Formula One’s inaugural Miami Grand Prix is a quintessentially South Florida spectacle
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Miami Grand Prix weekend
The inaugural Miami Grand Prix takes place Sunday, May 8 at the Hard Rock Stadium site in Miami Gardens.
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At the seventh turn on the Miami International Autodrome, there is an on-land yacht club, set up on a marina with fake water and inoperable boats stuck into the sheet of plastic. It’s accompanied by an outpost from Miami Beach bar Sweet Liberty, and has sponsorships from a cruise company and a scotch whisky brand.
At the 12th turn, there’s a man-made, beach-side pool party, presented by Hard Rock and complete with a sand sculpture depicting the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood’s now-iconic “Guitar Hotel.”
In the middle of the infield, there’s something called “Luxury Row,” which features a “Champagne Garden” and a branch of Bal Harbour Shops.
For the inaugural Miami Grand Prix, the Miami Dolphins and Formula One have tried to plop Miami Beach right in the middle of Miami Gardens.
“We’re going to put on a spectacle in terms of a show, in terms of an experience and in terms of an F1 race,” Miami Grand Prix CEO Richard Cregan said, and there’s a reason he listed the show and the spectacle before the race: South Florida’s first ever Formula One race is poised to be quintessentially Miami.
“From the beginning, we wanted to make it uniquely Miami,” said Dolphins CEO Tom Garfinkel, who spearheaded the team’s effort to bring a Formula One race to Miami Gardens on the grounds of Hard Rock Stadium. “I believe Miami is the most dynamic city in the country right now. ... We try to bring things out here that reflect that.”
On Wednesday, the Miami Grand Prix (GP) officially kicked off race weekend with an opening party — headlined by Kygo — and the first ceremonial laps around the track. In the first car, Garfinkel drove Dolphins owner Stephen M. Ross around the 3.363-mile course.
At the same time, organizers offered up their most extensive public look at the facility for inaugural Miami GP — a chance to showcase the gaudiest high-priced amenities around the track, as well as the incredible feat of engineering and ingenuity it took to get the facility ready for the Sunday race.
It’s simultaneously the best of Miami and the worst.
The idea for an Formula One race in Miami-Dade County has only been in the works for about four and a half years, Garfinkel said — the Dolphins and Formula One owner Liberty Media made their initial proposal to Miami in 2017 — and construction just began on the track nine months ago.
By Wednesday, the grounds around Hard Rock Stadium were unrecognizable, with parking lots repurposed into track, temporary grandstands erected to hold 85,000 spectators, and the immediate vicinity around the stadium transformed into a place for garages and team headquarters.
By the time the Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes need the stadium again for football season in the fall, everything Formula One (F1) will be gone, except for the new pavement and the paddocks built to house the cars.
To say a championship-quality race facility popped up overnight would only be a slight exaggeration. Workers were still putting the final touches on pedestrian bridges Wednesday with practices slated to begin Friday. There were often between 300-1,000 workers helping put together the facility on a daily basis, while there were frequently football or tennis events happening simultaneously. The Miami Open just wrapped up last month at Hard Rock and the stadium hosted a College Football Playoff semifinal in January.
“I’ve done a lot of grands prix in the past and certainly this one was the most complex I’ve ever undertaken,” Cregan said. “The undertaking has been quite big, but that’s the way Dolphins and Hard Rock, and Tom Garfinkel do things and I think everybody can be very proud of what they achieved here.”
The result is one of the most sought-after F1 tickets ever — the second most expensive this season.
Part of is the scarcity Garfinkel and Co. created by making only 85,000 available. Part of it is it’s in the United States, where the sport is more popular than ever and will still only host two GPs in 2022.
Miami also makes it an attraction, even if the event isn’t actually quite in Miami, but rather about 15 miles away from downtown and 20 away from Miami Beach.
Yes, the Miami GP is not actually in Miami, just like the Super Bowls in Miami aren’t and just like LeBron James didn’t actually take his talents to “South Beach” when he signed on to play for the Miami Heat in its downtown arena back in 2010.
Hard Rock Stadium — the host of Super Bowls, college football national championships, international tennis tournaments and now Florida’s first F1 race since 1959 — sits in suburban Miami Gardens, the largest majority-Black city in the state and a town with a poverty rate nearly double the national average, as of 2020. Miami-Dade, as a whole, has one of the largest wealth gaps in the country.
The stadium and the Dolphins do good for the community — many of those 300-1,000 workers, Garfinkel noted, are from Miami Gardens and the stadium is a legitimate tourist attraction, even if visitors typically stay elsewhere — yet F1 struck a nerve with parts of the city. Residents were suing to stop the race as recently as April, arguing the noise would be “intolerable for those who live within a 2.5-mile radius of the Miami Autodrome. There was also a racial-discrimination suit filed last year and protests from residents ahead of city approval.
The race was not always supposed to in Miami Gardens. The original proposal set a course through downtown Miami, going down Biscayne Boulevard, around FTX Arena and across the PortMiami Bridge. Back then, residents of the Greater Downtown Miami neighborhood were up in arms, too, and the city kept delaying votes on whether to approve the plan, eventually leading the Dolphins to propose their stadium as a site.
While the Miami GP is giving out 500 tickets per day to Miami Gardens residents, the vast majority of the crowd Sunday at 3:30 p.m. will come from outside the city and even outside the Miami metropolitan area. As much as pool parties and yacht clubs, this is part of the Miami experience, too: South Florida loves its outsiders, whether it’s college kids visiting for spring break, or money flowing in from out of state to create skyrocketing housing prices.
The Dolphins and F1, for their part, are trying to make the most of their opportunity to do good in Miami Gardens. The Dolphins funded 12 paid internships for students at St. Thomas University and Florida Memorial University, the Miami metro area’s only historically Black college or university, to work for the Miami GP. They also have 14 minority-owned restaurants selling food at the Autodrome and have an F1 in Schools program to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. Both Mercedes-Benz’s Lewis Hamilton and Aston Martin’s Sebastian Vettel — a pair of former world-champion drivers — spoke Friday about their time spent meeting with kids in the community.
The facility is also simply incredible and exactly the kind of carnival atmosphere Dade County does best and Miamians love. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind perk of living in the Miami area to be able to buy a more reasonable one-day ticket — about $100 — for a few practice sessions to check out this campus, which is filled with bars and restaurants locals will know, including Michael’s Genuine, Bodega Taqueria y Tequila, Havana 1957 and too many others to list. The speed of the vehicles in person is legitimately unlike anything else in sport, even with NASCAR running races down in Homestead for more than 20 years.
F1 will be coming back for at least a decade, too. The Dolphins and F1 have a 10-year deal with Miami Gardens, and the Dolphins want to keep taking bigger swings. Garfinkel’s next project is trying to bring the 2026 World Cup to Miami Gardens.
“I’ve had a couple meetings in the last week or so on World Cup ‘26 with high-ranking officials from FIFA,” Garfinkel said. “We certainly want the World Cup here in ‘26. We told them we want the final here in ‘26. ... It’s not up to us, but we think there’s no better place to play a great soccer match than at Hard Rock Stadium.”
As of now, the Dolphins don’t plan to have the fake marina there, but maybe they should.
From afar, it’s beautiful. From up close, it’s not quite what it seems. No matter what, it’ll make for a god time.
This story was originally published May 5, 2022 at 8:00 AM.
