THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage / Lusail
Once a quiet lounge for drivers' families and a few guests, the Paddock Club has become the most coveted address of a Formula 1 weekend: pit lane walks, garage tours and a kitchen that changes its menu at every race.
MOTORING · FORMULA 1
In modern Formula 1, the race is no longer the only performance. The other one takes place a floor above the pit lane, behind glass, where the sport has learned to host as carefully as it engineers.
The Paddock Club sits at the centre of that change. For decades it was a discreet room for drivers’ families, sponsors and a handful of guests. Today it is the most sought-after address of a Grand Prix weekend, and the clearest sign of how far the championship has travelled from the garage.
The current era of the sport, shaped by the media reach and commercial ambition of Liberty Media, has turned the Paddock Club from a standard product into a testing ground for hospitality. What was once a comfortable room with a view of the garages is now an immersion in the competition itself: wider access, menus built around each destination, appearances by former drivers and a programme that runs from the first coffee to the podium.
The Qatar Grand Prix at Lusail shows the format at full scale. The suites above the pit lane work as a raised salon over the mechanical storm below. By mid-morning there is live music, racing simulators, a coffee bar and a steady drift of guests between the tables, glass in hand, the noise of the cars arriving in waves.
Food has become one of the pillars of the experience. The Austrian caterer DO & CO has supplied the Paddock Club since 1992, and in December 2024 the partnership was extended for another ten years. The rule is that nothing repeats: each race receives its own menu. Oysters in Monte Carlo, sushi in Japan, Canadian lobster, finely carved Australian lamb. At Lusail, the race-day lunch has run from Atlantic cod with edamame and fennel to Wiener schnitzel with truffled mousseline, and between courses the trays keep coming.
Access is the real currency. Paddock Club credentials open a weekend without queues, and the programme is designed to put guests inside the sporting narrative: question-and-answer sessions with drivers, trophy displays, photographs a few centimetres from the cars. The pit lane walk is the moment most people wait for, a slow passage past the garages while mechanics finish set-ups and engineers read the data that will decide the afternoon.
The most elaborate packages go further, with guided tours inside a team’s garage led by its own staff. There the hidden choreography becomes visible: floors repainted at every round, tyre blankets warming the rubber, parts laid out with surgical order, the freight operation that moves an entire team across continents every fortnight. A truck tour of the circuit, narrated corner by corner, completes the picture at a gentler speed.
When the lights go out, everything converges on the view. From above the garages, guests follow the formation lap, the tension before the start, the millimetric choreography of the pit stops and the chequered flag, with screens, headsets and live commentary filling in what the eye misses. The podium celebration, seen at close range, is usually the emotional peak of the weekend.
Prices vary by circuit and climb steeply at the most coveted rounds, Monaco, Silverstone, Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi among them, with the fullest packages running well into five figures per person. Variants have multiplied too, from chef-led garage experiences to House 44, the clubhouse built around Lewis Hamilton’s world. The Paddock Club is for devoted fans, collectors of rare experiences and companies that want to receive their guests with a certain precision.
Formula 1 has found in hospitality a way to grow without losing its nerve. The spectacle no longer stays on the track: it runs through the corridors, the garages, the kitchens and the celebrations. And whoever has watched a race from a floor above the pit lane rarely watches one the same way again.
Details: Formula 1 Paddock Club packages are sold through the championship’s official hospitality channel and authorised agents; availability and prices vary by race. Published prices for the 2026 season start at around £7,500 per person, rising sharply for garage-access packages.
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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