The 2025 F1 season ended ESPN’s eight-year run as the sport’s American broadcaster, with record viewership in the United States.
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 on Nielsen Big Data and panel data. This was the 16th highest event viewership record out of 24 races in 2025, with 21 of the 24 races seeing year-on-year increases, with only Miami, Singapore and Brazil not recording an increase.
The full-season average of 1.3 meters per race is a new U.S. F1 record, surpassing the previous record of 1.21 meters from the 2022 season and marking a 135% increase in the first of ESPN’s latest seasons.
This was the final season of ESPN’s eight years as a Formula 1 broadcaster in the United States, during which the sport’s viewership grew significantly. The first season on a network to broadcast F1 was on ABC, which aired the first race in America in 1962, and ESPN also held the broadcast rights from 1984 to 1997. In 2018, it drew an average of 554,000 viewers per race, rising to 672,000 the following year.
During the coronavirus-impacted 2020 season, each race averaged 608,000 viewers, but that rose significantly in 2021 to 948,000 as Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen battled for the season-long championship.
ESPN has since averaged more than 1 million viewers per race and has offered commercial-free coverage after the second race, resulting in an average of 1.1 million viewers over the past two years.
Liberty Media took over F1 in early 2017 and has increased its focus on the US market, currently hosting three races in Miami, Austin and Las Vegas. ESPN was granted the rights previously held by NBC the year after the Liberty acquisition, and its viewership in 2025 increased by 142% compared to the final year of the NBC deal.
ESPN aims to retain the rights, but next year’s F1 broadcasts will be replaced by streaming on Apple TV, with Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddie Cue recently saying the platform’s subscriber numbers are “significantly higher” than the previously estimated 45 million.
