“Interesting to see, that there is a pretty large avid fan base in the Americas. But they would have to be, wouldn’t they? Only 1 or 2 races a year, apart from the Brazillians, there are no local drivers competing and the TV-times are far from main stream.”
I must say that I was pretty surpried that only 12% of the avid fans were Americans. I hoped for more.
But then, thinking a little bit about it, it makes sense. Here in Brazil, F1 popularity hasn’t been the same since Senna, and even though we had Massa and Barrichello fighting for titles recently, it gets completely overshadowed in the media by football. Most Brazilian F1 websites are untrustworthy and they generally make terrible translations from articles on GPUpdate or Autosport, so we are kinda trapped about F1 information here. How would people who don’t speak english be ‘avid fans’? I think they could take the survey (don’t remember if there were different languages to chose from), but probably no one even took notice of it, as I don’t remember it being medioned on the brazilian websites. We don’t get boardcasts of free practices, of post-race press conferences and the TV won’t boardcast F1 until 10 minutes before quali and the race. I don’t know about the spanish-speaking countries here in South America, but since they have almost no history in F1 (except Argentina and Colombia) I can’t picture a better situation.
So, putting these facts together:
- Only one race in America at the time of survey
- Poor local media coverage [at least here in Brazil]
- Almost all races either early in the morning or before dawn [a even worse problem in USA/Canada west coast]
- No F1 history in most Latin American countries
- General lack of interest and coverage in USA
- No American, Canadian, Mexican or Argentinean drivers
- “Avid fans” who don’t speak english probably didn’t know of the survey
It’s not a surprise there is so few ‘avid fans’ here in the Americas
