In a few short days, the flag will drop and Austin’s debut Formula One weekend will be racing along at full speed.
Well, maybe not full speed off the track. The jury is still out on whether plans to transport some 120,000 ticketholders to the Circuit of the Americas facility will succeed following the Formula Run footrace on Nov. 3, where a crowd of only 5,000 resulted in traffic delays of up to 90 minutes (fog was blamed). If Capital Metro’s bus drivers happen to go on strike this week as they already voted to do, scabs will help keep the shuttle busses running for out-of-towners even if we the people of Austin are inconvenienced.
F1 is expected to draw around 300,000 visitors from some 50 countries around the globe to our fair city. (Yet oddly enough there were rooms still available in local hotels at the end of last month. Go figure.) The City’s Aviation Department has okayed two temporary helipads and the skies of South Central Austin will sound like a war zone for three days as choppers chug overhead ferrying racegoers back and forth from the track. Law enforcement officials also expect an influx in human sex slave trafficking. Toto, we’re not in Waterloo on the Little Colorado anymore, are we?
The downtown F1 Fan Fest was reduced from closing 28 blocks to only 11. And the COTA folks are “thanking” us Austinites for our hospitality by presenting free shows by the likes of Fastball, Bob Schneider, The Bright Light Social Hour and Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears… acts locals can easily see much of the year. Gee, if they wanted to do us any favors, maybe they should have showcased the Austin musical artists for visitors and given us locals Aerosmith and Cheap Trick for free.
If you live, work or plan to spend time in the center city from Thursday into Monday, you are bound to feel the impact of the big event on the southeast edge of town. And we’re not talking about the economic benefits it’s touted to yield.
The track is done and has been anointed by Grand Prix legend Mario Andretti. The initially contentious $6.3 million addition to the terminal at Austin Bergstrom Airport to serve increased visitor traffic and customs processing quietly passed the City Council in October alongside a $7.7 million contract for more parking. As expected, the council also voted last Thursday (11/8) to annex 1,500 acres that includes the COTA facility, all with a taxable value of some $80 million, plus there’s the sales tax revenue it will generate in the future.
Since it was first proposed two-and-a-half years ago, F1 in Austin has raised questions, objections, lawsuits, controversy and much more that hasn’t felt quite right. It has been as much a race to the starting line as to whether the track would be done and the city can pull off the support services.
But now it is fait accompli, and we’re stuck with it. The big issue after this weekend, no matter if it suffers glitches or comes off without a hitch, is what the long-term effect on our city will be.
To this two-decade-plus local resident, at first blush the notion of an Austin Grand Prix seemed to promise a touch of European sophistication that might enhance our unique city in Central Texas. That was based on a visit to the Watkins Glen track with my father and two older brothers for an F1 race some 50 years ago.
Sigh… silly nostalgic me. Like all else in modern professional competitive sports, F1 is a big money business. And for all that it may contribute to our local economy, the civic costs for presenting it still remain unclear. Plus is it worth the unintended consequences that its boosters don’t seem to have even considered?
The economic model is of course South by Southwest and the many millions of dollars dropped into local business and civic coffers every March by what this year were nearly 250,000 visitors who came to enjoy what we are known for worldwide – music. But this weekend’s Grand Prix will be a preview of something different: A million or more further visitors are expected to pass through Austin for three COTA events in the first five months of next year: a Grand Am race in late February, a MotoGP motorcycle competition the third weekend in April, and a V8 supercars race in May. And that’s just for starters. Where other events are annual, COTA will be revving up the engines throughout the year.
Austin Post writer Stephanie Myers recently and rightly wondered if F1 will turn the city where we live into a playground for the rich. But the even bigger questions over the long haul are whether Austin should be focusing its already healthy economy on the not-so-reliable foreign tourist dollar. (Or would that be the Euro?) And if a city with a local culture devoted to green thinking and environmental causes should be a year-round host for a sport based on the internal combustion engine (even if big oil is a longtime Texas tradition), and at a time when concerns about manmade climate change grow ever more pressing.
However much Lance Armstrong’s doping revelations have also embarrassed the city where he lives, bicycle racing still feels far more an Austin sport than motor sports. When it comes to cars in these parts, we’re desperately trying to figure out how to keep them simply moving at more than a snail’s pace on our local roadways. Last thing we need is to try to move hundreds of thousands people around on a regular basis.
In a statement suffused with the multiple ironies and tone deafness that has marked the F1 affair from the beginning, Mayor Lee Leffingwell noted at a Grand Prix welcome luncheon earlier this month that Austin’s new stature as the site of F1 racing’s return to America is “sort of like Mayberry having the Super Bowl.” In addition to the dorky lameness of making a tired Opie Taylor joke about guest of honor Ron Howard (whose child stardom has in any case been eclipsed by his directing and producing successes), the statement was inadvertently as apt can be.
Even if F1 weekend is an unqualified triumph, this could also be the tipping point when the Austin armadillo gets flattened in the middle of the race track, the motors start to drown out the music, and the canary in the coal mine of local growth chokes and croaks on exhaust fumes. Cue ominous music: Only time will tell.