F1 TV rating highlights

F1 continues to dwarf NASCAR's popularity in all markets around the globe except the USA. Here are some highlights from Sports Business Journal. In just these small 5 countries F1's total viewers surpass NASCAR best ratings. Add up all the other countries around the world and you get the picture.

France
Average share of viewing audience across all three race programs has been in excess of 38 per cent. Despite the decreased audience for Bahrain, the race coverage still provided a 31 per cent audience share.

Spain
Tele5's coverage show increases for all three of the races so far in 2007. Bahrain GP yielded the highest live audience to date with an average of 5.2 million viewers (4.2 million – 2006), a peak of 6.7 million (5.6 million – 2006) which equated to an audience share of 57 per cent.

Germany
Formula One audiences have declined a little from last year because Michael Schumacher retired. RTLÂ¹s F1 related programming accounted for 8 of the dayÂ¹s 10 largest audiences for sport.

England
As viewers begin to recognize the true potential of Lewis Hamilton, audiences for the live coverage of the Malaysian Grand prix leaped 27 per cent from 2006. Although the numbers were down slightly for Bahrain due to the fine weather an audience share of 39 per cent was 8 per cent higher than n 2006.

Italy
The Australian Grand Prix attracted an unprecedented 72 per cent share in live audience. For the Malaysian GP the audience share was 61 per cent equating to 5.8 million viewers, a million more viewers than 2006. For Bahrain 11.1 million viewers watched Ferrari take a second win of the season, this represents a larger audience than for any event in 2006 excluding the season finale in Brazil.