Formula 1 continues to hit new viewership marks in its final days on linear TV.
Last Saturday’s Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix averaged a 0.7 rating and 1.52 million viewers on ESPN, marking easily the largest audience for the three-year-old event and a 70 percent increase from last year (905K). This year’s start time was just before 11 PM ET, two full hours earlier than a 1 AM start the prior two years.
While Nielsen methodological changes are always a factor in discussing viewership — specifically, the company’s February expansion of out-of-home viewing and September shift to “Big Data + Panel” methodology — the earlier start would seem to be the biggest factor behind the increase. While last year’s race peaked in the first quarter-hour at 1 AM ET, Max Verstappen’s win this year peaked at 1.8 million at 11:45 PM, nearly a full hour into the race.
Viewership increased despite the race having a much weaker college football lead-in than last year. The preceding Pittsburgh-Georgia Tech game averaged just over two million viewers, compared to 3.7 million for a four-overtime Texas A&M-Auburn game last year. It retained three-quarters of its lead-in, up from one-quarter last year.
Notably, the Las Vegas race averaged about the same number of viewers as the traditional United States Grand Prix, which aired on ABC in a Sunday afternoon window opposite the NFL (1.54M).
Las Vegas was the third-to-last stop on the F1 circuit this season, thus making it the third-to-last race on linear television for the foreseeable future. F1 begins a five-year media rights deal with Apple TV next season, a streamer that thus far has yet to report viewership figures for any of its sports properties.
The December 7 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix will mark the end of ESPN’s eight seasons carrying F1 races, a period that has coincided with any number of viewership milestones, particularly since COVID (making F1 one of the only sports properties faring better after COVID than before).
Fourteen of 22 races this season have set a new viewership high, and the season average of 1.3 million is on pace to surpass the record of 1.21 million set in 2022 (with the standard caveats regarding Nielsen out-of-home viewing and “Big Data + Panel,” which generally give all figures a built-in advantage over past years).
