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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where we wonder why everyone was making such a big deal about the eclipse yesterday. Max Verstappen eclipsed the F1 grid for about two years now! Har, har, har!
Anyway, I hope everyone is rested for the Chinese Grand Prix on April 21st. My name is Patrick and Madeline Coleman will be here soon. Let’s go.
Verstappen dominates the Japanese GP
Man, we were so excited for the Japanese GP. We’ve been talking about it all week as one of the biggest races on the calendar. There was no way this race wasn’t going to be exciting from the start! Let’s do this!
2024 #Japanese GP 🇯🇵 Timelapse#F1 # Formula 1 pic.twitter.com/nttutgKK98
– F1Visualized (@f1visualized) April 7, 2024
Oh yeah. When you say it like that, the The Japanese GP somehow slipped on a banana peel right out of the gates when Daniel Ricciardo and Alex Albon crash things red flagged for half an hour.
Once things got underway again, Verstappen embarked on a revision of the script. After his surprise retirement in Australia, you knew the Red Bull driver would want to make a statement at Suzuka: it was a fluke, and no, none of you can claim my reign over the sport. He beat the rest of the field by 12 seconds.
“No one will catch Max this year,” said Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. “His driving and his car are simply spectacular.” Athleticism‘s Luke Smith called it “the kind of dominance that quickly silences serious talk of a title fight.”
Note the Japanese GP
I will borrow fly A little from my colleague Jeff Gluck. (I’m having dinner with him next week before the NASCAR race in Texas, so he can give me the cease and desist papers then.)
Was the Japanese GP good or bad? I want to hear from you, my friends. follow this link to evaluate the race and explain your answer. We will come back to the results on Friday!
Side note:
I love this hat.
Let’s talk about TV audiences
With the Chinese Grand Prix returning next weekend, we will complete a month-long F1 tour across Australia, Japan and China. In 2024, F1 will not race in the United States or Europe until May. This in itself is not a problem (a theme for this section, as you will soon discover). It is nevertheless distinguished by a sport with powerful European roots and by a growing interest in the expansion of the American market.
The Australian race started at midnight ET (4 a.m. GMT), last weekend’s race at Suzuka started at 1 a.m. ET (6 a.m. BST), and the Chinese GP will start at 3 a.m. ET (8 a.m. BST). These are not unreasonable times for the European public, but they limit American interest.
I wanted to know if there was a noticeable drop in viewership, so I looked at the ESPN/ABC TV ratings for the first four F1 races dating back to 2019. (I didn’t count the 2020 season, which (was delayed until July due to the pandemic.) The Japanese GP ratings weren’t in when I wrote this, but I’d be surprised if they were higher than Suzuka’s usual ratings (around 750,000 ).
US F1 TV ratings (first four races)
Season | Race 1 | Race 2 | Race 3 | Race 4 |
---|---|---|---|---|
2019 |
659,000 (AUD) |
711,000 (BAH) |
260,000 (CHN) |
539,000 (BKU) |
2021 |
879,000 (BAH) |
906,000 (IMO) |
902,000 (POR) |
857,000 (SPN) |
2022 |
1,353,000 (BAH) |
1,445,000 (OR) |
568,000 (OFF) |
1,003,000 (IMO) |
2023 |
1,318,000 (BAH) |
1,523,000 (OR) |
556,000 (OFF) |
958,000 (BKU) |
2024 |
1,120,000 (BAH) |
920,000 (OR) |
541,000 (AUD) |
Three takeaways here:
- Yes, the accessible time slots are important.
- Even during the 2022 viewership rebound, there was a significant decline from Saudi Arabia (which started at 1 p.m. ET) to Australia (1 a.m. ET).
- Audience for the Australian GP is fairly consistentwith between 400,000 and 500,000 viewers each year.
- In these five seasons, F1 averaged 1.101 million American viewers in the second race and only 565,400 viewers in the third race. There was no big drop in 2021 when they raced at Imola in round two and Portugal in round three.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s just one audience; the American public is arguably the freshest in F1. Long-time European fans have a good chance of seeing these races live. (There are also plenty of ways to not watch live in 2024.)
This becomes a problem in one sense: Let’s say Red Bull and Verstappen continue to dominate and the sport continues to slide towards competitive monotony. At some point, it may be up to F1 to maintain consistent viewership in the US and Europe for every month on the calendar. A possible solution, if you’re looking for one: In 2022, the sport returned to Europe after the Australian race, and audiences recovered. In 2019, they sandwiched China between Bahrain and Azerbaijan. Creative scheduling could create buffers for harder-to-watch races.
But then, traveling in F1 is complicated, expensive and time-consuming. I don’t blame F1 for holding these three regional races in the same month, and I don’t envy the planners, who have an impossible list of priorities to sort through. Is the trip sustainable? Effective? Taxation? Are there enough free weeks? Are the host cities satisfied? Is the TV audience maximized? Do F1 races conflict with other track events?
It’s almost impossible to create a 24-race global F1 calendar and tick every box. Usually one item loses. In this case, regionalization and sustainability have exceeded favorable start-up times in the American and European markets. I think F1 is very good with that, even if my body is still recovering. (Won’t F1 think of me!?).
GO FURTHER
Regionalization, Saturday races and more GPs than ever: how F1 made its 2024 calendar
I came across a few small numbers that didn’t quite fit into the section above. I didn’t study statistics four times at university to waste data! (Look, I was too busy working for the student newspaper and writing a story about alpacas running a food stand.) (Yes, I did that.) (No, I didn’t try to publish it.) (Again.)
There have been rumors among fans that the US viewership is down year over year. And that’s true. Each of the first three runs of 2024 has been lower than its 2023 or 2022 versions. But “down” doesn’t necessarily mean “in freefall.”
Okay, the Saudi GP could be in free fall. But overall, the ratings could return to the peak that ESPN saw before the legendary 2021 season-ending championship fight between Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen. We’ll monitor this as the season progresses, as three races is hardly a substantial sample size for 2024.
Anyway, let’s leave it to Madeline Coleman in the paddock.
In the paddock with Madeline Coleman
“I feel a lot more comfortable, a lot happier and the confidence is slowly coming back.”
Sergio Perez struggled last season as qualifying became a weakness. After taking pole position at Miami last May, he only earned a front-row qualifying position at this year’s Japanese Grand Prix, when he qualified P2 and started alongside of his teammate Verstappen.
“Everything was on a margin – it was so easy to lose a tenth or two (and) push a little too much in some corners,” Pérez said on Saturday. “Everything, the amount of energy we put into the tires here is quite high, so it was quite difficult to put in the perfect lap.”
Only 0.066 seconds separated the Red Bull drivers during Q3 and next Sunday, the Red Bulls obtained their third double of the season. This stands in stark contrast to the end of the 2023 season, when Verstappen bagged victory after victory (except in Singapore) and Pérez secured just two podiums in the 10 races after the summer break. He seems more confident on the trackperforming daring overtakes on the Mercedes drivers inside the 130R, a rather fast corner, on different laps.
Fastest part of the circuit?
Yeah, that’ll do the trick – sublime stuff from Checo! 👏#F1 #Japanese GP pic.twitter.com/9dpF0VXEA1
– Formula 1 (@F1) April 7, 2024
This is a contract year for Pérez, and last year there were questions about the status of his seat. When team principal Christian Horner was asked what the Mexican driver should do, Horner kept it simple after Sunday’s race: “He just needs to keep doing what he’s doing.”
Driver market expected to be hot and seems to have started relatively early this season. As Horner said: “Everyone seems to be rushing, and we’re only four races into the year. We’re not in a big hurry, and obviously there’s a lot of interest in our cars, as you would expect, but Checo has priority, and it will take a few more races before we start thinking about what’s next. year.”
Here’s a fun story you may have missed during the Japanese GP weekend. Did you know that Pérez and Horner made a bet… and that Bernie Ecclestone profited from it?
“I had a bet with him because his best performance in qualifying was 4th place here. I had a bet with him to put him first,” Horner said on Sunday. “And somehow, after he won the bet, he told me that he owed Bernie Ecclestone exactly the same amount of money, so he passed the bet on to Bernie, who was the beneficiary of the first row of Checo. So dear old Bernie continues to make money without even being there.
GO FURTHER
In F1’s toughest place, Sergio Pérez finds purpose off the grid
Outside of points
Our takeaways from the Japanese GP are here. Quite a start to the season for Yuki Tsunoda, eh? I didn’t expect him to outplay Ricciardo so completely so early.
Luke has a good article this morning on the interesting dynamic between Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz at Ferrari so far in 2024. Namely, the guy they keep in 2025 (Leclerc) is outmatched by the guy they say goodbye to (Sainz).
Main images of Sergio Pérez and Carlos Sainz: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, Clive Rose – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images