The British Grand Prix at Silverstone has sold out in the shortest time in the race’s history and is now expected to break all previous attendance records. The race organisers cite an unprecedented demand for tickets that reflects a surge in Formula One’s popularity, and not only here. F1 expects all its remaining 20 races this year will also sell out.
All 142,000 tickets for British Grand Prix race day on Sunday 3 July have definitely been sold and the organisers feel demand for the Friday and Saturday of the race weekend is such that tickets for those days, too, could also all be taken up.
This would be the first time in the history of the race, which has been on the F1 calendar every year since 1950, that all three days have sold out and in that case the weekend crowd will surpass the record of 356,000 who attended in 2021.
“We have experienced unprecedented demand for tickets for the 2022 Formula One British Grand Prix,” said Stuart Pringle, Silverstone’s managing director. “We have never reached a position of sellout so early in the year.
“We have increased capacity slightly by adding extra grandstand seats and anticipate our race day crowd to reach 142,000 this year. If sales continue at this pace, we expect to be sold out across all three days.”
Silverstone is not the only circuit enjoying the resurgence of interest. F1 believes that all of the remaining 20 races will be held with capacity crowds, including the races in the Middle East which do not have broad motorsport audiences, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, the latter of which is likely to replace the cancelled Russian GP.
The season finale in Abu Dhabi last year attracted 108.7 million TV viewers globally while the sport reported a cumulative audience for 2021 of 1.55 billion, a 4% increase on the 2020 season.
The most recent round, held in Melbourne, attracted 420,000 fans, Australia’s highest attendance across a weekend sporting event. The race, which took place at 6am UK time, returned one of the broadcaster Sky’s highest viewing figures. It averaged at 1.01 million, making it the most watched morning F1 race on Sky Sports, an increase of 41% on the Australian GP in 2019 and a higher average than the final round of golf’s Masters garnered that evening.
F1 recently announced it would be holding a race in Las Vegas next season and is expected to add Kyalami in South Africa to the calendar in the near future. The US will now host three races in 2023 as the sport expands in the marketplace it has long wanted to crack. F1’s chief executive, Stefano Domenicali, has stated that the interest in hosting races was such that the sport could easily hold up to 30 meetings a season, although the calendar is capped at 24.
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The interest is in part because of the success of the Netflix series Drive To Survive. Equally, however, F1 is also reaping the benefit of the concerted effort the F1 owner, Liberty Media, has made to attract a new, younger audience since taking over the sport in 2017. The sport has enjoyed a huge increase in interest in its digital platforms, into which F1 has poured considerable effort and expense to try to reach a younger and wider demographic. Given they were starting almost from scratch, the figures would always be on an upward curve but the scale and speed has been surprising. There has been exponential growth in social media engagement, with numbers making F1 the fastest growing major sport globally. Across its platforms the sport reached 49.1m followers in 2021.
Motorsportbroadcasting.com reports that F1’s YouTube channel, which shows highlights of races, reflects these efforts and the engagement it is now generating. The site recorded that, five years on from the 2017 Australian GP, for which the highlights had 3.8m views, this year’s race had 7.1m views after one day.
