RATINGS WATCH: SYDNEY II, HUNGARY F1, MOTOGP
A BUMPER weekend of Motorsport on the box drew decent audiences on Fox Sports for all three of their headline racing events.
WORDS: Richard Craill IMAGE: Mark Horsburgh / Supercars
IF YOU add the three races together, Sydney’s second Supercars event in three weeks drew exactly the same audience as the first.
A cumulative audience of 358,000 watched races 10, 11 and 12 across the weekend; exactly the same that watched the three previous races at the same track.
122,000 watched Race 10 on Saturday night, a respectable number against heady competition from both footy codes in prime-time.
Against Supercars, a bumper 282,000 watched the NRL Sea Eagles v Eels clash while the top-rated AFL game was third on the Subscription TV list: 205,000 checking out the Sydney v Gold Coast game.
The Audience for the Saturday night race was, however, down on the last night race on the calendar; 183,000 watched the Saturday night show from Perth last year – though that was run in a slightly later time slot.
Supercars filled nine of the top-20 shows on Saturday with the return of support categories, in the form of the combined Super2/3 grid, proving popular: 62,000 watching their twilight race on Saturday.
That’s a decent number: It means more people watched Super2 on Saturday than any SuperRugby match (their top-rated game drew 53,000 for the Waratahs v Brumbies clash) and any A-League Soccer match (Perth v Central Coast drew just 9,000 on Fox Sports.. plus 53,000 on the ABC). A win for Super2, then.
On Sunday, 115,000 (Race 11) and 121,000 (Race 12) made the Supercars the 6th and 7th most-watched shows on STV, filling 8 of the top-20 slots on Foxtel.
Super 2 drew an even bigger audience than Saturday, 67,000 watching their second race.
After 8 completed races, the average Foxtel audience for Supercars’ disrupted season is 140,000, down from the record 171,000 across the full 2019 championship.
Channel 10 free-to-air coverage returns for the next round in Darwin.
FORMULA 1
83,000 watched Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes-AMG smoke the field in Hungary during qualifying on Saturday night, the largest qualy audience of the year (78,000 watched qualifying from both Austrian races).
92,000 watched the race itself, that number down 4,000 from the same race last year and 6,000 from the Styrian GP a week earlier.
MOTO GP
60,000 watched MotoGP’s thrilling return from Jerez, over on Fox Sports 505.
It means that on Sunday, 10 of the top-20 shows on STV were motorsport related.
A further 129,000 watched on 10Bold which, remarkably, makes the Spanish race the most watched motorsport event on the TV across the weekend!
We don’t have records for MotoGP, but we’ll keep track of their figures this year to see how they stack up.
As always, these figures don’t include numbers watching via Kayo or Foxtel Go.
Richard Craill (administrator)
Working full time in the motorsport industry since 2004, Richard has established himself within the group of Australia’s core motorsport broadcasters, covering the support card at the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix for Channel 10, the Bathurst 12 Hour for Channel 7 and Porsche Carrera Cup & Touring Car Masters for FOX Sports’ Supercars coverage. Pretends to be a PR guy / Journalist and sometimes photographer to make ends meet when not yelling at a television in a padded room.
