F1 touches down in US for Miami GP amid undercurrent of controversy

Spring break fever has overtaken Formula One. It has Charles Leclerc playing catch with the Marlins’ Jazz Chisholm Jr, Lewis Hamilton teeing off with Tom Brady and Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris chasing James Corden around the paddock in cutoff team shirts. It could only happen in Miami. And it’s a wonder it hasn’t happened sooner.

This weekend F1 will stage its first ever race in Miami as the US plays host to a pair of Grand Prix races for the first time since 1984, when the series touched down in Detroit and Dallas. But this time, rather than return to Motown or Moo Town, F1 has parked its massive traveling circus here, to the land of white sand beaches, neon lights and withering heat. And the local buzz isn’t simply a product of the town’s strongly poured daiquiris and mojitos.

It’s yet another breakthrough moment for a sport that has long struggled to crack the US market. And even though F1’s embrace of social media, Netflix’s Drive to Survive and Sky Sports’ cracking TV coverage (via ESPN) has played a big part in winning over viewers across the pond, many of whom couldn’t have cared less about motorsports to begin with, it is curious that F1’s American seduction didn’t start in Miami – America’s exotic foreign getaway.

Instead, it bounced across the coasts, tarried in Middle America and blew up in Indianapolis – and not in the good way. (Austin, however, is cool, weird and succeeded in entrenching F1 in the States.) The closest the series ever got to Miami was Sebring, Florida, a fabled inland racing venue three hours north that served as the backdrop for the one-off 1959 US Grand Prix.

But of course that was before the Americans at Liberty Media took over F1 in 2017 with the goal of making the global behemoth