Miami GP organizers exploring future night race possibility
The organizers of the Miami Grand Prix have held tentative discussions about changing the event to a night race at some stage in future.
The second edition of the race in Florida had a crowd of just over 90,000 on race day but fans are often dealing with high temperatures throughout the weekend that puts a premium on shaded areas. With the race located on a semi-permanent circuit that winds around Hard Rock Stadium, the backdrop could be adapted for a night race according to Miami GP managing partner Tom Garfinkel.
“We’ve had some discussions about potentially doing that,” Garfinkel said. “It’s obviously this time of year the weather’s a little unpredictable, the weather’s been nice this year so far, last year was unseasonably hot, but there’s a lot of factors that go into that with F1 and television and everything else so we’ve got to weigh all those things, but we’re certainly open-minded to it.”
The race was declared a sellout by Formula 1 with around 90,000 per day being the published attendance, figures that were called into question by some. But Garfinkel says empty grandstand seats at certain times don’t reflect a lack of attendance and he sees the event continuing to increase numbers in future.
“What we do is purposefully hold back tickets then bleed them out, we added some campus passes this last week or so. Last year we had roughly 85k sold per day, we probably could have sold 150k based on demand and the room we have here, but I want everyone to have a great experience. So it’s hard to get people in and out, make sure there aren’t lines, traffic, all of those things.
“We want to grow a little bit every year as we operationally get better and better to make sure people have a good experience, enough points of sale, bathrooms, it’s part of the reason we doubled the width of bridges is anticipating the attendance would grow in the future so we have the capacity.
“We are sold out of grandstands, we have a lot of amenities for people, for them to go and eat and drink, so sometimes the grandstands don’t look completely full, it’s people off doing other things, sitting in the shade, off drinking, watching it on TV.”
For more information: www.racer.com
For more information: www.racer.com
