The Miami Grand Prix is pegged to be one of the more exciting venues in the 2022 Formula One season, if only for the location and not the track. And the massively expensive pre-sale tickets proved exactly how much F1 is looking to make off the event. Many of those tickets have already soard to the thousands of dollars.
Yesterday, a select number of Miami Grand Prix tickets were sold via Ticketmaster to folks who had signed up to buy tickets early. Fans looking to nab their seats were consistently shocked by the prices.
The cheapest seats were located in “The Beach” area, and they cost a whopping $630. Other seats near the marina were over $1,000, while the start/finish grandstand sections were double that price.
And if you’re curious about all the prices, they are as follows:
- Turn 18: $1190 - $1550
- Turn 1: $990 - $1695
- Marina: $800 -$1015
- Fountain View: $780 - $860
- Family: $690 - $815
- Start/Finish: $1680 - $2070
- Beach: $640 - $880
Now, these are all prices for three-day passes, which means you’d be paying around $213 to $690 per day — but a lot of people were still shocked by the sheer amount of money they were being asked to spend. Unfortunately, these prices aren’t all that different when compared to other three-day F1 tickets for grandstand seating.
That last bit is the integral part: these are grandstand seats. Most road courses offer grandstand seating, but most people on a budget opt for General Admission. At the United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas, for example, you can get three-day tickets for about $210. You also have 10 grandstand options, all of which appear to be larger than Miami’s grandstand options (though I’d have to run more numbers to say that with absolute certainty).
So, at COTA, you can admittedly nab some fairly cheap grandstand seats, but those are often in less-than-choice locations that require you to walk a while to get where you’re going. At Turn 9, for example, you can get bleacher seating for $350 for the weekend. But there aren’t many amenities out that way, and you have to walk a mile to get to your location. Hop in the main grandstand, though, and you can be paying $1,500 — though I’ve seen prices higher than that.
The main thing that enables a cheaper ticket price at COTA is all that general admission seating, which is something Miami likely won’t have due to the fact that it’s a street circuit built, basically, in a parking lot. It’s also a temporary circuit, which means there are extra fees associated with building and tearing down the grandstands. It would be nice to have more affordable tickets for Miami, but the nature of the circuit doesn’t really allow it.
Some venues, too, are more expensive than others, and the fact that Miami is being billed as America’s Monaco signaled that prices would be high. The cheapest grandstand tickets in Monaco in 2019 were over $700, and the pit straight grandstands in Mexico that year started at $1,500 — which meant they could easily cost more with a higher vantage point.
Trying to compare any two F1 races can be difficult since there are so many factors that enter into pricing a ticket. But the prices for Miami are, to put it pretty simply, not all that surprising.