The Las Vegas Grand Prix turned out to be a historic success for sportsbooks, despite causing division among locals and facing legal issues. Despite the controversies surrounding the race, Caesars Sportsbooks reported a new company record for total betting handle on any motorsports event during the event, with rival entities BetMGM and Station Casinos also reporting record handle for an F1 race. Craig Mucklow, Caesars vice president of trading, told the Las Vegas Review Journal that the betting handle was three times Daytona’s numbers and well over seven figures. BetMGM said it tripled the number of bets for any prior F1 event during the race.
However, one of the major issues surrounding the race was its 10 p.m. local start time, which was chosen in part to minimize disruption to local citizens who had already endured months of headaches due to track construction. However, several drivers and team executives are pushing for an earlier start time to aid their own time-zone acclimation while traveling from Europe. According to Fred Vasseur, Ferrari team principal, F1 is now a worldwide project that is much more difficult to accommodate with European timing expectations than it used to be when it was just for European audiences.