The Speed of Sound

When visitors take an elevator ride to the Circuit of the Americas’ (COTA) observation deck, 251 feet above the track’s expansive grounds, they see one of the world’s best Formula 1 tracks, its winding esses, and the metal grandstands baking under the hot Texas sun. When Glynn Wedgewood surveys the expansive grounds, though, he sees music.

From the carefully sculpted, gently rolling hills where tens of thousands gather to watch some of the world’s biggest stars, to parking lots perfectly suited to host a variety of festivals and shows, to nooks and crannies ideal for a more intimate showcase, the grounds — to Wedgewood — are an almost infinitely flexible venue limited only by his and his colleagues’ imaginations.

“We’ll have one stage near where that video screen is, and one on that pitch over there,” he explains, pointing at large but unassuming patches of grass and concrete around the track. The 49-year-old Wedgewood, COTA’s senior vice president of music and entertainment, is clad in a standard back-of-house uniform — all black — complete with black Ray-Bans, a necessity on the many Austin days when there’s not a cloud in sight. To him, what looks like empty space can be readily transformed whether for a stadium-sized show or a small pop-up, a practice which is less unconventional than it might seem. “You go to any stadium and it’s not like there’s a permanent stage,” Wedgewood points out. The Germania Insurance Amphitheater is COTA’s full-time venue, but the racetrack hosts many other shows and festivals year round. “We’re so flexible and open minded, we’re not stuck to a certain idea.”

That freedom has led to one of COTA’s most notable innovations as a race circuit: to not only use its grounds for concerts but to connect those shows to the massive Formula 1 races themselves. By leaning into music-booking at a prodigious scale, COTA management has created something unprecedented in Formula 1. Unlike any other stop on the series, the U.S. Grand Prix has been paired with shows from arena- packing artists such as Stevie Wonder, Britney Spears, and Ed Sheeran since 2015.

This October’s headliners, Sting and Eminem, up the ante yet again: Eminem’s appearance will mark his first headlining performance in half a decade. The U.S. Grand Prix in Austin has drawn as many as 440,000 attendees from all over the world, a record not just for the U.S. but for races globally. Now, those hundreds of thousands of people have one more reason to linger: an array of artists of all genres and levels of fame, performing trackside throughout the weekend. Wedgewood books those acts alongside a team that includes his wife, Jenna, and coordinates the logistics of making those shows a reality — along with all the music that comes about through the rest of the venue’s calendar. Mariachi to metal, hip-hop to house, it all has an unlikely home here at the track. 

”I was — am, I guess, still — a musician,” Wedgewood explains as a self-effacing introduction to his successful career as a guitarist and singer. Growing up in a small town near Newcastle called Bishop Auckland, Wedgwood’s biggest gigs came as a member of the band Nic Armstrong & The Thieves, which changed their name to IV Thieves when they relocated from the UK to Austin (home of their record label, New West) in the mid-aughts. With them, he opened for everyone from Paul Weller to Oasis to the Pretenders.

Before his band started touring internationally, though, Wedgewood had already been dabbling in the music booking and production worlds that would come to define much of his career. He’d moved to Nottingham to pursue music, and in between band practices and shows he started working at a venue called The Social (it’s now called The Bodega). As part of his duties there, he booked a weekly showcase of unsigned bands from around the U.K., “just to expose people to new music,” as he explains it now.

It was years before he fully realized that part of his musical skill set, though — after he’d moved to Austin, enticed away from his “dreary, wet” homeland by the sunshine and a whole new music scene, met his now-wife Jenna, and had their son Owen (he now works at COTA as well, joining the family business).

His new Central Texas domestic life called for a more stable job, and he and Jenna started booking at small clubs around the world’s so-called live music capital. They were setting the stage at intimate spots such as the now defunct hot dog joint Frank and the club Swan Dive (capacity 250), helping Austin keep its title during quiet seasons and creating buzzy one-offs during South by Southwest (SXSW).

As he grew his career booking stages instead of playing them, Wedgewood began to see how his experience as a musician gave him an edge. And he never felt any culture shock either, despite moving into a radically different music scene from the one where he came up. “It’s very similar to the U.K. — you hustle at a lot of shows and make a whole bunch of new friends,” says Wedgewood. “It’s all about communication.”

From there, Wedgewood took a job producing events for Austin City Limits (ACL) Live, working around the clock at a 1,000-person room called The Belmont and all the while separately managing larger and larger shows and festivals for Red Bull’s culture division as a freelancer. COTA opened in 2012, bringing Formula 1 back to America by hosting the first U.S. Grand Prix race since 2007. That October, Mario Andretti circled the course in his championship Lotus 79 to inaugurate Austin’s place in the race series. Wedgewood’s work with Red Bull eventually led him to Formula 1 — namely, to helm the U.S. Grand Prix’s Fan Fest, an event spanning six city blocks in downtown Austin intended to build excitement for all the people who weren’t out at the track.

He deftly handled that task in 2014, working with acts including Joan Jett and De La Soul. Then COTA offered him a production manager position. The talent buyer and event producer ascended in a manner befitting the high-intensity nature of the gig: Wedgewood’s predecessor and previous supervisor quit 10 minutes before the doors opened for a show at the amphitheater. “Bobby [Epstein, chairman and co-founder of COTA,] rolls in backstage in his car and just says, ‘So you got this, yeah?’” Wedgewood remembers, shaking his head and grinning. “That was it.” A decade and countless shows later, he’s an executive.

To book artists this famous requires a huge amount of planning. “Em is someone who has been on our radar for years, he’s an absolute legend,” Wedgewood says of this year’s elusive headliner, Eminem. “We tried to make something work last year, but he ended up not playing at all in ’23.” And, syncing up calendars is just part of the equation. “It’s a true ‘one off’ show,” Wedgewood adds. “A lot of the time you’re going to see an artist on tour, so it’ll be the same show for the most part in any city. With us, we try to work with each artist and do something special.”

The musical expansion of Formula 1 wasn’t just through the megastars who grace the venue’s biggest stage, though. In 2016, COTA also introduced what they call the American Soundtrack stages, smaller venues around the grounds that they construct just for the race weekend. Those stages, primarily booked by Wedgewood’s wife Jenna, showcase the local talent — like Rosie Flores, Grupo Fantasma, and Shinyribs — that makes Austin such a destination for live music across all genres, from rock to country to cumbia. While the massive superstage shows are separate ticketed events, the smaller concerts during the day are booked around windows in the racing schedule. It gives the race a music- festival feel which is just right for Austin.

“There are just so many fans of different genres, artists, et cetera that make it out to race weekend,” Wedgewood says. “We try not to overthink things and just go with our gut when it comes to identifying artists who we feel might be a good fit for the event.”