Austin continues big sports weekend with F1 race

Today’s F1 U.S. Grand Prix marks the second half of a major sports weekend in Austin following Saturday’s Georgia-Texas game. ESPN sent a “small army of employees —  nearly 500″ — to Austin to broadcast both events, along with a “wide range of parallel programming” such as ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “SportsCenter,” “College GameDay” and F1’s “Countdown to Green.” The “Texas Takeover,” as ESPN is calling it, has “dual platforms” — one atop the Turn 1 hill at Circuit of the Americas and the other from the LBJ Lawn outside of Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. COTA showed the second half of Georgia-Texas on its giant TV screens, and track officials expected “about 50,000 fans to watch the game.” Eminem also held a concert at COTA on Saturday (AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, 10/18).

Saturday’s game between top-ranked Texas and No. 5 Georgia was “one of the biggest college football matchups this year.” With ESPN’s “College GameDay” in town, the net planned “plenty of crossover” between F1 and college football. It is a weekend “unlike one F1 has seen, particularly since the popularity boom.” Between Georgia-Texas and F1, COTA Chair Bobby Epstein was expecting “at least a quarter of a million people around that night in downtown Austin” by Saturday. Texas Exec Senior Associate AD/External Affairs Drew Martin estimated that “over 100,000 people would be at the downtown Austin college campus” on Saturday night (THE ATHLETIC, 10/19).