Throughout the recently completed 2023 Formula 1 season, a theme throughout was some fans making claims that Max Verstappen was making the racing boring, due to his dominance.
Verstappen was remarkable on his way to his third consecutive Drivers’ Championship, with him having broken several records with ease.
To name a handful, Verstappen broke the records for most wins in a season, most consecutive wins, most laps led, most points scored and highest victory percentage.
The three-time World Champion won 19 of the 22 completed races, meaning he won 86.4 per cent of the events in 2023, eclipsing Alberto Ascari’s 1952 record of 75 per cent.
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Of his 19 wins, 10 came consecutively, breaking Sebastian Vettel’s 2013 record of nine wins in a row.
Unsurprisingly, his dominance resulted in a huge points haul, the biggest ever seen in the pinnacle of single-seater motorsport.
Verstappen scored 575 points in 2023, a tally which would’ve still won Red Bull the Constructors’ Championship comfortably if Sergio Perez’s points weren’t included.
To cap it all off, the Dutchman led a record-breaking 1,003 laps, more than Charles Leclerc and Sergio Perez have led in their entire careers.
Nobody has been able to take the fight consistently to the 26-year-old, something which has led to the claims that he’s making the racing boring as most of his wins have come by several seconds.
However, the stats prove that despite Verstappen’s dominance, F1 in the United States is bigger than ever.
F1 in the US is certainly still booming since Liberty Media took over in 2018, with the sport having grown almost threefold since then.
Since 2018, the average number of viewers tuning into F1 in the US has grown from 500,000 people to 1.2 million, quashing any claims that Verstappen’s dominance is turning fans away.
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Eight races this season have broken US viewership records, with the Miami Grand Prix having averaged 1.96 million viewers, whilst the Monaco Grand Prix averaged a record-breaking 1.79 million viewers.
It’s not just on TV where figures are improving in the US, as attendances at Miami and the United States Grand Prix also improved in 2023.
Miami saw a 10 per cent increase, whilst the Circuit of the Americas welcomed 440,000 across the Grand Prix last October.