The Las Vegas Grand Prix on the Strip is only a few years old, but it is not the city’s first Formula 1 race. In 1981 and 1982, the sport’s season finale ran on a temporary circuit built in the parking lot of Caesars Palace.
A track drawn by hand
The Caesars Palace Grand Prix was the project of Bill Weinberger, then a Caesars vice president. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he sketched the layout by tracing his own left hand, which gave the circuit its three-finger shape. The track ran counterclockwise for 2.268 miles and 14 turns, part of it on undeveloped land next to the resort. On other days, the surface was casino parking.
Folding a road course into a flat lot meant tight, repetitive corners, and drivers found it punishing on their necks. The desert heat added to the strain.
Two races, two champions
Both races closed their seasons and both decided the title. In October 1981, Alan Jones won for Williams, but the story was Nelson Piquet. He finished fifth, enough to take his first world championship, and needed time afterward to recover from heat exhaustion.
In September 1982, Michele Alboreto gave Tyrrell the win in intense heat, and Keke Rosberg clinched the championship for Williams.
Why it ended
The racing was historic, but the business was not. The Review-Journal reports that neither race drew more than about 38,000 spectators. Weinberger was blunt about it years later: “As a casino event, the grand prix was a complete failure.”
Formula 1 left after 1982. The American CART series used a shorter layout at Caesars in 1983 and 1984, with Mario Andretti and Tom Sneva winning. Then Las Vegas went four decades without a Formula 1 race.
The return
Formula 1 came back in November 2023, this time on public roads. The new 6.201-kilometer circuit passes the same resort, now as one of the landmarks along Las Vegas Boulevard, and the sport’s owner, Liberty Media, built a permanent pit and paddock building to anchor it. Max Verstappen won that first race back, and the 2026 edition runs Nov. 19 to 21.
Sources
- Las Vegas Review-Journal, Andy Yamashita: Remembering the Caesars Palace Grand Prix as F1 returns to Las Vegas (2023)
- Formula 1: Verstappen beats Leclerc and Perez to victory in action-packed Las Vegas Grand Prix (Nov. 19, 2023)
- The Nevada Independent, Howard Stutz: $500M paddock building topped off five months ahead of Las Vegas F1 race weekend (April 14, 2023)
- Wikipedia: Caesars Palace Grand Prix (circuit length and CART results)
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