The last of a series of temporary structures built to accommodate Formula 1's first Las Vegas Grand Prix race in November is slated to be demolished by Feb. 1, a victory for a group of local business owners who say they the race cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue and threatened to ruin their Super Bowl weekend earnings potential.“This is the positive outcome we hoped for and was our intention from the beginning," Randy Markin, owner of Battista's Hole in the Wall since 1970 and general manager of Stage Door Casino since 1976, told the Las Vegas Sun. The Las Vegas Grand Prix, which involved races on the Strip from Nov. 16-18, saw F1 remove trees and shut down the fountains in front of the Bellagio, drain the gondola canal at the Venetian and block sights of the Strip with fencing and scaffolding, as well as impose a number of temporary construction measures to make the race possible. The Flamingo Road bridge in particular was blamed for a disproportionate impact to local businesses by blocking access to store fronts and creating a traffic nightmare that owners said kept Uber, Lyft and other car services from being willing to venture to the area. Markin told Forbes he’d never experienced a revenue loss until F1 came to town, and now he estimates his restaurant and casino businesses are down a combined $4.5 million. “Every single night we’d have 100 to 200 cancellations with the same line, ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t get down there,” he said. Wade Bohn, who has owned the Jay's Market convenience store on Flamingo Road since 2006, said he had to lay off five employees in the race-caused sales slump and estimates he's down about $4.3 million in revenue—half of his 2022 revenue—because he went from selling 3 million gallons of gas per day to about 1.3 million. The bridge goes directly over and past Jay’s Market. Ferraro’s Ristorante, another local business that signed onto letters sent to officials earlier this month, went from serving hundreds of customers for dinner per day to dozens because potential diners couldn’t reasonably make the two-mile journey from the Strip, Markin added. Super Bowl weekend is expected to bring an estimated 450,000 people to Las Vegas. The game at Allegiant Stadium—located less than three miles from the Flamingo Road bridge—will be the first ever held in Nevada and officials have said the F1 race prepared the city for the influx of visitors, private jet traffic and other changes in usual tourism patterns expected to accompany the NFL's biggest yearly event. Even without the hosting rights to the game, the Super Bowl has always been one of the biggest weekend for Las Vegas—more than 300,000 annually fill the city’s sportsbooks to bet on the game.$16 billion. That's how much Americans are expected to bet on the Super Bowl this year, Reuters reported.


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