Formula 1 Viewership is Falling Off a Cliff

If you ask any F1 fan why the sports viewership has fallen off a cliff this year, they'd likely point to the new regulations. And while drivers have also publicly criticized motorsport formula for 2027, that's not the real reason.

Formula 1's shift from ESPN to Apple TV has coincided with a steep decline in U.S. household TV reach, according to data provided to USA TODAY Sports by analytics firm Samba. Eight of the nine 2026 races Samba analyzed posted household reach declines, with the flagship Miami and Monaco events falling hardest.

Samba measures reach through content recognition software installed across 14.4 million smart TVs nationwide. Its figures show Miami's household reach down 68% year over year and Monaco down 66%. The season opened on steadier footing — Australia was down 4%, China down 1%, and Japan unchanged — but every race from Miami onward suffered double-digit drops, per Samba's data. The Japanese Grand Prix was the lone race that held flat year over year.

Liberty Media pushed back on the framing that fewer viewers are watching. F1 President and CEO Stefano Domenicali said in a statement that "our partnership with Apple continues yielding positive engagement, with viewership up year-over-year, season-to-date and total hours watched up 13%." Samba's own data supports that engagement claim: average minutes watched per household climbed 127% for the Australian Grand Prix and 113% for Monaco, indicating that households still tuning in are watching more.

The gap between the two metrics points to a smaller, more committed audience. Samba's vice president of measurement science, Alyson Sprague, offered one explanation for the pattern. "One hypothesis our team has for this finding is that F1 fans may have activated an Apple TV free trial to be able to access the F1 race," she said, "but that they didn't find enough value in the trial to continue on as a paid customer." Apple TV currently offers a one-week trial before charging $12.99 a month, though Apple says all practice sessions and select race weekends stream without a subscription.

Distribution context helps explain the drop. ESPN reaches over 60 million households per 2025 Nielsen data, while ABC — which carried Miami, Monaco, and Canada last year — reaches nearly all U.S. television households. Those ABC broadcasts averaged roughly two million viewers or more each, per Nielsen data, while ESPN races such as Japan and Austria drew around one million or fewer, according to Nielsen. Apple TV sat at about 45 million subscriptions in 2024, per The Information. Nielsen's average-audience figures are not directly comparable to Samba's reach metric, but they frame how much broader cable and broadcast distribution remained.

Apple's interest may run beyond individual race numbers. Samba reported that 30% of 2026 F1 viewers had not used Apple TV at all during the second half of 2025, marking an influx of new users for the platform, according to the firm. Apple has been assembling a wider sports slate, carrying every MLS match and a weekly MLB Friday doubleheader. Its F1 agreement runs through the 2030 season.