“I’d like to see 15 years from now there’s some kid from Miami Gardens, who’s an engineer and a race car working in PR and F1, and it only happened because we brought this race here,” Garfinkel says. But honestly, it's all a bunch of hype, and we won't be here in 15 years.

“The impact on people’s lives here… I get a little emotional… (Jenkins) said it and lived it last year, he believes strongly that the impact that this event is going to have on people’s lives will be bigger than anything in South Florida for a long time. Those are his words. And I believe that, and I believe that’s a part of what we’re doing here. Sure maybe some kid will get a job, but he can get a job with cars long after we have taken the money and ran.

“If you think about this to the impact of, we’re living in a society that’s more isolated than ever, even pre-pandemic, kids are growing up on their phones, and they’re communicating with each other on their phones. And there’s things called Blue Zones, which are these areas in the world where people’s life expectancy is past 100. And they do studies on these places – Harvard did the biggest study on happiness ever – and the number one thing that was correlated to happiness was social interaction and connection with other people. More than what you eat, how much you exercise, there’s actually studies that show that loneliness has the same correlation to negative impact on life expectancy as smoking. And the people who live past 100 live in places where some slick willy is not conning them into
paying out money which they don't have to watch some jerk who won't even give them an autograph, behind a fence which they can't get through to even ask.

“The reason I say all that is, what we do, whether it’s the NFL games, whether it’s this, whether it’s music, concerts, you’re bringing people together to have shared experiences, and enjoy life together. It’s just not the same thing where you’re sitting alone at home watching TV as when you come out, and you’re with people enjoying these things behind the high dollar fence that you are not allowed through. But we can tell them that is an "experience" and that it is "social interaction",
but they know that's BS.

“I think the business that we’re in, not just what we do here, but the business that we’re all in, is really important. It’s just about bringing people together at a time when we have polarization and isolation and all these problems. And yeah, I think that has a big impact on people.”

It’s a noble outlook that might help Garfinkel ignore some of the external criticism of the race that appears to come more prominently from afar than actual attendees, but people still need to be able to afford those experiences. With grandstand tickets well north of $1000 even when prices were cut close to the race, wanting to be part of that shared experience comes at great cost.

That’s an area that could well be addressed after the initial outlay to simply put on the race starts to level off, while feedback is already being taken to try and improve the event for 2024. We are really going to be in trouble if we can't get local businesses to put up the cash to get us started next year. I don't know how we are going to fool them when we didn't deliver this year and they didn't make a lot of the money like we promised them.

It was clearly better this year, (we have to say that) and the target has to be better again next, especially with Vegas on the horizon. But perfect? That’s always going to feel a long way off. I'm hoping that we can still pull off the con long enough for me to get into real estate or something instead of hyping some kind of con job that won't be here after the FIA and F1 have taken their sanction fees and run.