THE entertaining and at times controversial Austrian Grand Prix was a big winner for Fox Sports 506 on Saturday night, with the average audience of 107,000 the equal second largest of the year to date.

The race, won by Max Verstappen – but which featured aggressive racing and a spate of five second penalties behind the Dutchman – trailed only the wild Baku race in terms of overall audiences for F1 this year.

The Azerbaijan Race started an hour earlier, however, which always ensures a larger audience.

F1’s first triple header of the season saw audiences build week-on-week with 89,000 watching the French GP and 98,000 the Styrian race last week.

On Sunday, the race was well inside the top-10 most watched programs on Subscription TV and even out-drew the Collingwood v St Kilda footy game (though that match was also shown on Channel 7) on Fox.

On Saturday, qualifying drew 74,000 people to the coverage – again, the largest of the three races contested in the last three weeks.

There’s a two-week break for F1 now prior to the return of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, while this weekend the Repco Supercars Championship fires up in North Queensland for the NTI Townsville 500.

Fox Sports 506 and Channel 7 will both carry the coverage this weekend – we’ll chart the ratings here next Monday as always.

IMAGE: McLaren
SOURCES: 7PR, 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).