The 2025 F1 season ended ESPN’s eight-year run as the game’s American broadcaster, with document viewership in the USA.
The season finale, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, a three-way title decider between Lando Norris, Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri, averaged 1.5 million viewers and peaked at 1.8 million viewers on ESPN, based mostly on Nielsen Massive Information and panel information. This was the sixteenth highest occasion viewership document out of 24 races in 2025, with 21 of the 24 races seeing year-on-year will increase, with solely Miami, Singapore and Brazil not recording a rise.
The total-season common of 1.3 meters per race is a brand new U.S. F1 document, surpassing the earlier document of 1.21 meters from the 2022 season and marking a 135% improve within the first of ESPN’s newest seasons.
This was the ultimate season of ESPN’s eight years as a Formulation 1 broadcaster in the USA, throughout which the game’s viewership grew considerably. The primary season on a community to broadcast F1 was on ABC, which aired the primary race in America in 1962, and ESPN additionally held the printed rights from 1984 to 1997. It drew a mean of 554,000 viewers per race in 2018, rising to 672,000 the next yr.
In the course of the coronavirus-impacted 2020 season, every race averaged 608,000 viewers, however that rose considerably in 2021 to 948,000 as Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen battled for the season-long championship.
ESPN has since averaged greater than 1 million viewers per race and has supplied commercial-free protection after the second race, leading to a mean of 1.1 million viewers over the previous two years.
Liberty Media took over F1 in early 2017 and has elevated its give attention to the US market, presently internet hosting three races in Miami, Austin and Las Vegas. ESPN was granted the rights beforehand held by NBC the yr after the Liberty acquisition, and its viewership in 2025 elevated by 142% in comparison with the ultimate yr of the NBC deal.
ESPN goals to retain the rights, however subsequent yr’s F1 broadcasts shall be changed by streaming on Apple TV, with Apple’s senior vice chairman of companies Eddie Cue just lately saying the platform’s subscriber numbers are “considerably larger” than the beforehand estimated 45 million.
