Almost 10 years ago, Autosport asked: “Is Formula 1 a rip off?” We crunched the numbers on ticket prices, subscriptions in the early days of the pay TV takeover, team merchandise, travel and more – everything we thought you needed to be an F1 fan in 2015.
Those were the days before Liberty Media took over as the championship’s commercial rights holder. Since it did so, the company has massively changed the way F1 is promoted and consumed.
Here we present a fresh assessment for 2024.
Given Autosport’s typical audience, we have kept things UK-focused for simplicity (with a few exceptions) and dropped much of the previous focus on travel. After all, some are willing to pay much more than others to attend races – in the UK or around the world – while even getting to events has changed, with an increased focus on park-and-ride schemes alongside existing public transport infrastructures. City-based races are massively up, too.
We’ve kept plenty the same, however, including assessing the cost of and ways to watch F1 on TV, as well as how much you’ll pay for team kit these days. There’s also a new assessment of which races offer best bang for your buck from a sporting perspective, plus a look into the new deals Liberty has made to promote F1 since 2017. Here’s what we discovered.
Following F1 at home
F1 has a huge and growing global audience based on TV viewing figures – but it all comes at a cost
Photo by: Mark Sutton
Outside the United States and Italy, F1 fans have just one chance to watch the action live in their home nations every year. This, and motorsport’s fast and complex nature, means it remains among the most TV-focused sports.
In data provided to Autosport by FOM (Formula One Management), it is claimed that F1’s global TV audience average for each race is now 58.9million people. That’s up from a 48.2million average in 2018, when FOM fully started to track its audience data under Liberty ownership.
In the UK since 2012, Sky Sports has held the rights to show every F1 race live. Since our last look at such things, Channel 4 now shows just one race live on terrestrial TV each year, compared to the BBC showing 10 in 2015.
Because of Sky’s exclusivity arrangement, this in itself significantly sells UK TV viewers short on what F1 offers to viewers in other territories
Compared to 2015, the cost of the packages required to watch F1 on Sky has increased by £72 per year to £636 –…
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