Las Vegas Grand Prix: Formula 1 cars to reach speeds of 212mph down Sin City’s famous strip

Las Vegas is joining the Formula 1 race calendar

An artist’s impression of the cars in action (PA)

Formula 1 cars will speed along Las Vegas’ notorious Strip at speeds of up to 212 miles-per-hour when the city joins the Formula calendar from 2023 onwards.

The Las Vegas Grand Prix‘s 6.12km track will see drivers roar past landmarks such as the Bellagio Fountains and Caesars Palace for an event expected to attract 170,000 fans.

“We are doing something spectacular,” Stefano Domenicali, CEO of Formula One, told Reuters while overlooking the Las Vegas Strip, which lit up with ads for the event after it was announced.

“It’s the perfect marriage. We are in an iconic city, we’re going to have the right atmosphere, the right intensity, the right passion. We feel at home here already.”

F1 last raced in Las Vegas in 1982 at an infamously unfit-for-purpose circuit constructed in the carpark of the Caesars Palace hotel, which produced poor quality racing and saw drivers suffering from heat exhaustion under the burn of the Nevada sun.

The new race will take place at night and the street circuit will be the third-longest of all tracks on the Formula 1 calendar, after Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. The anti-clockwise 6.1 kilometre circuit will feature three long straights and 14 corners, including one chicane and a series of high-speed turns.

The track features a long back straight down the strip past Ceasars Palace and the Bellagio, right (Formula One)

The race will being within a very short run down to a tight Turn 1 at the end of the pit straight, before a quick succession of slow-to-medium speed corners prior to the first long straight approaching Turn 5. From there, drivers will face a series of high-speed corners including a long left-hander at Turn 6 at the north-west trip of the track.

After the first nine turns, drivers will head onto the Strip, the epicentre of Las Vegas’ entertainment and party scene. They will then take Turn 10 flat out, before hitting a top speed of around 212 miles-per-hour on the approach to the heavy braking zone at Turn 11, where most overtaking is likely to occur.

Turns 12 and 13 follow swiftly afterwards as speeds are brought down after the long straight, before one final high-speed corner ends the lap. Drivers will tour the circuit 50 times in the Grand Prix.

The layout of the Las Vegas streets means the circuit will be quite wide on its straights, allowing drivers plenty of opportunity to pull alongside one another for potential overtakes, akin to the circuit in Baku used for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Formula 1 will visit Las Vegas in November 2023, with a10pm local start time on the Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend most likely to be selected in an effort to draw as big an audience as possible in the United States. That would mean the race would begin at 6am in the United Kingdom.