The Hard Rock Stadium is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. In 2026, it’ll host more events than it has ever done in the last 40 years.
On January 19 just over a week before the inaugural Miami EPrix at the venue, it hosted the college football championship – a big deal in the U.S. A day after that, the final build for the EPrix began in earnest.
At Miami last week, if you looked just outside of the Formula perimeter at the track, you’d have seen some of the build going on for the Formula 1 event too in the first days of May. There is rarely a lull in action at the Hard Rock Stadium.
“In terms of building just for Formula E, the biggest priority was getting the grandstand up for them,” President of the F1 Miami Grand Prix facility, Katharina Nowak, told Formula E Notebook.
“So, we were able to do that in just eight days, which that alone is a massive credit to our incredible event operations team. Just when you think they can’t do the impossible, they end up figuring it out.
“With the NFL season slowing down end of January, early February, it gives us an opportunity to speed up the amount of motorsports activity we do here.”
But it is not just the Dolphins (NFL) and the Hurricanes (Uni football team) in action at the complex. The Miami Open tennis comes in March for two weeks just ahead of the ‘Jazz in the Gardens’ festival. Then there is the small matter of the FIFA World Cup in June/July, when the Stadium will host seven matches.
Just figuring out a schedule for Formula E to be at the facility was an event in itself but last year the deal was sealed.
“We’d love to work with them to continue to have Miami here on the calendar,” said Nowak.
“I think a key priority for us is to continue to grow our motorsports business, right, on top of everything else that we do.”
Practically speaking, Nowak and the Miami facility ensured there was an initial framework for Formula E to race in. The short 1.442 miles was felt by many to be too short, but any other configuration wasn’t hugely viable or conducive to an Fe race in its present Gen3Evo guise.
“Two years ago, our ownership made an incremental investment to what we’ve already spent to create an inner loop into our circuit, which is what we’re running on today,” added Nowak.
“It’s the configuration we’re running on today. That gives us the ability to be more than just a three-day motorsports venue. So now we’ve got a track that runs on this side of the property where we’re not crossing any public roads and can run our private drive club, precision drive club, 40 to 50 days a year.”
The race weekend was a success from the point of view of the event itself, the race and the facilities which were excellent. The negatives were a very modest crowd and the inclement weather, and clearly the latter fed the former to some respect.
FEN understands that the reason Formula E Operations was the initial promoter of the maiden event was that it was always part of an initial ‘feeler’ between FEO and the Miami Hard Rock. The two ‘got know each other’ last April with the Evo Sessions event and the EPrix will only help galvanise a trust that become a joint effort on the promotional side, something which is clearly hoped for in the near future.
For the Hard Rock Stadium adding the EPrix to its motorsport portfolio, which includes F1 and its corporate and track day activities via the Precision Drive Club, is attractive to bolster its global entertainment and sports venue credentials.
For future events the Hard Rock wants to build its platform more and that aligns with Formula E’s ambition to make itself louder and prouder in the U.S.
“I think for us, as long as we are aligned on the goal to continue to drive motorsport audience in the United States, we all know that we’ve now established ourselves as the Grand Prix here,” opined Nowak (pictured below).
“We’re coming up to our fifth year and really have started to build a core base of motorsports fans in South Florida, which we’re super excited about. If we can continue to foster and nurture that motorsports audience with more motorsports events here, and Formula E continues to grow in the United States, we couldn’t be more supportive of that.”
A good chunk of that objective means getting more people in to watch motorsport. While F1 is more or less a slam-dunk, Formula E isn’t quite a speculative longshot, and to keep the basketball references flowing, it may be looked at as an unproven rookie ‘floater’
“We’ve got a resource and an engine here that is, again, focused on continuing to foster that audience,” said Nowak.
“We’re happy to work with them and continue to work with them on how we can support them. We supported them a bit for this event as well. Now that we understand it and the team is fully experienced what it looks like to be here at Hard Rock Stadium.
“We think we can start to get creative about what all the things we can do together in the future. Our strategy is to figure out, to always figure out a way to cater to all audiences.”
