The biggest event on the sports calendar in the UAE is the annual Formula One race, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and that went down today.

F1 probably brings more tourists to the country than any other event. People from the region, certainly, but Europe, as well. The newsroom at The National very much had a sense of “important people in town” this weekend, and anyone who has been around journalism knows how that goes.

Also, we had a sense of wealthy people in town.

Certain sports skew towards wealth. Horse racing, certainly. Golf. Tennis, to an extent.

Hard to imagine anything beats F1, though.

What puts the vroom crowd out front is that some of the fans tend to have a lot of money, too. And we’re not talking “NASCAR money here, in the sense of “own my own RV.”

To check on the veracity of that here, all you needed to do was take a look at the mega-yachts parked in the marina of the Yas Marina Circuit.

The business section of The National did a story about how it makes good business sense to rent a yacht, for the weekend, for deal-making, etc. (Though the photo with the linked story doesn’t actually show any of the monster yachts in town this weekend.) And even those left ashore apparently are busy making deals, as we outlined in another Biz section story.

Advertisers certainly thought more rich guys than usual were in Abu Dhabi. We were running ads for luxury goods all weekend. The biggest blowout was by the watchmaker Cartier, which bought a four-page, broadsheet wrap of the main news section this morning. I don’t know what our ad rates are, but a four-page wrap of the A section … that must have brought in a fair chunk of change.

The race itself was both interesting and disappointing. Those hoping to see Sebastian Vettel, the German who already has clinched the season championship, win here for the third consecutive time were disappointed when Vettel suffered a tire puncture on the first turn, lost control and spun … and destroyed his wheel by the time he got around to the pits. There went the polesitter, 20 seconds into the race.

That left it to Lewis Hamilton, gifted the lead when Vettel spun, and he never gave it up.

Compared to last year, it was dull. That was when Abu Dhabi was the last race on the calendar and four guys had a shot at the championship, which was unprecedented, and Vettel won the race and the championship in dramatic fashion.

So, there goes our biggest event, but most of the rest of the Top 10 Biggest will be coming up soon. With the weather finally reaching “pleasant,” the European Golf Tour will come through (twice), as will the ATP and the WTA, and in January big soccer clubs from Europe will drop by to catch some sun, and then we have a fairly big marathon in March …

But the Grand Prix is out in front of all of them.