2024 marks the 75th edition of the FIA Formula One World Championship. We’re well over halfway through this year’s races and as it stands, three-time winner Max Verstappen sits in pole position on the driver’s leaderboard.
For the best part of a century, petrolheads the world over have flocked to globe-spanning grand prix events to watch drivers push their cars — and themselves — to the limits.
Names like Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna and Nigel Mansell are etched into the annals of sporting history.
2019 saw the release of Netflix’s original documentary series Drive to Survive, a fly-on-the-wall look at the ins-and-outs of the previous year’s World Championship. A massive success story for the streaming service, the show has also been posited as being the driving force behind a huge shift in the average age of F1 viewers, dropping from 44 to 32.
Using CintSnap – a way to survey individuals and understand opinions quickly – we conducted a poll with approximately 300 people in Australia, the UK and the US to explore how much of a draw Formula 1 really is.
Eyes on the prize?
The simple answer, based on CintSnap findings anyway, is that it isn’t one. The majority of those polled across each country informed Cint that they do not watch Formula 1 at all.
Our survey showed that Brits are the keenest on the sport, with nearly one in five (19%) of UK respondents tuning into every single Grand Prix of the season. That figure drops to 13% for US respondents and 12% over in Australia.
When it comes to assessing how long our respondents have been interested in the sport, we discovered that US fans are comparatively new to all things Formula 1. While a quarter of UK survey-takers and around a fifth of Australians have been invested in F1 for over a decade, just 8% of respondents in America have been watching for a similar amount of time.
With each of this season’s 24 Grand Prix races featuring televised qualifiers ahead of the main event, we sought to examine just how dedicated regular F1 viewers are when it comes to soaking the entire experience up.
In what should be considered good news for the bosses at Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile — F1’s governing body — Cint discovered high levels of engagement across the board, as the majority of our respondents who do watch the sport tuning into both qualifiers and races.
Oddly, there’s a small cohort of people in Australia (6%), the UK (8%) and the US (12%) who solely watch the qualifying rounds.
Red Bull and Lewis Hamilton take pole position
Each Formula 1 season sees 20 drivers representing 10 teams vying for the title.
Our survey suggests that, unlike other sports, F1 doesn’t necessarily inspire team-based tribalism. Nearly half of Americans (46%) don’t have a favorite team, and the same goes for 37% of Australians and 31% of UK residents polled by Cint.
However, some fans still find themselves rooting for specific teams. In the UK, British-based McClaren is the constructor of choice for 20% of those questioned. Australians tend to root for Red Bull Racing, with 20% of our down under audience identifying themselves as supporters of the energy drink affiliated team. Red Bull also came out on top in the United States, where 14% of respondents citing them as their team of choice.
When it came to picking a favorite driver, our survey turned in similar insights. The majority of F1 viewers are seemingly just in it for the ride: More than half of US respondents (54%) don’t have a favorite driver, with nearly a third of both Australian (32%) and UK (29%) survey-takers being similarly unattached to a specific participant.
For respondents with a stated preference, seven-time title winner Lewis Hamilton, who started his F1 career with McClaren before joining Mercedes in 2013, takes pole position in both the US and the UK. Our Australian audience demonstrated a bit of racing-related national pride, with homegrown McLaren driver Oscar Piastri being the most popular competitor.
Which is the raciest Grand Prix?
With grand prix races taking place everywhere from Montreal to Melbourne, via Monaco, Monza, and a lot of other places that don’t also begin with ‘M’, Formula 1 is a truly global concern.
What, though, do our respondents consider to be the cream of the crop when it comes to watching cars hit the dizzying heights of 200 miles per hour before maneuvering through hair-raisingly tight hairpin turns?
Australians favored their own event, with slightly under half of respondents (46%) stating that the Melbourne race is their favorite of the season. While the majority of American F1 fans polled don’t have a preferred Grand Prix, those that do have a race of choice plumped for the US GP, which is set to take place in Las Vegas in November of this year.
Like their Australian counterparts, UK respondents demonstrated a clear interest in their local race, with just under a fifth of them (19%) selecting the British GP as their favorite race of the season. Interestingly, the Silverstone race captured exactly the same audience share as Monaco’s famed Monte Carlo GP.
Racing towards a greener sport
Now, given that F1 is predominantly concerned with very expensive cars being flown around the world to race on a fortnightly basis, it might be fair to question the sport’s sustainable credentials.
Presumably cognisant of the fact that they needed to change with the times and instill a slightly greener approach to the sport, the FIA instigated a series of initiatives aimed at cutting F1’s combined carbon footprint.
Those plans may have fallen on deaf ears so far if our survey is representative of the wider Formula 1 community. 54% of American respondents were either aware or very unaware of the attempts to make F1 a more environmentally friendly concern going forward, with 56% of the Australian audience also being in the dark about the whole thing.
Brand sponsorship
Readers of a certain age will remember when Formula 1 was synonymous with ads for big tobacco. Thanks to a shift in the FIA’s approach to advertising in 2006 that’s no longer the case.
The range of brand logos plastered all over cars, outfits, and racetracks has diversified in recent years and F1 remains seriously big business. Major partners include everyone from DHL to Rolex, and teams are sponsored by a dizzying array of brands including Hewlett Packard (Ferrari), Myprotein (Williams) and Palm Angels (Haas).
The billions spent by advertisers each year might be paying off — for Cint panelists at least.
Around half of everyone who took part in the survey across each country noted that their perception of a brand had been positively or very positively impacted by their sponsorship involvement with Formula 1. Australia leads the way with 53% of respondents responding favorably to advertising of this kind, a figure that sits at 52% for UK-based F1 fans and 49% of American petrolheads.
Are you the type of person who pays attention to every single practice session and pit stop tyre change? Get your sporting kicks far from the starting line? Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page.
Methodology
A ‘CintSnap’ is a snapshot into the minds of general consumers. The data featured was pulled using the Cint platform and leverages Cint’s programmatic research tech. A census demographic of approximately 300 consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia were surveyed for each question within a three hour window on the 12th September, 2024.
Cint’s research technology helps our customers to post questions and get answers from real people, in real time – and to use these insights to build business strategies, publish research, and accurately measure the impact of advertising efforts. Find out more here.
