Las Vegas GP 2026: eSIM, Schedule and Guide

The 2026 Las Vegas Grand Prix runs from Thursday 19 to Saturday 21 November, and every session of it happens after dark. Sunset in Las Vegas in late November lands around 4:30 PM, so first practice on Thursday is already into dusk and the race itself starts at 8:00 PM on Saturday night. The cars run flat out down Las Vegas Boulevard past the casinos, with the neon of the resort corridor as a backdrop and a chequered flag that falls well after dinner.

That setting is what makes the weekend, and it is also what makes it awkward. A night race on the busiest street in Nevada means enormous crowds packed into a narrow strip of the city, all online at once, in road-closure conditions that change how you move around every evening. This guide covers the session times, the layout of the track, how to get about while the Strip is shut, what to wear when the temperature drops, and how to sort out connectivity before you travel with a USA eSIM. We sell the eSIM, so the pricing here is exactly what appears on our live site.

Session times

All times Pacific, which is UTC-8 in November. This is the published schedule as of 18 August 2026, and support-session timings do occasionally move before race week, so it is worth a check against the official app once you land.

A few things worth reading off that table before you book anything.

Thursday is a real day of running, not a warm-up you can skip. Two F1 practice sessions plus both F1 Academy sessions means track activity from 4:30 PM until 10:00 PM. If you are flying in, land Thursday morning at the latest.

The gap between the last support race and the Grand Prix on Saturday is over three hours. Fans who arrive for the F1 Academy feature race at 4:20 PM are in their seats a long time before lights out, which matters a lot for how warmly you dress and how much your phone battery has to survive.

Sessions finish late and everyone leaves at once. Qualifying ends at 9:00 PM Friday, the race finishes somewhere near 9:45 PM Saturday, and the walk back competes with tens of thousands of people doing the same thing on foot.

If you are coordinating with people at home, 8:00 PM Pacific on Saturday is 4:00 AM Sunday in the UK and 5:00 AM Sunday in central Europe.

The circuit

The Las Vegas Strip Circuit is 6.201 km of closed public road, 17 corners, run anti-clockwise. Here it is against the actual street grid.

Reading a lap off that map tells you most of what you need to know about where to stand and where you are staying relative to the action.

The start/finish line and the pit complex sit on a purpose-built stretch beside Koval Lane, east of the Strip and behind the resorts, roughly between Harmon Avenue and Flamingo Road. Turns 1 through 4 are the tight opening complex around the paddock, then the cars run north up Koval Lane.

Turn 5 puts them east onto Sands Avenue, and Turns 6 to 9 are the loop past the Sphere and the convention halls. This is the fiddliest part of the lap and the section furthest from the Strip hotels.

From Turn 10 the track heads back west and north, joining Las Vegas Boulevard near the Wynn and Fashion Show at Turn 12.

Turn 12 to Turn 14 is the reason people buy tickets. That is roughly 1.9 km flat out heading south down the Strip, past the Venetian, Caesars Palace, the Bellagio fountains, Paris and Planet Hollywood. Turn 13 is barely a corner, just the natural kink in the Boulevard taken at enormous speed.

Turn 14 to Turn 16 is the heavy braking complex at the south end that folds the cars left onto Harmon Avenue, and Turn 17 sends them back north up to the line.

Practically: if you are staying on the Strip between Fashion Show and Harmon, the track runs past your front door and you walk to your seat. If you are staying east of the Strip near Koval or the convention centre, you are close to the paddock end. If you are anywhere else in the city, you are on the wrong side of a road closure every evening from Thursday.

Road closures and getting around

The circuit is made of streets people normally drive on, so the city closes and reopens them around the sessions. Las Vegas Boulevard, Koval Lane, Harmon Avenue and Sands Avenue all shut in the evenings, and the closures start well before the first car turns a wheel and lift well after the last one stops.

That changes movement in three specific ways.

Crossing the Strip gets hard. The pedestrian bridges at the big intersections are the normal way across Las Vegas Boulevard, and during race week some are closed, some are made one-way and some become the only sanctioned crossing for a long stretch. A three-minute crossing becomes a twenty-minute detour, and no map app models this well.

Rideshare and taxi pickup moves. Drop-off and pickup zones get relocated away from the closed roads, sometimes to the far side of a resort from where you would expect. Surge pricing after a session that has just dumped 100,000 people onto the pavement is exactly what you would guess. Walking a few blocks away from the venue before you request a car is usually faster and much cheaper than queuing at the designated zone.

The Las Vegas Monorail becomes useful. It runs elevated on the east side of the Strip, so road closures do not touch it, and its stations put you behind the east-side resorts near the paddock end of the circuit. Hours are typically extended for the event. It is the one form of transport that the closures cannot slow down.

Walking is the default answer for most of the weekend. Distances on the Strip look shorter on a map than they feel: the frontage of a single mega-resort can be a ten-minute walk, and the crowd density after a session makes it slower still.

From the airport, Harry Reid International is only about 5 km from the Strip, but that is 5 km into a city with its main artery shut. Give the transfer far more time than the distance suggests, in both directions, and do not book a tight departing flight on Sunday morning.

What to wear

This is the thing most first-time attendees get wrong, and it is worth more than one line.

November in Las Vegas averages a daytime high around 19C (66F) and an overnight low around 7C (45F). Those are pleasant numbers on paper. The problem is that you experience the low end of that range, not the high end. The sun sets around 4:30 PM, the race starts at 8:00 PM, and you are sitting still in an open grandstand in a desert for several hours while the temperature falls.

Wind funnelling between high-rise resorts makes it feel colder again. The inaugural running of this race in 2023 became notorious for exactly this, with fans in shorts and team shirts quietly suffering.

Pack a proper insulated jacket, a hat, gloves and warm layers under whatever team gear you want to be seen in. Bring them for Thursday and Friday too, since practice and qualifying both run into the night. Rain is unlikely, since November is one of the driest months here, so waterproofs matter less than warmth.

Also worth knowing: you will be on your feet for hours on concrete and asphalt, so comfortable shoes matter more than they would at a permanent circuit with grass banks and shuttle buses.

Where to stay

Almost every hotel decision here is a decision about which side of a road closure you want to wake up on.

Resorts on Las Vegas Boulevard between Fashion Show and Harmon Avenue sit directly on the Turn 12 to Turn 14 straight. You walk to your seat, you can retreat to your room between sessions, and you skip transport entirely. You pay heavily for that in race-week rates.

Properties east of the Strip around Koval Lane and the convention centre put you near the paddock and Turns 1 to 9, still walkable, usually cheaper, and well served by the monorail.

Anywhere further out, including downtown and the airport corridor, means a nightly transport problem in both directions during closures.

One local quirk to budget for: nearly every Las Vegas resort charges a mandatory nightly resort fee on top of the room rate, and parking is often charged separately. Neither is always obvious in the headline price you compare online, and both climb during event weeks.

What you use data for on race weekend

It is easy to underestimate how much your phone does over three days at a circuit. The usual list looks like this:

• Maps and walking directions to gates, grandstands and the pedestrian bridges that are actually open.
• Rideshare and taxi apps for the trips that closures push to the edges of the Strip.
• Your mobile ticket, loaded and scanned at the entrance.
• The official event app for the timetable, timing and any late session changes.
• Group chats to find the rest of your party in a packed crowd.
• Posting photos and short clips of the cars lit up against the neon.

None of that is heavy on its own, but it adds up across a weekend, and a night race means a lot of it happens in the dark when you are leaning on your screen even more. Budget around 1-3 GB per day and you will have room for everything above without watching a counter. Bring a power bank as well: cold weather and a screen at full brightness for six hours will finish a phone battery long before the podium.

Why an eSIM beats roaming and venue Wi-Fi

Roaming on your home plan can work, but the cost is the catch. Per-day roaming passes stack up fast across a long weekend, and pay-as-you-go roaming rates can produce a nasty bill once you land in the US. Venue and resort Wi-Fi gets overwhelmed when tens of thousands of people reach for it at once, and it does nothing for you out on the Strip, in a rideshare queue or on a monorail platform.

A USA eSIM sidesteps both problems. It connects to local US networks at local data rates, it travels with you everywhere on the route rather than staying tethered to one hotspot, and it costs a fraction of a roaming pass. No network beats congestion in the densest part of the crowd, but away from the worst pinch points the eSIM keeps you online at a sensible price. You set it as your data line and forget about it.

Recommended plan and USA pricing

Each plan below covers the USA on one eSIM profile. Here are the VIP rates referred customers pay, verified against live pricing on 2026-06-29:

For a single weekend on the Strip, the 3GB or 5GB plan is the sweet spot for most fans. If you stay several nights and share a lot of footage from the night sessions, the 10GB plan gives you headroom.

Setting it up before you fly

Getting online should be the easy part of the trip. Here is the order that works:

1. Buy your USA plan before you leave home.
2. Install it over your home Wi-Fi once the email says your QR code is ready. The QR is delivered through our website, with that email as your heads-up.
3. Set the eSIM as your data line in your phone settings.
4. Keep your home SIM active for calls, texts and two-factor authentication codes.
5. Turn off data roaming on your home line so it cannot ring up charges.

Done in that order, you land at Harry Reid already connected, with no kiosk hunt and no roaming surprise before you even reach the Strip.

Doing Austin and Las Vegas

The US calendar gives fans two rounds within a month of each other, and they sit in the same country. A fan doing both, the United States Grand Prix in Austin in late October and the Las Vegas night race in November, can run the same USA eSIM across both with nothing to rebuy, because the United States is a single-country plan. Pick a plan with enough data and validity to span the two trips, or top up before the second one. For the season as a whole, see the main F1 2026 eSIM guide.

Sort the connectivity now, pack a warmer jacket than you think you need, and the only thing left to think about when the lights go out on Saturday night is the racing.