Why the Las Vegas GP is held on Saturday

In addition to the on-track sessions over the course of an F1 weekend, the 20 drivers have to deal with a variety of other obligations, such as interviews, promotional activities and, of course, interaction with the fans.

For the sake of efficiency, it is therefore good that the drivers at least know what awaits them in terms of on-track action.

In most cases, an F1 weekend is divided up as follows: On Friday, the drivers start with the first and second practice sessions, on Saturday they work through the third practice and qualifying, before concluding the weekend on Sunday with the Grand Prix.

In almost all other cases, any changes to that schedule are caused by sprint weekends. Second practice gives way to sprint qualifying and the third practice changes to the sprint race, while qualifying and the race remain as they are.

However, in some cases that works a little differently, as during some race weekends everything is moved up a day and the race is scheduled for Saturday.

Earlier this year we already saw this in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where the race was brought forward because of Ramadan.

Yet it will happen a third time this season, in Las Vegas. That, however, is for an entirely different reason.

Why?

The United States has completely different timezones to European countries. Virtually all of western Europe shares a nine-hour time difference with Las Vegas. Just Portugal, the United Kingdom and Ireland differ, with an eight-hour gap.

F1 has been making every effort in recent years to get the American audience on board, but it also wants to keep the European audience happy. 

With the all the lights of Las Vegas' famed strip, the race was never going to be scheduled for other point of the day than at night.

However, a grand prix held in Nevada on a Sunday evening would conflict with schedules from around the world, particularly in Europe, where most of the continent would be getting ready to go to - or would already be at - work. 

Therefore, the race will be held on Saturday night, as it was last season, at 22:00 local time, with late Saturday night in Las Vegas coinciding with Sunday morning in western Europe.

The Las Vegas Grand Prix will start at 06:00 in the UK and Ireland and at 07:00 Central European Time, which is considerably more reasonable.