This weekend, Formula One will hit the streets of Las Vegas for the first time since the 80s and it’s going to be huge under the lights & also late on a Saturday night (10pm PT/1am ET) rather than the usual Sunday afternoon. Las Vegas will be the third US-based F1 event of the year after Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas last month as well as Miami earlier in May.They won’t go up and down again at Caesar’s Palace as it will take place around the Las Vegas Strip & also the MSG Sphere where one random guest would have the whole view’s access of the track based on top of a screen (would love to a see his reaction to that lap-by-lap from start to finish!!) ahead of everyone watching on through the grandstands. But only thing missing is that ABC won’t show the Las Vegas GP race despite having some build up content via Good Morning America. It will instead be via cable on ESPN as well as paid streaming through ESPN +. We would’ve love to have the pre-race show straight after the local news at 11.35pm ahead of the 1am ET race start through to 3am, but then half the county across the East Coast would be in bed by then while half the people in the West are still staying up until midnight by partying big for this special race.
If the race started at 8pm PT/11pm ET, then that might make sense for ABC to round off its Saturday night sports programming straight after the College Football. Lots of people always stay up until 12-1am as it’s the middle of the weekend. But it looks like that it makes sense to have repeat programming rather than having just the coast tuning in to watch the race between 1-3am ET just because some people are unable to watch it by having to sleep past midnight. It’s a hard call when Formula 1 is a World Championship that mainly suits the European audience as let’s hope the continued rise of the sport in America will unlock more potential with the hope of Andretti Global-Cadillac coming in as the 11th team in 2025 or 2026, which would mean a bit more free-to-air exposure by having the Las Vegas Grand Prix being shown at last on ABC someday.