Premiere in the 2024 season: The Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg is the first Formula 1 race track to record fewer spectators than last year
For the first time in the 2024 Formula 1 season, on-site spectator numbers at the race track are down: the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg recorded a small drop in attendance compared to the previous year with 302,000 fans.
In the record year of 2023, more spectators than ever before traveled to the race in Styria: 304,000. Formula 1 also performed slightly better in 2022 than in 2024 with 303,000 fans on site.
With 2,000 fewer spectators, the drop in Spielberg is very small, but it remains a minus – and thus does not fit in at all with the trend of the current racing season with the same or slightly higher spectator numbers at the racetracks.
No concrete figures from Saudi Arabia and Monaco
However: Neither the organizers in Saudi Arabia nor the organizers in Monaco have any concrete figures for 2024. Saudi Arabia has not yet published any information about the number of visitors to its Grand Prix. Monaco, on the other hand, has simply stated its maximum capacity of 200,000 for years.
Lower attendance growth at other races
And elsewhere, the increase was emphatically small: the season opener in Bahrain, for example, saw an increase of 500 on-site fans compared to the previous year and therefore managed 100,000 spectators at the race track. At least these are the official figures from the Bahrain International Circuit.
The biggest jump so far from 2023 to 2024 was the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne: after around 441,600 fans in the previous year, around 452,100 spectators came to the Albert Park Circuit this year, an increase of around 10,000. This currently puts Australia in pole position in the spectator rankings for the 2024 season
Influence of the sprint race unclear
It is unclear to what extent the changed weekend format with additional qualifying and sprint race contributed to this year’s figures in Spielberg. However, there is a comparison with previous years: The Red Bull Ring in Spielberg had already hosted Formula 1 sprints in 2022 and 2023.
