Fake beaches at Miami Grand Prix are ludicrous but demonstrate F1's commitment to making the sport global

The fake marinas on display at the Miami Grand Prix will invite scorn this weekend, but with two American races this season it shows that organisers are taking it seriously.

Since the takeover of the organisation by the Liberty media complex, those in charge have clearly taken criticism to heart when it is made constructively, and have been prepared to make swift alterations. Not always for the better, but by considering real change between seasons, F1 has a chance to cling to relevance in a way other sports do not.

The F1 season before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was scheduled to be 23 races long, and they have managed to find a replacement, making this the busiest campaign in the sport’s history.

That has seen the 2022 season embrace not just one, but two races Stateside for the first time ever.

The Drive to Survive series has apparently been instrumental in garnering a new audience, but that has come with problems.

Last year’s race director, Michael Masi, was criticised for the decision to allow Max Verstappen his frenetic final-lap attack on previous champion Lewis Hamilton.

It made for a wonderful climax to the season, but simply put, it was against the rules. F1’s report admitted as much, but also refused to change the outcome of the race. It was an admission that they had created a controversy that was simply too complex to untangle. And so they ditched Masi and introduced a string of rule changes and new provisions to prevent a repeat. In the circumstances, it was probably the best they could do, and reinforces their willingness to rip up what has come before.

In roughly a decade, the sport has undergone a series of fundamental changes. Pitstops now last a handful of seconds in order to get the cars back into the action as quickly as possible. Teams are punished for profligate use of new engines and car parts, to reduce expenditure advantages between the most affluent and poorest teams. Safety measures such as the halo have given drivers much improved safety outcomes when objects fly at their skull at hundreds of miles an hour. Almost all of the drivers were able to come out in support of Black Lives Matter, in a sport that has traditionally been both conservative in its attitude to rule changes and in its politics.

And there is further evidence of change in the way the season is playing out. Last season’s champion Verstappen has been competitive, but he trails Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. Hamilton, perhaps the sport’s greatest ever driver, has been reduced to an also-ran, despite his Mercedes team looking impregnable for most of the last 10 years. That is due to the requirements from Formula One not to just change their cars in a piecemeal fashion from last season, but to do so from the ground up.

In football, rugby, or any other global sport you might want to consider, rarely do you get such far-reaching changes. Football, for example, had the backpass rule, two decades later considered goal line technology, and introduced five substitutes three decades after - and only due to pandemic. Rugby went professional and turned its players into uniformly meaty rectangles, but beyond that has tinkered at the edges. Baseball elected to take steroid abuse seriously, but that was about it. What F1 considers doing every few years, other sports have to face a crisis before they will implement them.

While the fake water and beaches do make Miami look faintly ludicrous, essentially they show that F1 is pulling out all the stops. That willingness to change and manufacture whatever they feel is necessary can create chaos, as we saw last season, but it has also made for an immeasurably more competitive sport to watch.