[querulous]

it's also because they wanted to run it at night with all the casinos (and the sphere) on the route lit up. the miami gp started at 1230pm and the montreal gp at 11am (930am and 8am vegas time, respectively) but the las vegas gp route doesn't look half as good in daylight

[wwweston]

Skies are dark in Vegas by 6pm right now (and probably a lot more comfortable than it will be at 10pm, generally).

[renewiltord]

Yeah but that’s too early for Europe. It’s just an optimization problem across many dimensions. And rarely is the optimum there the optimum if you disregard all but one dimension.

Some combination of “strip looks better at night”, “showtime or post”, “needs to be viewable by Europeans” and so on.