British GP at Silverstone already a sell-out amid surging demand for F1 tickets

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 this year. The sales reflect a growing surge in the popularity of Formula One, with race organisers at Silverstone citing an unprecedented demand for tickets, while F1 expect all of its remaining 20 races this year will also sell out.

All 142,000 tickets for race day at the British Grand Prix on Sunday July 3rd have been sold, which will be a new record attendance. Organisers are expectant that demand for the Friday and Saturday of the race weekend is such that both days 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, all three days will have sold out. If it does 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 sell out 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.”

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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 which is likely to replace the cancelled Russian GP.

Last season’s finale in Abu Dhabi attracted 108.7m TV viewers globally while the sport reported a cumulative audience for 2021 of 1.55bn, a 4 per cent increase on the 2020 season.

The last round 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 1.01m, making it the most watched morning F1 race on Sky Sports, an increase of 41 per cent 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 currently capped at 24.

The interest is in part due to the success of the Netflix series Drive To Survive. Equally however, F1 is also reaping the benefit of the concerted effort owners Liberty Media have 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 and 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 nonetheless 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 the highlights had 3.8m views, while this year’s race had 7.1m views after just one day.

– Guardian