RATINGS: BIG BRITISH GRAND PRIX
THE BIGGEST F1 TV audience of the year in Australia has tuned in to watch Lewis Hamilton cling on to victory in the 2020 British Formula 1 Grand Prix.
WORDS: Richard Craill IMAGE: Renault F1
113,000 viewers watched the absorbing race on Fox Sports 506, 2,000 more than the first race of the much-delayed 2020 season in Austria a month ago.
It’s also a notable jump compared to the 95,000 who watched the British GP last year on the same channel.
It makes the British race the most viewed of the year to date and arrests a trend of smaller audiences across each of the previous three races.
F1 is now averaging just over 103,000 for the season to date, down slightly from the 106,000 average who tuned in to watch the Sunday night (11pm AEST start time) races last year.
In 2019 several races, including China (in the late afternoon / early evening) and Singapore (essentially run in prime-time here) helped boost F1’s average Fox Sports TV audience by virtue of starting earlier for local audiences.
Regardless of the Subscription TV-only audience and the late-night starts, F1 remains a surprisingly strong performer in the Aussie market; easily the most watched show broadcast beyond 10PM on local TV.
Saturday’s qualifying session drew 80,000 to 506, the second largest qualy audience of the season to date.
As always, these numbers do not include those watching via Kayo Sports or Foxtel Go, with those numbers not published.
MOTO GP
SERIOUS ISSUES with the TV ratings agency, including several IT breeches, delayed the release of seven days worth of TV ratings from last week, including the figures for the second round of MotoGP in Spain.
A bumper audience on Fox Sports and 10Bold watched the season opener at Jerez a week prior; 60,000 on Fox Sports joined by a surprising 129,000 on 10Bold.
65,000 watched the second round on Fox on July 26, while the 10Bold audience shrunk to place it outside the top-20 programs on free-to-air multi channels that day, meaning less than 104,000 viewed it.
Ratings Watch Archive – Click Here
SOURCES: TV Tonight, Mediaweek, TV Black Box.
(NOTE: Numbers are overnight metro (5 capital city) and Foxtel ratings supplied by ratings agency OzTam to media outlets. They do not include any additional reporting, including time shifted content, regional ratings or broader reach, unless released and freely available. They also do not include streaming numbers on Kayo or SuperView, etc).
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.
