TV News: Abu Dhabi GP breaks TV Viewership/TV Rating record, ESPN finishes strong
Bringing one of sports television’s biggest success stories to a close, ESPN ended its final year of televising the Formula 1 World Championship with the all-time single-season viewership record for the championship on U.S. television.
The average race audience of 1.3 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC for the 24-race season was the highest live telecast average in the championship’s history, breaking the record of 1.21 million that was set on ESPN Networks in 2022.
The season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Sunday, Dec. 7, averaged 1.5 million viewers on ESPN (up 50% from 1 million in 2024), peaking at 1.8 million, based on Nielsen Big Data + Panel data, making it the 16th of 24 races this season to set an event viewership record. All but three of the 24 races had year-over-year viewership growth.
The 16 F1 races with event viewership records set in 2025 included Australia, China, Monaco, Spain, Canada, Austria, Great Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, Azerbaijan, USGP, Mexico, Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Miami, Singapore and Brazil were the three races that did not have year-over-year viewership increases.
Over the past eight seasons since F1 returned to ESPN Networks in 2018, viewership increased from an average of 554,000 viewers per race in 2018 to 1.3 million in 2025, an increase of 135 percent. In its final year on NBC, F1 races averaged 538,000 viewers in 2017, with the 2025 season average marking an increase of 142 percent over NBC’s final season.
Average viewership for each season of ESPN’s eight years of Formula 1 coverage:
2018 – 554,000
2019 – 672,000
2020 – 608,000
2021 – 948,000
2022 – 1.21 M
2023 – 1.1 M
2024 – 1.1 M
2025 – 1.3 M
Beyond viewership success, ESPN delivered unprecedented promotional support and editorial coverage of F1 the past eight years, including on-site editions of SportsCenter and other studio coverage at North American races in Miami, Las Vegas and Austin, tune-in promotion during other ESPN programming, and cross-promotional marketing opportunities like the 2024 Texas Takeover that highlighted the Circuit of The Americas and Texas Longhorns football coinciding on the same weekend. The race telecasts were presented commercial-free from the second event of 2018 onward and ESPN added additional coverage in many of the eight years.
The relationship marked the return of Formula 1 to its original U.S. television home – the first race ever aired in the country was on ABC in 1962. F1 races also aired on ESPN from 1984-1997.