The first edition of the Miami Grand Prix is expected to be one of the more exciting venues for next season, at least for the location if not for the circuit action itself. And the massively expensive pre-sale tickets showed just how much the sport is attempting to gain with the event, as many of those tickets have already soard to the thousands of dollars.
In recent days, the first tickets for the 2022 Miami Grand Prix were sold via Ticketmaster to fans who had signed up to be able to buy tickets early. But some fans were not expecting the ultra-expensive pre-sale ticket 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.
Here are the prices for each area:
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
Of course, these include access for all three days (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), which means a cost of about $213 to $690 for each day day, but still many fans were surprised by the sheer amount of money they were being asked to spend. However, the prices are not a lot more expensive as compared to other three-day Formula 1 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.
At Circuit of the Americas you can find some fairly cheap grandstand seats, yet these locations are far from ideal when to comes to track visibility and also you have to walk a while to get where you are 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 Circuit of the Americas is all that general admission seating, which is something that Miami will not be able to offer taking into consideration the fact that it is 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 Formula 1 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.
