Based on what pics I have seen this am, the concrete was not the cause of this entire incident that is now being reported. The pictures I have seen the cracking and loss of concrete on one side of the valve only indicates to me a car passed over the slightly raised cover and caused the damage to the concrete with that impact with these three cars.
It may have simply been an unsecured or improperly secured iron valve cover, which might have been slightly lifted by some previous car, by under body suction and/or skid plate contact.
A screw up nevertheless.

Typically on street courses, the metal covers are welded in pre-practice; ground-effects cars suck them up otherwise.
Kind of a rookie error by whoever was prepping the track surface.

there is a manhole cover in front of my house, which is on a curve.
one time a truck "tiddlewinked" that cover into my yard !
luckily, i heard it and called it in, then directed traffic until the city came around and put it back.
that would have been fun if a car decided to drive a wheel into that hole.

Manhole cover was bolted down. The housing itself lifted along with the road surface. Some of the smartest minds in the world work in F1, I'm guessing this was a highly unforseen issue. I don't see the logic in docking Ferrari the ten grid spots for a chassis change considering it was a new facility issue outside of their own control.

most headlines i saw said it was a dumpster fire of a race

Bolted down AND paved over

I thought the race started today (Saturday 11/18 )at 10:00 PM local time.

Still might be a dumpster fire...

The water valve cover failure happened during P1 or Practice 1 on Thursday and carried over into P2. No real issues that I saw in Qualifying 1, 2, and 3.

How did a manhole cover lift itself?

Paved over you say?

How did they then so quickly determine for P2 all the over "paved over" covers were secure after only destroying three multi-million-dollar cars?
Other than claims here, I haven't seen anything to confirm they were supposed to be bolted down and/or paved over.
The earliest pic post-accident of the cover area doesn't indicate any obvious bolting or shattered pavement that would have covered the cover, IMO.
Seems welding has been an adequate decade plus proven solution.

Updates

Apparently the broadcast announcers thought that was what was done as this was the required safety method of doing this at street tracks like Monaco, etc., They remove the covers and fill them with sand and then pave them closed with asphalt. The downforce "suction" from an F1 car doing over 200 mph apparently is enough to suck a smaller cover up enough to contact the underside or lift it enough for the next car to really hit it.

Also is wasn't a large "manhole" cover but a smaller water valve shutoff cover.

Wall Street Journal has article about this in Sat edition page A3.

Someone really messed up

The ground effects on the cars are the primary method of down force. Air entering under the car goes through a Venturi effect as the space expands towards the rear, creating a tremendous area of low pressure holding the car down/pulling things up.

The frictional effect of a tire tread to “kick up and back” the cover as the front or rear of the “tread patch” of a tire as it goes over the cover would be very high and exceed “vacuum lift” which cannot exceed -14.7 psi. Absolute pressure can only go down to zero.

I will admit that as Hurricane Wilma passed over my house it TWICE vacuum lifted a 36” by 36” by half inch thick plywood hatch into the attic space. Made my go “Zikes, what was that? Winds at the nearby airport gusted to 126 MPH.

Those same winds lifted a very large stainless steel evaporative cooling tower and threw it off the 16 story high roof, hitting on a grass lawn less than 150 feet from where I was in the one story house. If the cooling tower had landed on my roof overhead of where I was - I would be dead.

F1 staff really messed up on that cover, according to the WSJ article. F1 drivers and teams have a real reason to demand changes.

Hypothetically, if the cover was 8" Dia, and a perfect vacuum was present, up to approx 360lbs of uplift could be present, for a metal cover that may weigh 25? pounds.

I question that any "kick up" forces were present by contact with a tire. Now if an item run over had a compressive/rebound response to tire contact, I might consider it, but a nearly solid rigid metal cover meant for decades of heavy traffic is not flexible nor compressible in this case, its geometric design does not lend itself to becoming dislodged by lateral forces. If the tire runs directly over the cover, a cars floor ground effects are much lesser at play at the edges away from, the tunnel. How much drop in barometric pressure exists directly behind a rotating tire at speed is unknown, as is the tire's rubber "stickiness" in the rather cold conditions.

My takeaway so far is the cover was simply not secured, and likely very obvious to first responder track crew in the minutes following the incident, and why they quickly checked the rest of the circuit, and a mistake a multi-billion dollar operation is not quick to admit as it's a huge PR fiasco.

I suspect in the future a program will be implemented that street removeable covers on race circuits will be paint marked after verification they have been properly secured, like the paint marks on critical fasteners on cars/semi's etc.

Actually, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal the race went well and Max Verstappen, the winner, who was so critical at first, said it was a good race and he was looking forward to coming back next year.

I watched the race and thought this might really turn out to be a bust and boring. I've watched just about every F1 race for the past two or more decades and rarely miss one, even attended the first F1 at Indy. So when the lights went out and Verstappen jumped into the lead I thought goodnight the will be another boring, no passing Max runaway and it wasn't. They said the race had the most passing of all of the '23 events this year, which is unusual for current era F1 and even though it was a street course it is the second longest course on the calendar. Don't know how many manhole and water valve covers are on the second longest course but too bad they missed one, Oh I think Max and a few other drivers and team didn't enjoy the pre-race (week) circus and activities and the start and time of the race, practice, and qualifying. Only one thing better would have been to have a Mercedes on the podium. Even better would have been to have American F1 driver Logan Sargeant on the top of the step and the two (American team) Haas cars on each side of him on the podium.

I once saw a New York City garbage truck hit a manhole cover with the snowplow. Flipped it over and it landed upside down on the manhole.