Miami Grand Prix can learn lessons from Viva Las Vegas?

News of the beleaguered mooted 2021 Miami Grand Prix changing its mooted track layout in an effort to appease local defiance toward those plans to a new custom layout winding around the iconic Miami Dolphins National Football League team’s Hard Rock Stadium, reminded of another flash-in-the-pan United States Grand Prix.

Miami Debacle

First, the Miami debacle — local efforts to host a round of the 2021 world championship have seen ongoing picketing and action from local splinter groups apparently abhorred by the prospect of a downtown grand prix.

To the extent that race organisers have heeded calls to eliminate a section of track down Northwest 199th Street in an effort to avoid traffic disruption in the area around race weekend. A revised weekend program will also limit race action, noise and disruption to local schools.

All of which means we are set for a 'car-park' grand prix. 

You may be wondering why that rings a bell, well it should — the Las Vegas Caesars Palace Grand Prix was exactly that, almost forty years ago back in 1981 and ‘82. 

Formula 1 was keen to return to the ‘States after the Watkins Glen and Long Beach slipped off the world championship schedule and publicity-hungry Las Vegas was quick to put up its hand to step up and deliver.

Local soon promoters soon cooked up a temporary circuit around the Caesars Palace casino car-park that provided ample overtaking opportunities on a super-slick track surface complete with ample run-off areas and sand traps.

Caesars, however, proved hugely unpopular with the drivers and between the track's anticlockwise direction straining their necks, the extreme Nevada Desert heat and paltry crowd attendance and the venue was canned after just two F1 races.

Controversial as it was, Vegas however still delivered two quite unexpected results and both races being the final race of the year, they decided the Formula 1 world championships in each of those two years too — one of them being quite a surprise.

Piquet’s Exhausting Coup

The 1981 race was the fifteenth and final round of that year's FIA Formula One World Championship with Carlos Reutemann's Williams-Ford arriving in Nevada leading Nelson Piquet's Brabham-Ford by just a point in the title race and Jacques Laffite's Ligier-Matra also in with a title shot.

Reutemann qualified second alongside pole man and Williams teammate Alan Jones, with Piquet fourth but suffering sufficiently from the wrong-way-round circuit, that boxer Sugar Ray Leonard's masseur allegedly was called in to cure his troubled back and neck. Laffite qualified back in twelfth.

Reigning world champion Jones sped off into the lead but Reutemann was soon gobbled up by Gilles Villeneuve (Ferrari), Alain Prost (Renault) and Bruno Giacomelli (Alfa Romeo) and the Argentinian was coming under increasing pressure from Piquet too. Piquet made his move on the struggling Reutemann on the seventeenth lap before as Carlos slipped back out of the points with gear selection issues.

So Alan Jones won his final grand prix that day from Prost, Giacomelli as Nigel Mansell’s Lotus as Nelson Piquet came home fifth to score the two points he needed to steal the first of his three world championships. Laffite passed John Watson’s McLaren on the last corner of the last lap for that final point, but new world champion Nelson Piquet was so physically exhausted that he was on the verge of collapse as his head bobbed about in the cockpit in the closing laps. Still, he gamely held on to the finish. after which it took him a quarter-hour to recover.

Keke The Unlikely Champion

Roll on a year and Vegas was the sixteenth and final race of the 1982 world championship and the last of three races in the USA, with no less than ten different drivers having taken a race win through the year until then. Caesars Palace would once again decide the world championship, but it had been a heartbreaking and trying year on track also marred by ongoing F1 infighting and off-track drama.

Ferrari’s early-season challenge had been horribly curtailed by Gilles Villeneuve’s tragic death in Belgium and Didier Pironi suffering severe injuries in Germany shortly after, but the Frenchman was was still second in the championship, with Keke Rosberg (Williams-Ford) leading and John Watson (McLaren-Ford) still in the hunt as F1 arrived in Nevada.

The track better suited the nimble normally aspirated cars as Michele Alboreto (Tyrrell-Ford) lined up third behind the turbo Renaults of Alain Prost and René Arnoux, with title contenders Rosberg and Watson sixth and ninth respectively.

After the start, the Renaults initially powered away out front with Prost leading Arnoux as Alboreto barged his way past Eddie Cheever’s Ligier-Matra. The Italian was soon driving his wieldy Tyrrell to great effect on the tight confines of the car-park racetrack while Watson who had dropped to twelfth early on was also on the charge as he passed among others, Piquet and Rosberg, who avoided Ferrari super-sub Mario Andretti when his 126 C2 suffered a suspension failure.

Arnoux was in trouble and soon retired to leave Prost under mounting pressure from Alboreto, while Watson had fought back to third and it was not long before both were past the struggling Renault. Alboreto thus became the eleventh winner in the sixteen-race ’82 world championship as he took Tyrrell’s first win in four years.

But Rosberg had done what he had to, cruising home to clinch the title in spite of being excluded from the Brazilian Grand Prix and only winning one race at the so-called Swiss Grand Prix at Dijon in France. Second-placed Watson meanwhile drew level with poor Pironi in the final standings.

The short-lived and quite controversial Caesar’s Palace Grand Prix had however already run its course after just two races on its car-park track, both had drawn tiny crowds and cost the hotel a fortune and few seemed sorry to see the dusty desert venue disappearing from the F1 scene along with 1978 World Champion Mario Andretti, the Ensign and Fittipaldi teams and glorious V12 engine supplier Matra.

Now, forty years down the line, Formula 1 appears destined to return to an already controversial car-park grand prix format. Will history repeat, or will Miami defy the odds and deliver a cracking grand prix? If Vegas was anything to go by, the action promises to at very least prove most unusual. (Photo: F1 Archives)