What a race week actually costs you
Not the ticket. The five days of logistics around it, and how we take them.
The ticket is the part with a published price, so it is the part people plan around. It is also the smallest problem in the week.
A race weekend is not an event. It is five days in a city where every hotel, every restaurant and every car has been spoken for by people who booked in January. The circuit is the easy part; it has a gate and a time. Everything either side of it is a negotiation with a city operating at capacity.
The costs that are never quoted: the driver who cannot reach you because the roads around the marina close hours before anyone tells you they will. The dinner you assumed you would sort on the night, in a city where nothing is available for four days. The hotel that is technically walking distance and is not, in that heat, in those shoes.
None of it is difficult. All of it is early. Ground transport for a race week has to be committed weeks before, with the road closures already mapped and a second plan for the two evenings when the first plan will not work.
That is what a trip like December is: not access to a race, which anyone can buy, but the five days around it arranged by people who have already had the argument with the road closures.
The ticket is the cheap part. The week is the expensive one, and it is the one that is worth handing over.