The 2026 Formula 1 season may be going swimmingly for Kimi Antonelli and his Mercedes garage, but things aren’t going so well when it comes to the motorsport’s viewership numbers, according to data analytics firm Samba TV shared with USA TODAY.
F1's U.S. viewership is down in its first season on Apple TV after it moved away from ESPN following the 2025 season.
Most notably, the Miami Grand Prix’s household reach was down 68% this year compared to last year, while the Monaco Grand Prix was down 66%.
Eight of the nine races analyzed this season have experienced household reach declines. The lone outlier was the Japanese Grand Prix, which did not change.
The first three races were comparatively stable — Australia was down 4%, China was down 1% and
Japan was unchanged — while every race since Miami has suffered double-digit drops.
“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,” Samba TV’s vice president of measurement science Alyson Sprague said in a statement to USA TODAY. “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 for new subscribers. After that, the streaming service costs $12.99 a month. Apple also says all practice sessions and select race weekends are available without an Apple TV subscription.
ESPN, meanwhile, operates on the traditional broadcasting format and is included in cable packages. It’s also available on digital services like Fubo and YouTube TV.
Plus, the Miami, Monaco and Canadian Grand Prix last year were broadcast on ESPN’s sister broadcast network ABC. That enabled those races to rack up an average viewership total of roughly two million or more each, per data from Nielsen.
The ESPN broadcasts for grand prix like Japan and Austria in 2025, on the other hand, picked up around one million viewers or less apiece.
It is worth noting that Nielsen’s average-audience figures are not directly comparable to Samba TV’s household-reach metric, but the Nielsen data provides important distribution context.
ESPN reaches over 60 million households, per 2025 data from Nielsen, while ABC reaches almost all U.S. television households. Apple TV numbers are harder to pin down, but they were at around 45 million subscriptions in 2024, per a report by The Information.
Despite the viewership dips, some F1 races in 2026 have experienced boosts in minutes watched. In data shared by Samba TV, the average number of minutes watched per household was up 127% for the Australian Grand Prix, while Monaco was up 113%.
Samba TV also notes that 30% of 2026 F1 viewers hadn’t used Apple TV at all during the second half of 2025 — representing an influx of new viewers for the streamer that may matter more than putting up big numbers for specific events.
The streamer is also using F1 to broaden its stable of sports offerings: as of 2026, Apple TV currently carries every Major League Soccer game, and it streams an MLB doubleheader weekly on Friday nights. Its deal with F1 runs through the 2030 season.
Methodology: USA TODAY compiled this data from Samba TV, which said it gathers viewership data from “its proprietary Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology from tens of millions of opted-in Smart TVs resolved to nationally-representative panels. Samba's ACR is integrated at the chipset level across 24 of the top Smart TVs sold in more than 100 countries globally.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: F1 viewership has plunged since move from ESPN to Apple TV
