Amid the confusion between the cancelled first session and restarted second one, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff swore at a journalist in a news conference when he suggested the situation was bad for F1's image at such a high-profile event.
"It's completely ridiculous," Wolff said. "How can you even dare trying to talk bad about an event that sets the new standards to everything?
"And then you're speaking about a [expletive deleted] drain cover that's been undone. That has happened before. That's nothing.
"Give credit to the people that have set up this grand prix, that have made this sport much bigger than it ever was.
"[F1's owners] Liberty has done an awesome job and just because in FP1 a drain cover has become undone we shouldn't be moaning.
"The car is broken, that's really a shame. For Carlos it could have been dangerous, so between the FIA and the track everybody needs to analyse how we can make sure that this is not happening again.
"But talking here about a black eye for the sport on a Thursday evening? Nobody watches that in European time anyway. Come on."
F1, which unusually is acting as the promoter for this grand prix, has spent more than £500m on preparations for the race. This includes a buying plot of land in Las Vegas, on which it has built the largest pit building on the F1 calendar and prepared the track.
The pit building will become a permanent presence for F1 in the Nevada city.
Hosting a grand prix in Las Vegas is the culmination of 40 years of on-and-off effort and has succeeded because of buy-in from the casinos, who expect to make millions of dollars and see the race as part of Las Vegas' bid to become a global centre for sport.
However, although F1 built the track, the responsibility to check it for safety was that of governing body the FIA, which did so before practice started.
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