MIAMI GARDENS — The U.S. popularity of Formula One racing is in overdrive, but Black racegoers were few and far between at the 2024 Miami Grand Prix, which ironically takes place at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, a small, predominantly Black municipality just north of Miami.
One of the melanin-enhanced folks giddily watching multimillion-dollar Formula One cars shriek around a 3.36-mile road circuit at velocities exceeding 200 mph was attorney Alan Clarke. “Brothers already like cars and we already like driving,” said Clarke, who flew in from Columbia, South Carolina.
“It’s just about exposure and access to Formula One. A lot of people don’t know that it exists, a lot of people don’t know that the best driver, Lewis Hamilton, is Black. But, as long as it’s considered a White, or European sport, we’re just going to opt out,” adds Clarke. He was rocking a red Ferrari T-shirt and paid around $500 to take in a weekend of motorsports. “Without knowing that it really aligns with all the things we like. We like cars, we like engines, we like good weather, we like nice women. It’s really a match made in heaven!”
Fans still at odds over controversial final lap between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen in Abu Dhabi
Clarke got no argument from buddy Donald Crump, a corporate lawyer from Houston. Like many Black gearheads, Crump is still fuming over 2021, when an out-of-the-blue rules change denied Hamilton what would have been an unprecedented eighth Formula One Drivers’ World Championship.
“It hurt,” Crump said of an unanticipated officiating decision made during the last lap of the last 2021 race, in Abu Dhabi, gift wrapping the drivers’ championship for Dutch driver Max Verstappen. “I watched it at home and, just knowing that they didn’t do the right thing, knowing that they purposely manipulated that race just to not see (Hamilton) get eight world championships. It hurt.”
Formula One’s brain trust said there was no ill intent back in 2021, but try telling that to Crump, clad in a purple T-shirt stamped with the signage of Mercedes AMG, Hamilton’s current team before the British driver moves on to the legendary Ferrari squad in 2025.
“Mercedes, Ferrari — it doesn’t matter where he goes, I’m going with him!” said Angelie Spencer, who flew from Kingston, Jamaica, with her friend Imani Angus, to enjoy Miami Grand Prix 2024. “I’m happy to return to Ferrari, because I was always a fan of (legendary German driver) Michael Schumacher. So, when I started watching Formula One 22 years ago I was a Michael fan, until he retired.”
Internal medicine physician Theo Sai, and his wife, Vianka, came from Tampa to root for Lewis Hamilton, who 2023 salary was $55 million, and whose gasoline-and-electric-powered Mercedes W-15 racing car produces 1,000 horsepower. To put Sai’s 280-mile Tampa-to-Miami Gardens sojourn in perspective, he’s trekked to Monaco, Austria and Mexico City to soak in Formula One’s international ambiance.
“Everybody knows it was his race to win,” Sai said of Hamilton’s fateful 2021 experience in Abu Dhabi. “But we can’t dwell on the past. He still has a championship in him — he just needs the right car.”