When I saw the US Grand Prix pull 1.5 million viewers on ABC, my first thought was simple: it shows momentum.
The numbers are still behind NASCAR. But that’s the point everyone misses.
F1 isn’t competing with NASCAR. It never was.
The Audience That’s Been Waiting Since 2008
There’s a technically-oriented audience in America that’s been orphaned since CART imploded. These fans cared about engineering, road courses, and international competition.
NASCAR couldn’t serve them. IndyCar tried but never captured the global scale.
F1 didn’t convert NASCAR fans. It found the people who were already interested in something different.
The demographics prove it. F1 fans tend to be more educated, have higher net worth, and are genuinely interested in international sports. They’re drawn to the technology as much as the racing itself.
Ten years ago, F1 viewership was dwarfed by NASCAR. By 2022, the Miami Grand Prix matched NASCAR’s Darlington race at 2.6 million viewers each. That convergence tells you F1 captured an audience that was always there.
Liberty Media Understood The Assignment
When Liberty Media bought F1 in 2017, they spent three months on audience research before launching anything. That’s the opposite of how traditional sports operate.
They saw where sports consumption was heading. The NFL had proven that year-round content creates value beyond game day. F1 had all the ingredients for compelling storytelling but hadn’t used them.
The results speak for themselves. Average viewership doubled from 554,000 in 2018 to 1.1 million in 2024.
Everyone points to Drive to Survive as the breakthrough. But that’s just one piece of a bigger content strategy.
F1TV offers historical races, technical deep dives, and driver segments. They’re creating content that lets new fans understand what longtime fans have been talking about for decades. That shared language between generations of fans is powerful.
The sport has colorful history. The personalities are larger than life. The stories are stranger than fiction.
Take the Oscar Piastri contract saga from 2022. Alpine announced they’d signed him. Piastri responded on social media saying that wasn’t true. Then revealed he’d signed with McLaren instead. Nobody saw it coming.
You couldn’t write that and have it be believable. But it happened in real time on Twitter.
The Saturation Question
I think there are too many Grand Prix races. Just like NASCAR, too many events dilutes the value of each one and creates fatigue.
But F1’s supplemental content strategy is strong enough to mask that problem. The social media presence, video content, and longer-form storytelling keep fans engaged between races.
F1’s Instagram has 36.9 million followers compared to NASCAR’s 4 million. That’s a 9x advantage on the platform that matters most to younger audiences.
The US market has room to grow. But fragmentation means there’s a ceiling coming. Busy people have limited time and attention.
The objective is creating sufficient content without overwhelming the audience. F1 seems to understand that balance better than traditional American sports that are everywhere all the time.
What This Means For International Sports
If I were advising another international sport trying to break into America, the lesson is clear: tell the stories.
Reveal the personalities. Show what makes your sport compelling beyond the competition itself.
That’s how humans communicate information at a basic level. Stories deepen understanding of events in ways statistics never can.
F1 is making it in America. The trend is positive and there’s room to grow.
But the bigger story is about content strategy in a fragmented media environment. Liberty Media saw that sports consumption was changing and positioned F1 to capture an underserved audience.
The 1.5 million viewers and consistent records throughout the season prove that international properties can compete for American attention when they understand who they’re actually serving.
F1 didn’t chase NASCAR fans. They found their own audience and gave them what they’d been waiting for since CART collapsed.
Sometimes the obvious move is the wrong one.
