.
The 10 p.m. local time start to the race puts it in the dark, lit up by both track lighting and the Vegas nightlife. Miller says they have the proper illumination dialed in, as per FIA guidelines, for the straightaways, corners, and chicanes—all elements that required careful planning on just where and how to place lights.
When it comes time to race again in 2024, the team can take lessons learned from 2023 when crafting the plan, but one of the toughest pieces of the puzzle is already in place. The roadway is expected to last a minimum of six years—Miller says the desert isn’t too harsh on asphalt, and it could last eight to ten years—although the team will work closely with Clark County in times where they need to do utility work or make any other patches to the circuit surface.
The Permanent Paddock
The paddock building offers the only permanent structure for the Las Vegas Grand Prix. At 1,000 feet long and 100 feet wide, the three-story building—not counting the rooftop space—is longer than three football fields, and features pit garages on the ground floor and two levels for club and event space. The rooftop will also activate with fan experiences.
The pit building encompasses the three-story control tower, embedded in the west end of the new structure to hold everything needed to adjudicate and monitor the race.
Miller says the highlight of the paddock building comes from the floor-to-ceiling glass along the pit lane and around Turn 1 on the club levels, along with the balconies that wrap all the way around.
“You can hang out on the paddock side and watch the talent go from the pit garages, or you can hang over the rail and watch the drivers below you,” he says.
By making the strategic decision to not add seats to the outdoor balconies, Miller says the energy of the teams below will get matched by the fans above, maneuvering to see the action. “It is not an event you want to sit in a chair,” Miller says, “you want to be able to stand and see the action below you.”
Crafting the 39-acre site wasn’t without its challenges, being that there was a 25-foot fall from one corner of the site to the other, requiring apt engineering and 250,000 cubic yards of infill to raise the entire site and level it. “That is not a small feat,” Miller says.
But the challenge also turned into a positive, allowing the team to install two tunnels below grade for fans to circumnavigate the site without being at track level. Wilm says the tunnels also remove the need for additional bridges, improving the sight lines for the main grandstand of Turn 1, which is “the most exciting part of the race. You don’t want to miss that visual,” she says.
The crowning achievement of the paddock building is a 28,000-square-foot LED screen in the shape of the F1 logo “that will be so brilliantly lit up so airplane, blimp, [and] helicopter shots see this as the signature building for F1 in North America.”
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
