Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

OPINION:

Once again, talk of racing on the Strip is revving up

Sports

Steve Marcus, Sun File Photo

Will Power of Australia speeds by a downtown casino during the Vegas Grand Prix Champ Car World Series Race in April 2007.

Let’s step back in time, shall we? Or better, let’s drive there at a high rate of speed.

It was a sunny, blustery spring afternoon in April 1998. I had driven to an unpaved, 200-acre piece of land just north of the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign on the Strip. This was an undeveloped lot, publicly owned land, rife with potential. The best comparison today is the lot on the north end of the Strip at Sahara Avenue where MGM Resorts is staging Rock in Rio USA.

I sat in my vehicle, a 10-year-old Mercury Cougar, and awaited the arrival of the international king of motorsports. Through all that dust in the wind, he was driven to this locale in a black Mercedes-Benz sedan. The driver pulled up next to me and waved me over.

I climbed in the back of the Benz and sat down next to Bernie Ecclestone, CEO of the Formula One Group. The man behind the wheel, whom I also met for the first time that afternoon, was political operative Sig Rogich. Both were wearing sunglasses, and I can recall making a crack about this being a “French Connection”-style summit. No one laughed.

In this car, with his politically powerful representative in the driver’s seat (metaphorically and for real), Ecclestone described his dream for a Formula One race in Las Vegas. He would design a track that would wind through this very property and up and down the Strip. It would be a track woven through an 18-hole golf course, which would have been open year-round. The track would be the stage for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, marking the return of Formula One racing to the city for the first time since the Caesars Grand Prix took over the Strip in 1981-82.

“Las Vegas is the front-runner,” Eccleston said. “I’m very serious about this.”

The urgency was palpable in that car. Ecclestone was pushing the Clark County Commission to approve his plan with the same rate of speed as then-two-time F1 champ Michael Schumacher roared around the track. Ecclestone wanted a decision quickly, or he would take his race elsewhere.

“Las Vegas needs to move on this,” he said, and Rogich, Ecclestone’s PR rep in the United States, agreed. As he said, “Once we lose it, it’s gone forever.”

R&R Advertising came up with the concept and presented it to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Officials were blown away, both by how the track incorporated the famous Strip hotels and by the capacity of the sport to reach upwards of 350 million people around the world and draw tens of thousands of tourists for race weekend.

But there was another bidder for that property: Billy Walters, the extraordinarily well-connected golf course developer who also is, still, one of the city’s greatest sports bettors. Walters became a wealthy guy building golf courses around Clark County and had produced a plan for that property to develop a 27-hole golf course complex at a cost of $33 million. The course would be world class and furnish a fantastic golf experience for guests at the new resort being built just to the north, Mandalay Bay.

In a September 1998 commission vote that changed the fate of F1 in the United States and the landscape of the Strip, Walters won the bid — by a single vote. Today that project is Bali Hai Golf Course.

As the years swept past, Ecclestone and F1 had been out of conversation — until a couple of weeks ago. Ecclestone, who turned 84 last week, evidently has maintained his zeal for speed. He says he wants to bring Formula One back to Las Vegas, telling the Independent newspaper in Britain: “Vegas says they are ready and it would be on the Strip for sure.”

F1 track designer Hermann Tilke reportedly visited Las Vegas recently to map the layout of the course. If the F1’s lead track designer is hanging around the Strip, we are to reason, an actual F1 race must be in the offing, right?.

Unfortunately for race fans, city tourism officials say they haven’t heard anything from F1 about bringing a race to Vegas. And Ecclestone might well be generating buzz to leverage other cities, such as Long Beach, to hustle a hasty deal elsewhere.

I just remember what Rogich said so long ago: Once we lose it, it’s gone forever.

Until F1 produces something more than the flashy claims of its leader, we will consider the Las Vegas Grand Prix a dusty memory.

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