The Official Mexican Grand Prix Thread

I have a fresh bottle of mezcal all lined up.

Thanks Tavo, for bringing us both COTA and the return of the Mexican GP!!

That USGP will be hard to beat. As the end approached you could hear the SkySports team lose a little more of their confidence. Surely Hamilton will be able to catch and pass Max, never even was it close. Max played it just right, let him catch up then keep him just more than a second away, no DRS. Lovely.

Perez has been doing well the last couple of races. Love to see him do well in Mexico.

Is it just me, OR is anyone else having trouble finding Negra at the grocery store?

Why the quotes? That really is a baseball stadium that the track goes through there. It's slow, but that place is a got damn party zone. The fans have a blast there & couldn't love it more.

Sant' Tavo will tell us the accurate  attendance numbers from the Mexico GP. 

Well, that's CIE's job, not Tavo's. Tavo's job in Mexico City was mostly about getting the Mexican GP going again, assisting CIE, not running it himself or being any kind of spokesperson for it.

Mexico's probably isn't 100% accurate but they've been much closer with their numbers than COTA has. Mexico actually gets huge crowds all 3 days every single year. Last time they got 92K on Friday, 115K on Saturday, and 138k on Sunday. Their total, with a much more packed house the first 2 days than COTA, and a much greater seating capacity than COTA ... was still 'just' 345K. 

Even if you do take COTA's 400K as a somewhat accurate estimate (Brawn said it was 380K btw, which is still a little far-fetched, but more believable than 400K given the 140K they say they had on Sunday), it helps to remind yourself that Sunday crowds don't exist in a vacuum. COTA said they had 140K on Sunday and 400K overall, which just doesn't add up given the patterns of F1 attendance numbers across 3 days. You don't get 10K on Friday, 20K on Saturday, and then 100K on Sunday. And you don't get 120K on Friday, 140K on Saturday, and 140K on Sunday.  For a race that draws 100K on Sunday, for example, typical numbers would be more like 40-60K on Friday, 60-80K on Saturday, and 100K on Sunday. COTA's 2021 numbers don't come close to fitting the pattern. Mexico's numbers do fit that pattern.

And you have to know the extent to which COTA have exaggerated their crowds in the past, which I do. In 2016 they claimed a then COTA record weekend total of 269K people. They actually overestimated that weekend attendance by about 105k people - or by more than 60%. There is zero chance that crowd was bigger than the 2012 crowd, which was much more packed and COTA had 2x as much seating capacity as in 2016.

And given that the same things that helped COTA's crowd will likely help Mexico's crowd, and given that Mexico has had much better turnouts than Austin in every year since it returned to the F1 calendar, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them surpass COTA's 'biggest ever F1 crowd'. I also wouldn't be surprised to see them with another crowd around 350K for the weekend, which would be right in line with what they've always done ... and they'll do that right, without all the logistical fuckery we saw at COTA.

let's race
big ups to brandon, whoever he is ;)

Easy folks.

I think(hope) Kidrybot was just joking.