Why Miami GP with fake marina beats original F1 plans for a Bayside race

“I dread the thought of a street circuit like we had with Valencia, which wasn’t really a great street circuit. It can be very hit and miss, but maybe it’s a hit…”

Bernie Ecclestone, who was close to Sanchez and had talked with him in the eighties about bringing F1 to Miami, was sceptical that it would ever happen.

“All these things, it’s all of a case of how much?,” he said in 2018. “Not only did we try to do things in Miami, I even got the guy [Sanchez], who was a good friend of mine, to build the [permanent] circuit in Miami. He eventually did it at Homestead or somewhere, but it never really worked.

“And when I was trying to do the street race, and we more or less got it on board, it was going across to the island and back again. And everybody looked at it and thought, ‘Christ, it’s going to cost a fortune, and it’s going to disrupt the place’.

“They had the Formula E and they stopped it, because it was too much trouble. And they have enough things going on in Miami, it’s not like nobody’s heard of Miami.”

Miami was a big deal for Liberty. Chase Carey and his colleagues had been running the show for a year after Ecclestone’s ousting, and their main achievement in terms of the calendar was renewing deals with China and Singapore. Miami would be the first new event created on Liberty’s watch, although behind the scenes plans were well advanced for a Vietnam GP in Hanoi.

“We have been very clear from probably the day we came in about our goals and ambitions to grow the sport in the US, and grow the sport also in Asia,” Carey said at the time. “And we have actually been pretty clear on one of the key components being adding a race initially in a city.

“We are very proud of the race we have in Texas, but we have talked about destination cities, and I guess the three we have thrown out most often have been New York, Miami and Las Vegas. So it fits with what we have been talking about and saying.

“There are obviously steps we have to go through, we are engaged with other cities in the US, but we think Miami would be a wonderful city to host a race. We are working through the process to determine if that is something we can put together with the city in a way that works for both of us.”

All of that F1 experience had been added to a stadium organisation that hosted the SuperBowl as recently as 2020, as well as events as diverse as a Barcelona v Real Madrid football match and the annual Miami Open tennis tournament. These people know how to run an event, in other words.

“We went to a few races, trying to learn as much as we can,” says promoter Garfinkel. “Always observing, always paying attention, and always trying to learn new things – how the paddock works, what’s different about the races, and what can we do differently or better? So talking to people, asking questions, where their pain points are, so we can try to fix them before they happen.”

He has no regrets about having to move from the city to the stadium: “I think we’ve actually ended up in a better place. Certainly the first priority was having great racing. And so that was a constraint downtown, there weren’t going to be a lot of passing opportunities. So we’ve now got three DRS zones with three different overtake areas.

“Beyond that, we had a blank sheet of paper to create a great race track. So, I think the important thing is ending up in the right place, and I believe we really did.”

A temporary track would have been just that, involving lots of compromises and a huge effort in building it up and taking it down every year. With a stadium at the heart of the new venue a lot of the required facilities were already on site.

“We’ve got a lot of club spaces and hospitality areas that are pre-existing,” says Garfinkel. “Bathrooms, kitchens, a lot of things that make it easier for us to put on a great event.

“And so we’re going to take advantage of all of those things. There’s a lot of things we’re adding to what we have there to make it a great experience. But I don’t know that it would have been as good had we not been doing it where we are.”

The track itself has been created by British firm Apex Circuit Design, with support from the F1 organisation’s Craig Wilson. A lot of work has been done by former Williams engineer Wilson on what makes for good overtaking.

The bottom line is that the Miami GP may not be in the prime coastal location, but in theory the actual circuit is much better than the one we would have had.

“I think the most important thing now is that with the land and the area around the Dolphins stadium, we were able to design and build a track that is effectively a permanent circuit, without restrictions,” says Cregan.

“It’s very hard to do a good circuit in a city, there’s so many things which are restricting you. F1 were involved from the beginning, from a simulation point of view, from a design point of view.

“And we’ve effectively ended up with a very good track, and I think it’s very fast, very flowing, plenty of overtaking opportunities. So I just think it’s going to be it’s gonna be exceptional.