Formula 1 Las Vegas ticket prices continue to plunge a day before the Grand Prix
By Jordan Valinsky, CNN
New York (CNN) — Ticket prices continue to decline sharply for Formula 1 Grand Prix in Las Vegas, even as the highly anticipated event is set to rev its engines in just one day.
Since last week, prices have dropped 23% for Saturday night’s main event, falling below $1,000, with the current “get-in” price for tickets hovering around $800, according to TickPick. That’s down 50% since a month ago when the cheapest ticket sold for $1,645.
Prices for the practice and qualifying sessions, on Thursday and Friday respectively, are crashing too. The cheapest tickets for both days dropped as much as 20% in a week and are down 70% from last month.
It’s a drastic decline for the sporting spectacle, the first F1 race to be held on the Las Vegas Strip. A year ago, when tickets initially went on sale, this Saturday’s title race tickets were selling for around $1,622. This week’s prices indicate that they have fallen by 50% since November 2022.
Thursday’s practice tickets were sold for $919 last year but have sunk to $119 this year, TickPick said, an 87% decrease. Friday tickets for qualifying races are selling for $259, a 76% drop from last year’s price of $1,085.
Several factors are contributing to the drop, according to TickPick CEO Brett Goldberg, including the fact that Red Bull driver Max Verstappen already won this year’s championship title in Qatar last month thus dampening enthusiasm among the sport’s fans as it nears the end of the season.
That, plus the expected chilly weather and the overall cost of attendance when factoring in flights and hotels “during a down season in the cold means the reasons to travel beyond the race are limited,’ he said.
Goldberg predicts that ticket prices will normalize next year, perhaps not being priced as high as they were when they initially went on sale in 2022 for the inaugural race.
“With the popularity of the sport on the rise domestically, the investment in the infrastructure, and the spectacle of Las Vegas road races, it was a difficult decision on go-to-market pricing, but the public has spoken this year,” he said.
Despite the falling ticket prices, Goldberg expects that the three-day event “will be well attended” and “it will create amazing visuals and experiences for those in attendance,” noting its distinct track that snakes around the Las Vegas Strip at night.
“If F1 is able to maintain a long-term view on the race location, this will be a distant memory very soon,” he said. (F1 Las Vegas organizers didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.)
Las Vegas is the third US city to host an F1 race this year, after Miami in May and Austin in October. Drivers have credited the popularity of the Netflix series “Drive to Survive” for growing the sport’s audience in the US.
However, there are some small indications that American interest in the sport might have peaked: US TV ratings for this year’s F1 season have fallen 8%, but are the second-highest average on record for ESPN, according to SportsMediaWatch.
Motorsports writer Jeff Gluck for the Athletic hypothesized that the casual viewers who were drawn in from the Netflix series might have already lost interest, signaling a “real danger” for the sport in the US if they bail altogether.
Gluck wrote that something compelling has to happen. “‘Something’ could mean Red Bull falls off or another team mounts enough of a challenge to make it more interesting next season,” he wrote. “But what F1 likely can’t afford in the US is for 2024 to be a similar year to the last two — because that could cause the group with newfound F1 passion to follow the casuals out the door.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
