It’s interesting that in 1961 there were nineteen non-championship F1 races in Europe, plus two more in South Africa. Eight world championship F1 races took place in ‘61, seven in Europe and one in the USA at Watkins Glen, so there were a grand total of twenty-nine F1 races around the world, the vast majority in Europe. Many non-championship races drew huge crowds, most notably Solitude in Germany where 300,000 people gathered in 1962 to watch Dan Gurney score his second F1 win for Porsche in as many weeks (Dan scored Porsche’s only world championship F1 victory in the previous week’s French GP at Rouen). The Modena GP in Italy in 1961 took place on the same day as Monaco yet 50,000 people showed up to watch Giancarlo Baghetti win in a factory
Ferrari while
Stirling Moss was scoring a legendary win over Ferrari’s regular drivers at Monaco. My point here is that if you added up the crowds in Europe in 1961 for the many F1 races and handful of championship sports car races, I guarantee you it would be ten times the number that pay to go to races in Europe this summer.
What does all this mean? That’s a question I cannot answer. All I know is that for many years F1 has been about the worldwide TV audience, not the trackside crowds. All of us understand that TV is the key, but the incipient decline in attendance at some modern F1 races should be cause for concern, should it not?
It can and has been argued that fourteen years ago
Max Mosley wilfully killed Group C sports car racing in order to force all the manufacturers and sponsors to focus on
F1. That strategy has been eminently successful to the point that the manufacturers are now Ecclestone and Mosley’s biggest opponents for control of the business.
