Fans, podium, Mexico City, Mexico, 2021

F1’s YouTube channel crosses four billion total views milestone

RaceFans Round-up

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In the round-up: Videos on F1’s official YouTube channel have reached a total of four billion views

In brief

F1’s YouTube channel reaches 4 billion total views

The official F1 YouTube channel has amassed a total of over four billion views on its videos.

According to data on social media analytics site Social Blade, the official YouTube channel for Formula 1 reached four billion total views yesterday across all videos posted on the platform.

With 6.89 million subscribers, Formula 1 is by far the most popular official motorsport series channel on the video sharing platform, ahead of Moto GP (4.6m subscribers) and dwarfing NASCAR (798,000), the World Rally Championship (738,000), Formula E (688,000), IndyCar (312,000) and the World Endurance Championship (169,000).

The most popular video on F1’s official channel is a countdown of the top ten most dramatic pit lane incidents in the sport, uploaded in January 2019, with 26 million views. A highlights video of December’s championship deciding Abu Dhabi Grand Prix has amassed 16 million total views.

Verstappen returns to endurance simracing after Le Mans crash

Formula 1 world champion Max Verstappen is taking part in his second 24 hour endurance sim race in two weeks by racing in the top split of the iRacing Daytona 24 Hours event.

Verstappen had competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual last weekend for Team Redline, but crashed out of the race from the lead seven hours in after losing control in the Ford Chicane.

Racing in the GTD class in a Porsche with Team Redline once again alongside team mates Gianni Vecchio and Chris Lulham, Verstappen’s team were running in second place but were hit by technical issues that dropped them down the field.

IndyCar driver Romain Grosjean is also competing in a different split, with popular YouTube personality Jimmy Broadbent as one of his team mates for Grosjean’s R8G team.

Montoya wins opening Formula Regional Asia race

Sebastian Montoya won the first round of the Formula Regional Asian F3 championship in Abu Dhabi after the race was blighted by multiple safety cars.

Montoya – son of multiple Indy 500 winner and former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya – won from pole position ahead of Gabriele Mini, with Ferrari academy driver Arthur Leclerc taking third.

Red Bull junior drivers Isack Hadjar and Jak Crawford finished fourth and 11th, respectively, while Mercedes junior driver Paul Aron crashed out after contact with Pepe Marti.

There will be two more races at the Yas Marina circuit today to complete the first of five rounds in the month-long series.

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Comment of the day

With Callum Ilott making his full-season IndyCar debut in 2022, @ckyriazis2006 believes it will be an achievement for the Ferrari academy driver to finish even relatively down the order…

I’ve been watching IndyCar for many years now and I can tell you although there is quite a bit of parity in this series, with this team and despite how talented he is he will have a tough time. I would say if he finishes above 20th in points that would be cause for celebration even if most people would see that as a failure.
@ckyriazis2006

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Brent Foster!

Author information

Will Wood
Will has been a RaceFans contributor since 2012 during which time he has covered F1 test sessions, launch events and interviewed drivers. He mainly...

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30 comments on “F1’s YouTube channel crosses four billion total views milestone”

  1. The Ferrari sim would be pretty cool.

    1. @johnrkh Crazy level of detail, those wing mirrors are actually more useless than real F1 wing mirrors.

    2. I would like it as well, but if you look ahead and see the nose of the car (the rig), and then the halo and the nose (the screen) :(
      (A similar problem, when one has a steering wheel, but not turns off the displaying of the virtual steering wheel in a sim. In worst case they are not sufficiently in sync, thus it is a small annoyment, what someone will likely discard when driving the sim at pace.)
      So not bad, but if VR continues to evolve, then it likely can give more for less money (for more people) soon. For max realism, likely a VR device + a motion rig (what tries to simulate the forces for you, attached to a car like this Ferrari replica, or to a seat in simpler efforts) could do the same. Imo at the level of immersion VR could do even better, than having the aforementioned problems, and the problem that one has to use key binds to look around on a setup with screens.
      Thus nice stuff, but I likely would not buy it, not even as a billionaire, or if I would buy it I would not play the official F1 game on it (but I would use it to drive formula, prototype, touring and historic cars in other sims), so for me it beats its purpose.

      1. Although, then the best option is to buy someting like this, and use it combined with a VR helmet :D

  2. Meanwhile, Baby Shark has been viewed over 10 billion times

  3. The official F1 YouTube channel has amassed a total of over four billion views on its videos.

    Four billion views and they still behave in a very amateurish way. They could make those videos much more inclusive to deaf people in a simple way: turning on the subtitles.

    1. @becken-lima I’d be interested to ask how F1 compares to other major sports when it comes to subtitles.

    2. @becken-lima

      I wonder if auto-generated subtitles will actually work well, with all the car noise.

      1. someone or something
        23rd January 2022, 14:40

        They should, considering how the car noises come from a different channel than the commentary.

        1. Not when the subtitles are generated by Youtube.

  4. As much as Liberty aren’t perfect, it’s worth remembering that it really wasn’t that long ago that any F1 content on the platform just wasn’t available, or swiftly taken down if it was. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I first watched a race highlights package. I try to remember that whenever watching the official F1 (or any F1) channel.

    Bernie’s calculator presumably didn’t ‘do online’.

    1. +1.

  5. All I can say looking at those YouTube subscriber number is “wow WEC have been done dirty”.

    They usually upload their full races within a couple of weeks of them taking place, which is an absolutely brilliant thing to do in my opinion. Some other channels I would recommend is GTWorld, the official channel of SRO series such as GT World Challenege Europe (formerly Blancpain GT Series), Intercontinental GT Challenge and British GT. Their channel doesn’t just upload full races, but livestreams them (in most territories I think, can only speak from the UK myself) which again, is a move that I love, particularly for the Spa 24 Hours. I would also recommend IMSA, who upload most of their full races on YouTube within a couple of weeks, and also have their IMSA.tv platform, which livestreams all the races (and support races) and is free. Their season starts with the excellent Daytona 24 Hours next weekend.

    1. Actually the RoarBeforeThe24 qualifying race is today on imsa.tv with commentary from the ever exceptional @imsaradio/radiolemans crew.

      1. @uneedafinn2win Yep forgot about the Roar. I’ll have to catch it later. But I agree, the IMSA/RLM lot are absolutely superb.

  6. Tut tut racefans! You of all people should know you’re not allowed to call it “Formula Regional Asian F3 championship”. Dare to mutter the words F3 outside of the official FIA International F3 championship and you’ll be in trouble with the big guns! 😉

    1. @eurobrun What can I say? I’m a risktaker…

  7. Prepare for a grumpy comment…

    I’m not keen on the official F1 youtube channel.

    So much of the highlights has simply awful quality audio from the sky commentators and I can’t understand why this is. It sounds really muffled. It just makes it sound like they have had to make it sound bad due to copyright, even though half the time it sounds like it did originally.

    I myself also like to know the information about the video, such as who is describing what happened in the practice highlights for example, and from what I can tell, they never share who it is. Too much of the credits is hidden.

    I also think there should be a separate channel for these “shorts”. Or at least only have the vertical ones for android, and do a “normal” version to show what it looked like in reality… I may be in the minority, but I think vertical video content looks very unprofessional. I could understand if it was literally just someone filming themselves on their phone, but cropping footage that was originally a 16:9 ratio just removes a load of important information. Watching portrait video on TVs or monitors always irritates me. It makes it feel to small, as if you want to then go closer, but then you have to look up and down more often. Part of the reason things like TVs, monitors and movies especially have gone widescreen will be because we have a far wider view than we do vertically. I myself just don’t see the point of vertical video, especially when the original content wasn’t! How hard is it to rotate your phone 90 degrees?

    Rant over, sorry! :D

  8. Wow, so there’s a chance we can see a Schumacher vs. Montoya in F1 again someday. I can’t wait.

    Wow no. 2 – MotoGP’s numbers are amazing!! Incredible how popular that sport is even though motorcycles don’t benefit from general motorsport cross promotion like car racing does (where e.g. popular drivers change racing series or guest appear in unique events like LeMans24 or Indy500 etc).

    Formula 1 — 6.9m |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
    Moto GP —- 4.6m
    ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
    NASCAR – 798,000
    ||||||||
    WRC —- 738,000
    |||||||
    FE ——– 688,000
    |||||||
    IndyCar – 312,000
    |||
    WEC —– 169,000
    ||

    Some thoughtsL
    Formula 1 — 6.9m – should remain stable, although the new 2022 cars may create some additional interest
    Moto GP —- 4.6m – status quo, although Rossi’s retirement may hit the series
    NASCAR – 798,000 – should go up, as the new generation cars for 2022 have created a lot of buzz and interest
    WRC —- 738,000 – status quo, fluctuation of interest connected to the popularity of rallye video games
    FE ——– 688,000 – we’ll see how the exit of huge manufacturers impacts them
    IndyCar – 312,000 – should be on a consistent rise with the fantastic field of young blood and improving content
    WEC —– 169,000 – the new hypercar categories and popularity of online virtual events involving world renowed names should make for a significant boost in popularity

    1. I doubt the F1 numbers will stay stable. They’ve been growing at a pretty fast rate for quite a while. I can remember in 2018 they only had about 1 million subs, and equally a couple of years ago they were at about 4.5 million. With new regs (and the new season – a traditional bump time looking at the recent analytics), I expect they’ll keep rising for quite a while.

      Hope all the others keep increasing though. Especially Indy and WEC, whose YouTube channels are great for finding past races (WEC usually within a couple of weeks, Indy normally has to wait a couple of years before posting them, I assume because of rights agreements. They’re partway through posting 2019 races at the moment).

    2. IndyCar should also get a nice bump from having almost all of its season (14 of 17 races) on free-to-air TV in the States, a big change from previous years.

  9. Australia’s Supercars has 149k. Pretty impressive, considering it may be considered a regional series.

  10. Yet another song I became aware of via an F1 driver.

  11. Well of course the F1 Channels’ views go up when they are so mean when it comes to other channels showing even just a bit of racing. Hell they even made the BBC remove the Senna tribute on Top Gear, SMH.

    1. Maybe they should, you know, pay F1 for those rights then? Top Gear ain’t some small indie channel, it’s by the company that collects TV taxes from everyone in the UK. SMH!!!

      1. By remarkable coincidence, the very episode with the Senna tribute (s15e5) is currently (1200 GMT) playing on Dave (owned by BBCStudios). It is scheduled for 1 hour and the tribute is just over 16 minutes. It’ll be interesting to see how this time will be filled if there is a so called ban….

        1. …..And despite the billing, there was no Senna tribute so the cheque must still be in the post!

  12. I reckon a good portion of those top 10 pitlane incidents views are from my 6 year old! He loves a bit of pitlane drama!

  13. Holy cow wasn’t expecting COTD. I love Ilott too. In a perfect world I think he is probably with Haas last year and this year.

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