Toto Wolff says that data provided by Liberty Media doesn’t support the stance of ‘Mercedes winning multiple F1 titles is turning-off fans’.
Dominance can be repetitive, and therefore boring. As it happens, ‘dominant’ is also a word that perfectly describes Mercedes performance over the past six years of the turbo-hybrid era, in which they’ve won six consecutive world championships – in both categories.
And so, many fans have complained about the dominance of Mercedes, primarily saying that it’s bad for the sport itself. However, team principal Wolff has defended his team’s case, saying that their success has in no way hurt the growth of F1.
To support this, Wolff used F1 data from 2019 – which showed growth in all categories, particularly social media. The Austrian also pointed out that – despite the one-sided championship – 2019 was an interesting season, with unpredictable races for the most part.
“The data speaks a different language,” said Wolff. “We were presented the 2019 data by Liberty Media and you could see that our audience has grown everywhere. You would imagine that pay TV is something that is – should be – quietly shrinking.
“It’s not for F1. We are one of the few sports that is growing the audience, whilst moving countries behind the pay wall. And, the UK is a great example. When we were with BBC and Channel 4, the absolute audience was weaker than we have today but Sky is doing a great deal, and providing lots of content and this is growing.
“We look back at the year 2019 with almost two billion viewers, 490 million unique viewers, almost 90 million views over a weekend and an average of 20 billion live viewers for the Grand Prix. These are huge numbers, compared to any other sport out there that is really a stand-out, so in terms of global attraction for the sport, it’s there.
“We are the fastest growing sport on social media, even compared to all the American leagues. You can see that we are on a good track. The reason behind it is I think Liberty is doing a good job to social media which wasn’t the case before, and I think we had a great competition.
“With Mercedes winning a sixth championship, you can say ‘does this make people turn off’ but there was still variability and there was still unpredictability. You wouldn’t know before a weekend if a Ferrari was on pole position, a Red Bull was on pole position, whether Max Verstappen would win.
“The battle between the generations is something that has been a great attraction, Vettel against Leclerc, Verstappen against Hamilton, it’s something that attracts the audiences, and for me the best news is, we are growing our fanbase and our audience with the younger generations, and I think overall we’re on a really good path,” summed up Wolff.
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The story was edited by Darshan Chokhani