I came to Las Vegas for a basketball tournament probably about 11 years ago. After that night out I vowed to never come back, but here I am again!
It’s a pretty cool place to be, and the energy around F1 this weekend is just incredible.
Walking through the iconic Las Vegas Strip and then having the cars drive down there was an absolute spectacle. We got our bearings a bit and got to see different viewpoints of the track, which was really cool. Seeing the Bellagio fountains next to the cars going by — it was just fantastic.
It’s a crazy idea that’s come to fruition, and to be here for the first one is pretty cool.
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I was in Oscar Piastri’s garage down at McLaren for first practice. You get to put the headphones on and listen to everyone on the radio. There are 20 or 30 engineers NASA-style up there with the laptops out all doing the calculations. I don’t think people realise the finetuning and the little margins that they try to gain to be able to win races. To get in there and see that and see the car up close was really neat.
I was chatting to Oscar last night. He seemed really calm — the calm in the storm. There are things that you can’t change that are happening on the racetrack and all this kind of stuff, but he just seems like he knows exactly what he needs to do to make sure that his body and his mind are ready to go out there and perform whenever he needs to perform.
Even just chatting to him, he’s locked in for what’s about to happen. It’s pretty cool to see that, and I think there’s a mutual respect between professional athletes when it comes to the moment of having to perform and the stress that can be around it and just being able to have the mental fortitude to be able to fight through it.
When I got in there it was essentially when they shut down the track with the manhole cover coming out. It was a weird sensation. All of a sudden you see a few people running around and you feel a bit of stress — like, ‘What’s going on?’. There was confusion in the paddock, with everyone trying to figure out when it was going to start back up — if it was going to start back up — and what was going to happen. I think when they made the announcement a lot of people were probably already out the door saying, ‘This is going to be past my bedtime!’.
We stayed back for a little bit and got to see some people from Australia and some friends and connections in Vegas. It was cool also because there were not as many people around, so we got to really see the track and see a bit behind the scenes.
We met a few people last night just roaming through the paddock too. I said hi to Gordon Ramsay, who I’d met earlier in the year. We talked to James Corden — he was very lovely. He was talking about AFL, and he’s like, ‘It’s the craziest game. It’s the most impressive game in the world’ and all this kind of stuff.
We went back to the hotel before the second practice and got to watch it on the TV before we crashed. A lot of these drivers haven’t experienced the track, so the disruption opens up the race even more. Whoever can adapt to the circumstance better is probably going to be the person that comes out on top.
It’s going to be an incredible next few days I think, and the race is going to be a heck of a spectacle.
Mason Cox is a Collingwood premiership player who’s kicked 117 goals from 113 AFL games. He’s at the F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix with Kayo Sports.
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