Online ticket sales for the 2024 Chinese Grand Prix launched at 8 p.m. China Standard Time on January 9th of this year, and by 8:01 the operation was in trouble. Overloaded servers wreaked havoc on a system designed to link pre-ordered tickets with either a national ID or an international passport, blocking buyers who thought they had already, in some ways, won the lottery. Chaos and frustration ensued. “There was such a backlash online as to how JUSS Sports, the ticket sales promoter, messed it up so badly,” says Zhou Haoran, F1 Guest Commentator at Shanghai Sports TV. But it’s not entirely surprising that technology crumbled in the face of a historic moment.
This weekend the dam breaks on five years of pent-up excitement around the Chinese Grand Prix, its first running since 2019. The country’s strict zero-Covid policy made hosting a Formula One race weekend impossible until the rule’s cancellation in 2022—by which time it was too late to secure Shanghai’s place in the schedule for 2023.
