GP Las Vegas: Times, standings, circuit info, weather

GP Las Vegas times

If you like sleeping in and watching Formula 1 live, then you have a tough weekend ahead of you. There is driving late at night in Las Vegas and that means that we have to get here quite early to follow everything live. Especially the first and third free practice are old times if you want to see them. By the way, it is also a bit different than normal for the people on site in Las Vegas, because qualifying and second free practice take place at the beginning of the night (00:00 – 01:00) local time.

Championship standings

Sergio Pérez still had to do everything he could to defend second place in the world championship, but he did good things in that regard last race weekend. Hamilton had a bad weekend and Pérez had a pretty good weekend, so the difference is now 32 points. Things must be going crazy now (although it is certainly not ruled out yet) if Pérez wants to drop back to third place. In the meantime, things continue to shift considerably behind that, as Sainz was in fourth place and is now back in P6, while Alonso returns to fourth place and Norris moves up to position five. The margins are small, so anything can certainly happen there.

Happy faces in Faenza, Italy, because AlphaTauri climbed from tenth to eighth place in Mexico and then picked up enough points in Brazil to significantly strengthen that position. In fact, Williams may still have to look in the rear-view mirror to see if it will not be overtaken at the last minute. Further up front, it remains exciting between Mercedes and Ferrari, especially now that Mercedes seems a bit out of shape again.

Circuit

The previous Grand Prix in Las Vegas took place in 1982 and that was on a somewhat improvised street circuit in the parking lot of Ceasar’s Palace. That was quite a deception and Formula 1 wants to avoid that this time. Yet Las Vegas is not very fortunate when it comes to the infrastructure there. As a typical American state, Las Vegas has a very straightforward street system and this is partly reflected in the circuit layout.

You can mainly see this in the abundance of straight sections. Sector 3 is particularly special in that respect. The first part leads along the famous Las Vegas Boulevard, or ‘The Strip’. Despite their high speed, this will probably almost never end for the drivers. Count on speeds of well over 300 km/h. It is still very questionable whether this 6.2 km long semi-street circuit has enough potential to lead to spectacular racing situations. Skeptics expect more of a show around than on the track. We’ll see next weekend.

Weather

In any case, it doesn’t seem like the weather will play a significant role this weekend. Dry weather is on the weather maps for the entire weekend, with maximum temperatures of around 20 degrees. However, the driving takes place late and it can cool down to around 7 degrees at night, so warming up the tires may still be quite a challenge for the drivers.