TV News: ESPN Formula 1 Viewership Pacing Ahead of 2023

With 10 races remaining in the championship’s largest schedule ever, Formula 1 returns to racing this weekend after its annual summer break with ESPN’s race viewership riding positive momentum and pacing ahead of last year’s full season average.

ESPN and ESPN+ will have live coverage of the Formula 1 Heineken Dutch Grand Prix on Sunday, August 25, with the Grand Prix Sunday pre-race show at 7:30 a.m. ET and the race telecast at 8:55 a.m. ESPN platforms will also have live coverage of all three practice sessions and qualifying as well as other event-related programming and ESPN Deportes will have live coverage in Spanish.

After defending World Champion Max Verstappen started the season with four wins in the first five races, competition took a decided upswing. The last nine races leading into the summer break produced two wins for F1 legend Lewis Hamilton, who had not won since 2021; a first-time winner in Oscar Piastri; George Russell’s first win since 2022 and Lando Norris scoring a surprise victory in Miami. Popular Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc won his home race in Monaco and took a winning dive into the ocean.

The increased competition helped lead to increased viewership for ESPN’s F1 race telecasts, with six of eight races in the stretch with comparable events in 2023 seeing year-over-year viewership gains and five event viewership records set.

After the first 14 races of the season, live F1 race telecasts are averaging 1.2 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, an increase over last year’s full-season average of 1.1 million. The 2023 season was the second most-viewed ever on U.S. television, following the record average of 1.21 million set in 2022.

ESPN’s viewership this season has steadily grown since the first five races of the season, which were affected by schedule changes. The first two races (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia) were on Saturday mornings rather than the usual Sunday, and the next three (Australia, Japan, China) were held in overnight hours. The Japan and China races were not held early in the season last year.

Among superlatives so far this season:

• The Miami Grand Prix in May was the most-viewed live F1 race ever on U.S. television with an average audience of 3.1 million for the race portion of the ABC telecast.
• The Monaco Grand Prix in May on ABC set an event record with an average of 1.965 million viewers.
• The Canadian Grand Prix in June on ABC set an event record with an average of 1.8 million viewers.
• The British Grand Prix in June set an event record with 1.3 million average viewers, also the largest audience ever for a live F1 race on ESPN2.
• Five consecutive races had year-over-year viewership gains: Japan, Miami, Monaco, Canada and Spain. (China and Imola were not run in 2023). The audience for the Austrian Grand Prix was essentially even with 2023 and the Belgian Grand Prix audience was slightly down.

ESPN’s popular commercial-free presentation of F1 races will continue through the remaining 10 events, with telecast presenting sponsorship by Mercedes-Benz. Seven of the 10 races will be simulcast on ESPN+ with the two additional supplemental viewing options of the Onboard Cameras Channel and the Driver Tracker Channel.

As was the case earlier this year for the Miami race, SportsCenter and other ESPN news platforms will again have expanded, on-site coverage from the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin and Las Vegas Grand Prix, the two remaining U.S. races on the F1 calendar.

F1 returned to its original U.S. television home in 2018 – the first race ever aired in the country was on ABC in 1962. F1 races also aired on ESPN from 1984-1997.

Formula 1 Heineken Dutch Grand Prix on ESPN Platforms