Formula 1’s return to Sin City was a bit of a bumpy ride for some travellers – Motorsport Images photographer Andy Hone had the view from the ground (and a fair way up as well)
WORDS AND PICTURES ANDY HONE
AS OUR FLIGHT BANKED around the neon-speckled sprawl of Sin City I wondered once again if I was the only person arriving for the Las Vegas Grand Prix having not read (or pretended to read for social media grandstanding purposes) Hunter S Thompson’s ‘classic’ gonzo novel Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. I gather it concerns the author following a commission from Sports Illustrated magazine to cover the annual Mint 400 off-road motor race, but then blowing out the job in a blizzard of narcotics and booze. Apparently it’s “a savage dissection of the American dream”.
Well if there was anyone skiving in favour of “heinous chemicals” and mescal this weekend then I didn’t see it, although a handful of journos dutifully followed in Thompson’s wheeltracks by driving from Los Angeles… not that a tatty rental Chevy Spark would hit 100mph of course. And at least one of them got stuck in a random 5am traffic jam in the desert on the way back to LA, hardly the stuff of which great gonzo reportage is made.
Perhaps I was less excited than some because I’d been to Vegas before. But there were still a number of firsts here for me. I’ve never photographed a wedding before, certainly not one officiated by an Elvis impersonator. Just how did this happen? Maybe the fragile grasp on sanity had broken after all…
When you de-plane at Harry Reid Airport the first thing that strikes you through the glass, apart from the usual accusing stares of the people waiting to get on, is the number of slot machines. From the moment you arrive until your final departure, Las Vegas is a precisely tooled machine for continuously lifting money from your wallet.
One more thing: the carpets. Wherever you may roam it’s either a collection of wacko patterns or a writhing mess of coiled lines, like a giant-scale game of snakes and ladders without the ladders. Is the intention to get you wired and a little bit dizzy, losing all sense of time and space – especially inside the windowless casinos where the lighting is set to a perpetual midday?
There was a lot of cynicism ahead of the event, plenty of people working in Formula 1 quietly expressing low expectations – in a low-profile way, of course, because financially there was a lot riding on its success. Max Verstappen probably best expressed the tension betwee
