This weekend’s Miami Grand Prix set a new Formula One viewership record for its U.S. TV audience.
ESPN reported that an average of 3.1 million viewers tuned in for ABC’s broadcast on Sunday, with a peak of 3.6 million. The previous record average viewership was 2.6 million viewers (and peaked at 2.9 million), which was set during the inaugural Miami GP in 2022. The television ratings then dipped for last year’s race, coming in at 1.96 million.
That’s a 48 percent increase in viewership from 2023 to this year, and a nearly 20 percent jump over the 2022 numbers.
It’s also the rare, possibly first time that F1 has beaten NASCAR in ratings. The Cup Series race at Kansas Speedway was set to start at 3 p.m. ET on Sunday while the Miami GP was slated for a 4 p.m. ET start. But the AdventHealth 400 was rain-delayed for three hours. Kyle Larson ended up winning the race in the series’ closest-finish ever — a 0.001-second gap to Chris Buescher. NASCAR ended up having 2.296 million people watching via FS1, down two percent over last year, according to Sports Business Journal’s Adam Stern.
The surge in F1 viewership was presumably connected to Lando Norris’ 7.6-second win over Max Verstappen, marking the Briton’s first F1 victory ever. At the end of Lap 1, Norris was sixth, but he “knew we had good pace, and I knew was in it for the long game.” The McLaren driver kept his head down and pushed, Verstappen staying within his sight.
“I could still see Max. And when you can see Max, there’s hope,” Norris said. “And it’s not often that you can see Max on track. So I knew the whole time, even when I was back in sixth, that there could be opportunities, whether there was one Safety Car or something went my way.”
And the safety car period did go his way, allowing him to pit and have fresher tires. The gap slowly got bigger between Norris and Verstappen as the laps dwindled, and the Briton continued pushing. He said, “I wanted to go for a fastest lap on the last lap. But I was imagining Andrea (Stella, McLaren’s team principal) on the pit wall, like, ‘No, Lando, please’. So, yeah, he was talking to me, but I just thought then just to take it home and take it easy. But until then, you know, I wanted to pull away, and I didn’t want Max in the picture when I was over the line, and I don’t think he was. So that was job done.”
Norris’s victory came at a critical moment for the sport. While TV viewership is nearly double what it was in 2018 (before the debut of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive”), it dipped 9.1 percent last year compared to 2022. That’s not surprising, considering how one-sided the racing has been of late. Before Miami, Verstappen won 23 of the last 27 races (Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez winning two each). It was expected that the Dutchman would cruise to another win in Miami.
As George Russell said of Norris’s win, “He’s deserving of a race victory probably many, many years ago. And I think for all the drivers in Formula One in this era of dominance from one team and one driver, it’s always great to see somebody get that chance to score a victory.”
The TV viewers appear to agree.
(Lead photo of Max Verstappen, Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Anadolu via Getty Images)
