Miami Dolphins CEO Tom Garfinkel on the growth of F1, hot laps with Jaylen Waddle, and more

MIAMI — Dawn breaks at Hard Rock Stadium on the day of the 2024 Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix. The campus around the stadi slowly comes to life, on a day that will see celebrities, the motorsport world, dignitaries, and thousands of fans descend on the location to see one of the greatest spectacles in motorsport. But that morning Tom Garfinkel, vice chairman, president and CEO of the Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium and the managing partner of the Formula One Miami Grand Prix has something else on his mind.

Navigating the twisty first section of the race course through Turns 4, 5, and 6.

On the morning of the 2024 Miami Grand Prix Garfinkel participated in an intimate media roundtable with selected journalists, including SB Nation. In a half-hour discussion Garfinkel talked about the growth of the Miami Grand Prix, threading the needle between catering to fans as well as celebrities, and the growth of the sport in the United States. But his concern about that section of the race course speaks to perhaps the biggest aspect of the event itself.

The racing.

The circuit in Miami has become a track that racers love to drive, and as we saw throughout the weekend it can create some exciting racing.

“I mean, I actually drove the track a couple days ago. I drove one of our wide receivers around the track. I got him up to 156 miles an hour on the back straight,” described Garfinkel. “I did three laps but there’s one corner, I just can’t figure out. And I was talking to [Juan Pablo] Montoya about it actually, because when Montoya drove the track the first year, he loves the track. He’s like, ‘[i]t’s one of my favorite tracks I’ve ever driven. It’s really challenging.’

“And I said, ‘I can’t figure out this one corner.’

“Not that I know how to drive a race car, but there’s one corner I just can’t [figure out]. And it’s basically, it would be about Turn 4, 5, 6 right before you get out to the marina. You come around and every time I’m like, ‘gosh, I, I missed it. I missed again and I can’t figure it out.’

“And [Montoya] said ‘[i]t’s actually really hard.’

“And then I was talking to one of the team principals [Saturday] and they said, ‘yeah, our driver today in qualifying didn’t run a perfect lap and that’s the corner he messed up on.’

“So I think they like it because it’s challenging.”

For those who are wondering, the wide receiver in question was Jaylen Waddle.

Bringing the F1 world to Miami

In 2021 F1 announced that a second race would be coming to the United States, with the inaugural Miami Grand Prix scheduled for May of 2022. “We are thrilled to announce that Formula 1 will be racing in Miami beginning in 2022,” said Stefano Domenicali, President & CEO of Formula 1, back in April of 2021.

“The USA is a key growth market for us, and we are greatly encouraged by our growing reach in the US which will be further supported by this exciting second race. We will be working closely with the team from Hard Rock Stadium and the FIA to ensure the circuit delivers exciting racing but also leaves a positive and lasting contribution to the people in the local community.

“We are grateful to our fans, the Miami Gardens elected officials and the local tourism industry for their patience and support throughout this process. We are looking forward to bringing the greatest racing spectacle on the planet to Miami for the first time in our sport’s history.”

However, reviews were mixed following the inaugural race. Fans complained about the prices, the amenities — or lack thereof — and the crowds. Drivers griped about the surface.

But since that debut, the game has changed in Miami. The track has undergone resurfacing and a bit of a redesign, the amenities and experiences for fans of all stripes has been improved, and the past two races in Miami, including this past weekend’s, have been viewed as a success.

“Every year we’re trying to get better,” said Garfinkel when asked what it would take to call this year’s race a success. “So the feedback we get from people that are attending the event is that they had a great time. [What] we’re trying to do is bring people together to experience life and have great moments and bring the greatest talent in the world here to Hard Rock Stadium, to this campus.

“And whether that’s, you know, Roger Federer and Serena Williams, whether that’s Messi and Neymar, whether that’s Jay Z and Beyonce and Taylor Swift, or whether that’s the Super Bowls, college football championships, the World Cup, Formula One is no exception.

“So if we can bring that kind of talent here, if we have a great race today, we’re sold out and everybody has a great time. I would say that’s success.”

Even this year, Garfinkel found areas that need improvement. This year’s Miami Grand Prix marked the first time the campus hosted an F1 Sprint Race in addition to Sunday’s main event, and as Garfinkel noted the gates could have been opened earlier for the Sprint Race, to allow the excited fans access to the campus prior to Saturday’s first big event.

“We’re still getting all that feedback. There’s a lot of nuance, I think yesterday, for example, we had a set time to open the gates. We should have opened the gates earlier with the sprint race starting at noon,” said Garfinkel on Sunday morning.

“I think we had, you know, some log jam, people getting here early excited to get into the gates. Probably we should have scheduled to have the gates opened earlier. So we did open them probably 25 minutes earlier than scheduled yesterday because we had people queued up.

“But if we had thought about it ahead of time, we would have just probably opened the gates 30 minutes to an hour earlier than we had originally planned.

“So there’s a lot of things like that, that as we go, we just pay attention to and try to, you know, write down and prove on, listen to people. So there, there’ll be a lot of tweaks next year, every, every year we try to get better.”

In addition to improving things for the fans, Garfinkel and the team in Miami have made strides to improve things for the drivers. The first Miami Grand Prix saw complaints about the track surface, which underwent a resurfacing prior to the 2023 installment.

There were also concerns about one of the chicanes in the original layout.

Now, however, drivers seem to enjoy the speed, and the challenges, Miami offers.

“Yeah, we haven’t got any complaints,” said Garfinkel Sunday when asked about the feedback on the track. “I’ve talked to all the team principals and I haven’t talked to too many drivers this year, the last two years I talked to them directly more. But the biggest complaint year one was the corner out at [Turns] 15 and 16, and really that chicane is put in to slow the cars down before they get to the straightaway.

“So it was a safety thing that the FIA had put that chicane in the way it was put in.

“And so between year one and two, we worked with Formula one and the FIA to kind of smooth that corner out a little bit. And so, and we did that last year and this year we left it the same because the feedback we got was that it was actually much improved. And in fact, I was talking to one team principal yesterday said it’s actually they enjoy it because what did he call it?

“He said it has a lot of personality.”

Garfinkel also noted how the resurfacing work done since year one has satisfied the drivers.

“They’re all very positive about the racetrack, the surface and the circuit itself just, the challenging nature of the circuit and the quality of the surface,” added Garfinkel. “So, we’ve really got no more complaints.”

Garfinkel was also asked about the impact on the area. Hosting a Formula 1 race is a massive endeavor, and the campus at Hard Rock Stadium is not exactly small. Inviting the motorsport world to Miami Gardens for a week in the start of May asks a lot of local residents, businesses, and services. Traffic is up during the week, and in the first year there was local pushback to the event, as we are seeing now in Las Vegas after the first Las Vegas Grand Prix.

In Garfinkel’s mind, those complaints have diminished since year one, and he views the event as an opportunity for the residents near Hard Rock Stadium.

“I haven’t heard much of anything but positives really since the first race happened. You know, I think it’s a great opportunity. I mean, I’ve always felt like one of the real great things about this is that ten years from now there’s gonna be people working in Formula One, whether it’s in engineering, marketing, PR, operations, whatever who grew up in Miami Gardens who wouldn’t be working in Formula One,” described Garfinkel.

“That’s kind of a vision we have. We have STEM programs in the schools here, locally. We have community days where we bring a lot of people out to the track and show them so they can see it and understand what it is,” added Garfinkel. “And, you know, I think that’s positively impacting a lot of people’s lives and we’re actually getting a lot of positive feedback about it now.”

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Threading the visitor needle

The Miami Grand Prix is, as Garfinkel describes it, a uniquely Miami event. One that is designed to appeal not just to F1 fans, but the A-list celebrities that descend on Hard Rock Stadium for now three years running to see, and be seen.

That certainly poses some challenges, and leaves the event open to some criticism. During Sunday’s roundtable the brilliant Safid Deen of USA Today asked Garfinkel about a tweet posted by sports business reporter Darren Rovell which highlighted a $280 lobster roll for sale at the Miami Grand Prix, to which you could add caviar for $400.

As is often the case, some context is needed.

“Well, you know, I think what he missed on that one is that it was actually a suite menu. So it’s a lobster roll for like, you know, eight to ten people or so,” outlined Garfinkel. “So $280 for lobster for ten people in a suite. Still a lot of money but it’s lobster.

“It’s not a hot dog.”

But Rovell’s lack of context aside, the photo does illustrate one of the high wires the Miami Grand Prix attempts to navigate, which is creating an environment where you can have the hot dog, or the lobster roll with caviar.

In Garfinkel’s view, this year’s Miami Grand Prix was perhaps the best indication yet that the race promoters were finally striking that balance.

“I mean, we had, it was really fun because for the third year it was always kind of the vision and yesterday it happened more than the first two years. At one point I walked out, and the 300 level [of Hard Rock Stadium] was probably half full. So the campus pass holders can go on the top of the stadium,” described Garfinkel.

“They can go, you know, if you look right across the way here, you see these stands right here where there’s people standing, those are campus pass holders, they have risers that they can stand on them. Once the cars go by, that’s $450 for three days.

“It’s $150 a day to stand on a riser right next to the racetrack. Get all kinds of food, go across the bridge. You can go up in the stadium, walk around the top of the stadium, see almost the whole racetrack, look down in the paddock. The concessions up there are the same as they are for Dolphins games.

“So for $150 a day, you know, I think you can have a great experience and then there’s $15,000 for the highest end. You know, lobster from Carbone, so we’re trying to run the spectrum up and down. We want it to be a place where everybody can come and have a good time.

“And if you are a celebrity or a dignitary of some sort, your ability to get in and out easily to be secure without people asking you for a selfie every two steps you take and to be with your friends and be able to enjoy fine dining or something and try to do that as well.”

The ultimate goal?

Turning everyone who walks onto the campus into an F1 fan.

“Well, hopefully by the time they leave, they’re all race fans,” said Garfinkel when asked if he had an ideal split in mind between race fans and celebrity fans.

“I think at the end of the day, the racing comes first. We wanted to produce a racetrack that delivered quality racing and where there was overtaking and where there’s exciting places to watch the racing,” described Garfinkel. “And then after that, we want to create a great experience around that and hopefully whether you’re a hardcore fan or whether you’re just a casual fan that wants to come out here and have a good time, you know, you can have both.”

And expect to see more of the Miami Grand Prix, beyond the current ten-year deal in place between Hard Rock Stadium and F1. Asked about extending the current deal, Garfinkle simply said “I would expect us to be here past the 10 years and I’ll leave it at that.”

Ultimately, the goal is to create an environment for fans across the spectrum to find what they want to find on campus, starting with incredible racing.

“But what we’re trying to do is, you know, elevates a good word. Elevate the experience across the board from again, for everybody that comes here in a way that’s, that’s uniquely Miami. There’s things that we do here that might not work in other markets and there’s things in other markets that they do great that, you know, we might not do here.

“So we’re just trying to make this the best event it can be. But we’ll continue to try to tweak on that and add fun things as we move forward.”

Photo by Dan Istitene – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

Formula 1 in the United States

Anytime the grid comes to the States, a question is raised.

“Can F1 sustain — or even expand — its popularity in the United States?”

The sport has seen a boom over the past few years in America, fueled largely by the success of the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive.” That spurred an increase in the number of races in the United States, with F1 adding the Miami Grand Prix in 2022 and the Las Vegas Grand Prix last season.

Certainly F1 has tried to level the racing field, with the implementation of the cost cap, but the growth of F1 in the United States comes as Max Verstappen remains the dominant force on the grid.

In Garfinkel’s mind, the majority of the grid is tightly packed, and the sport is just witnessing someone performing at the ultimate level.

“Well, I would say the parity is actually vastly improved,” described Garfinkel. “You if you take the one man out of the equation for a moment and you look at where the differential between the top of the grid and the bottom of the grid. But I wanna say it was, you know, three seconds or something just five, six years ago and now it’s under a second.

“So the competitive nature of the cars I think is really high quality.”

However, he also believes there is something special about witnessing the kind of greatness Verstappen is bringing to the fold.

“There’s one person that happens to be operating in a really, really high level right now. In fact, I had one, I’ll say racing expert in Formula One [who] told me recently that [Verstappen is] so dialed in right now, they think he could drive blindfolded and still turn the lap,” described Garfinkel. “You know, because he’s, he’s just that dialed in, in terms of what he’s doing on a simulator and how much time he’s spending and how dialed in he is and in sports, sometimes you’re gonna have that kind of dominance, there’s nothing you can do to a race track to fix that.

“You know, there’s something about it that’s kind of special to watch, when someone’s able to perform at that level that consistently, there’s something beautiful about that too.”

Although, in a bit of foreshadowing, Garfinkel had his own prediction about how the Miami Grand Prix would turn out.

“The competitive nature of things is wonderful and you don’t know what’s gonna happen today,” said Garfinkel. “I mean, if you were taking odds or something, you’d say odds are that Max is gonna perform really well today.

“But nobody knows.”

As it would turn out, Verstappen would have to settle for second hours later, as Lando Norris secured his maiden F1 victory.

Because you just never know in sports.

In Garfinkel’s mind, the Miami Grand Prix is part of the American F1 story. In his view, the Miami Grand Prix works with both the United States Grand Prix in Texas, and the Las Vegas Grand Prix, to churn out a new generation of F1 fans here in the States.

Because in his mind, a rising tide lifts all boats. Or in this case, creates more fans.

To Garfinkel’s point? ESPN announced massive ratings for the Miami Grand Prix, setting a new record here in the United States with 3.1 million viewers.

That is a lot of new fans.

“Miami, and Las Vegas, and Austin, Texas are all three very different cities with three very different cultures, and I think the races reflect that people are going to choose to attend the races that, you know, or the cultures and the type of events that they want to attend.

“And the fact that they’re all different, I think is a good thing because people can have different experiences at different events. I look at it like, you know, all ships rise with a rising tide. So three events is great in the United States. It just means we’re creating more Formula One fans.

“Having been around auto racing a very long time now I’ve never watched a race on television with someone and been able to turn them into a fan.

“I’ve never taken someone to an event and not turn them into a fan.

“So I think a lot of times people will come to an event like this who may not know much about the racing. They come for a great event and then they learn about it and fall in love with the racing and start watching it on TV. So, I think it’s all great for Formula One.

“And having three races in the United States is fantastic.”