You are walking around the streets of the city and you see a flyer talking about the upcoming Grand Prix coming up. The prize being all seven chaos emeralds and 1,000,000 Rings (aka Money). The Grand Prix being 16 tracks (to be unique from other Grand Prix), each one taking place on a different day, one day at a time. It says it starts tomorrow, so 16 days of racing. You can take a piece of paper hanging at the end of the paper as a ticket to the Grand Prix.