Need for Speed Racing Games

Formula One Coming to Austin — Better Book Now
Forbes Online 06/07/2011
Author: Larry Olmsted


It’s about to get a lot louder in the World’s Live Music Capital.

For years Austin has been growing its tourism business by leaps and bounds, fostered by a reputation for great music and plenty of it, one of the nation’s best emerging food scenes, plenty of traditional Texas barbecue, and a hipster, Bohemian atmosphere that sets the State Capital distinctly apart from the rest of Texas, hence its unofficial but widely cited slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.”


Until now, the city’s main annual events have been the Austin City Limits music festival and the bigger been the South By Southwest festival, a two-part cultural happening that combines a music festival with a film festival, both respectively among the nation’s highest profile. But Austinites are about to get blown away by a new event that promises to bring an unheard of 300,000 visitors to the laid back city – Formula One.


Formula 1 is the most watched sport on earth, with over 520 million viewers, more than soccer, baseball or NASCAR. It is the highest level of auto racing sanctioned by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the governing body of world motorsports, and its season consists of a series of Grand Prix races held on purpose-built circuits, and to a lesser extent, former public roads and closed city streets. Formula 1 cars race at speeds up to 220 MPH.


The move to Austin is a huge event for US race enthusiast, marking the return to F1 to our shores. The 2011 season saw races in Bahrain, Australia, Malaysia, China, Spain, Monaco, Turkey, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, India, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Abu Dhabi. Austin’s deal with FIA calls for annual races form 2012 until at least 2021. The city is building a new track and facility, The Circuit of the Americas, in the southeast part of the city.


The race promises to be a red hot spectacle – it is tentatively scheduled for June 17, 2012, when average temperatures in Austin hover around 100 (or more). Click here for info.


Currently Austin has about 30,000 hotel rooms, or enough to handle about a fifth of the anticipated hotel room demand, so if you want to see a Grand Prix here in the States – and you will have lots of international competition – act now. Organizers expect a big spillover to nearby San Antonio, the nation’s 7th largest city. Austin and San Antonio are less than 90 minutes apart and directly linked by a major highway, but hotels in the northern suburbs of San Antonio are less than an hour form the race site, though if you get squeezed out of Austin, it may be worth going further into downtown San Antonio, mainly due to the vast amount of dining and nightlife options, especially along the city’s famed RiverWalk. There are several major hotels directly in the RiverWalk, including the Westin, Hilton, Contessa and others.


In Austin, the top choices are the Driskill, the Four Seasons, and the Omni, as well as a few resorts outside the city, notably the Hyatt Lost Pines, the Lake Austin resort and the Lakeway resort.