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Australia holds the record for the best-attended Formula 1 race weekend in the sport’s history. With attendance numbers ever-growing at Albert Park, could the country soon raise the bar even higher?
November 12, 1995. Sunday evening in Adelaide, Australia. The city reverberates to the sound of a Bon Jovi concert, taking place in front of a capacity crowd in 40°C heat, closing out the 1995 Australian Grand Prix weekend.
This was Formula 1’s eleventh and final visit to Adelaide. The sport had been visiting the South Australian capital since 1985. Adelaide loved Formula 1 – and the feeling was mutual. On the sport’s last visit, mechanics emerged unprompted from their garages waving “Thank You Adelaide” flags.
For that past decade, the Adelaide race had always appeared as the final round of the season and the trip Down Under was one of the most anticipated for those working in the sport each year, who looked forward to the relaxed, party atmosphere of the season-closing race weekend.
The local fans turned out in their thousands for the final Adelaide race. The event had always been well attended but the 1995 Australian Grand Prix broke all records for the best-attended F1 race weekend in history. The four-day event was attended by a total of 520,000 fans – numbers which, officially, no other race has come close to beating in the 30 years since the record was set.
210,000 were in attendance on race day alone. It remains the biggest-ever single-day attendance for a sporting event in Australia and is a figure which has been bettered only once in Formula 1, at the first United States Grand Prix to take place on the infield course at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2000, when 250,000 fans were present at the famous brickyard.
Contemporary rumours that Adelaide could return to host a race under the Pacific Grand Prix title amounted to nothing – but passion for motor racing is still strong in the city that was F1’s premier destination in the 1980s and 1990s. The Adelaide Motorsport Festival draws huge crowds when it takes place annually one week before F1’s visit to the new home of the Australian Grand Prix.
Why Did Formula 1 Choose Melbourne?
With fans, teams and drivers all happy with Adelaide’s presence on the Formula 1 calendar, it’s worth wondering why the sport ever left. Well, like the reasoning for many things in Formula 1, it came down to money and politics.
A sporting event is, needless to say, a jewel in a tourism crown. Melbourne had experienced financial troubles in the 1990s, from the collapse of banks to a recession, unemployment and budget deficits. The city had bid for the 1996 Olympic Games, but lost the deal to Atlanta.
Businessman Ron Walker and Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett saw the Australian Grand Prix as the answer to at least some of its problems and inked a lucrative and secret deal in 1992 to bring the race to a new home in Melbourne when the existing contract with Adelaide expired in 1995, with the aim of establishing Melbourne as a leading global sporting destination.
The story goes that the Adelaide promoter was unaware of this deal until one year later. The growing expenses of the event, along with a recent financial crisis of its own, meant that when it was presented with the news, Adelaide was in no fit state to make a counter offer. The race was heading to Melbourne and the news was formally announced in December 1993.
Melbourne’s Controversial Beginnings
On both sides of the story were unhappy locals. The controversial decision for the Australian Grand Prix to move east was met with backlash from those in Adelaide who did not want to lose their race, as well as some in Melbourne who did not particularly fancy the F1 circus descending upon their city each year.
A park is for the people, not for profit. That was the view of environmentalists who had concerns over the sport’s use of Albert Park. In 1994, the community-based protest movement Save Albert Park was founded, speaking out on the destruction of natural habitats, environmental damage from the construction of race-related facilities and noise and air pollution during the event weekend.
The movement would go on to stage rallies in Melbourne, and even block construction work at the track. The early years of protesting saw as many as 700 arrested as 20,000-strong marches made their way through the city.
Despite the detractors, Melbourne would get its first taste of Formula 1 in March 1996. What was the fun, end of season visit to Australia became a much more serious affair, with Melbourne hosting the all-important season-opening event. However, just as Adelaide had suited being the season-ending destination, the new race in Melbourne suited its season-opening slot – one which it would hold for all but two years from 1996 to 2019.
The inaugural 1996 race weekend in Melbourne had a grand total of 401,000 attendees, with 150,000 in attendance on race day itself. Although a disputed figure (more on that later) the latter number remains the best-ever race day figure in Melbourne, while it would be 26 years before the weekend total eclipsed 400,000 again.
Public Transport Strike in 1997
Just one year later, for its second appearance on the calendar in 1997, attendance at Albert Park dropped by over 100,000 for the weekend, down to 289,000. The race weekend was marred for spectators by a public transport strike, when members of Victoria’s Public Transport Union called for a snap strike which ran from Friday to Sunday of race weekend.
The Public Transport Corporation had assisted 70% of the crowd in reaching the circuit in the race’s inaugural year by tram and bus. While efforts were made to counter the strike with 650 private coaches readied to ferry fans to and from the track, the strike action decimated the attendance figures for the weekend. After 101,000 were in the venue for qualifying on Saturday at the 1996 race, the 1997 race saw just 68,000 attend on Saturday. The race day figure dropped by almost 50,000, to 107,000.
A Home Hero Emerges
In 1998, race day attendance stood at 103,000, a figure which was still down on the previous year, despite the public transport system being fully functioning this time around. Attendances for the next few years were not made available, though figures released for 2001 and 2002 showed that race day attendance had bounced back up to just under 130,000.
In 2002, Albert Park’s first home race hero emerged. Driving the unfancied Minardi, Mark Webber made his Formula 1 debut at the track in the 2002 Australian Grand Prix and finished a fine fifth. The unlikely result saw Webber and team boss Paul Stoddart invited onto the podium after the official post-race ceremonies to celebrate their achievement with the partisan crowd – an act for which they’d later receive a £50,000 fine.
From 2004 to 2008, no doubt in part thanks to Webber’s presence on the grid, the race weekend’s overall attendance remained at over 300,000. However, by 2009, race day figures had dropped to a little over 100,000. The race suffered what was then its worst attendance to date in 2009, with a four-day crowd of 286,000. The 2009 race was somewhat of an anomaly. Held in late March, it clashed with the start of the Australian Football League season, while John Brumby – the then Premier of Victoria – cited the economic struggles and rise in unemployment as another contributing factor to the lower attendance.
Attendance figures bounced back in 2010 to 305,000 – the best since 2005 – and remained stable over the next few years, peaking with 323,000 in 2013. Webber departed the grid after the 2013 season, but Australia had more home-grown talent to cheer on in the form of Daniel Ricciardo. The Perth-born ‘Honey Badger’ finished on the podium at the 2014 Australian Grand Prix, only to have his achievement cruelly taken from him thanks to a post-race disqualification.
Despite renewed hopes for Aussie success in the form of Ricciardo, attendance figures began to decline at the start of F1’s V6 hybrid era. An attendance of close to 315,000 in 2014 would be the last time that decade that the weekend figure would eclipse 300,000. Formula 1’s global popularity declined in the mid-2010s and with it, so too did the Australian Grand Prix’s spectator figures. For the first time in its history, race day attendance dropped to under 100,000 in 2016, when the weekend figure was a worst-ever 272,000.
By 2019, the tide was beginning to turn once more. 2019 saw the best weekend attendance at Albert Park in 14 years, with a crowd of 324,000 attending over the four days – but any hope of further growth in 2020 was dashed by the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic. The 2020 Australian Grand Prix weekend began against a backdrop of uncertainty. McLaren withdrew their team from the race after a team member tested positive for the virus. Fans queued at the circuit gates on Friday morning only to be turned away, as the Grand Prix was cancelled just hours before the opening practice session was scheduled to begin. Melbourne’s tenure on the F1 calendar came to a sudden, temporary stop.
Back & Bigger Than Ever
After two years, the Australian Grand Prix eventually returned in 2022. The F1-starved crowd showed up in their thousands on a reconfigured track layout, with expanded spectator areas. F1 was back in Melbourne, bigger than ever. In the time since Australia’s last actual F1 race in 2019, Drive to Survive had captured the imaginations of millions and F1’s popularity was at an all-time high after a title showdown between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton in 2021.
The weekend attendance figure broke Melbourne’s top figure set in 1996, with a weekend crowd of just under 420,000. That was despite a government-imposed limit of 130,000 fans per day, reportedly due to a shortage of catering staff but also attributed to the ongoing pandemic. With those limits gone in 2023, the attendance figure rose higher, to 445,000 and grew again in 2024, to 452,000. Despite that, the race day attendance figure is still somewhat short of 1996’s reported 150,000 record.
With more on-track action from a packed support line-up – featuring the likes of Formula 2, Formula 3 and Supercars – attendance has increased on Thursday and Friday at the track compared to previous years. In 2024, Thursday’s figure was over 65,000, with Friday’s figure a strong 124,000. It was reported that 37% of attendees were first-time visitors to the Australian Grand Prix.
In 2024, the Australian Grand Prix was the second-best attended race of the season, bettered only by the British Grand Prix at Silverstone which attracted 480,000 fans at its four-day event for the second year in succession. For the first time in its history, Friday tickets at Albert Park sold out in 2024, while Saturday had an attendance of close to 131,000 and Sunday surpassed 132,000.
Why The Future Is Bright For Melbourne
Demand has been just as high for Australian Grand Prix tickets in 2025. A “third-party global outage” resulted in ticket sales for the 2025 race via Ticketmaster being delayed by 24 hours. When they eventually became available, the most popular grandstands sold out fast, despite the controversial use of ‘dynamic pricing’ that increased ticket prices substantially according to demand.
These are grandstands which were recently redesigned to help with the increased demand for tickets. Ahead of the 2023 race, grandstand capacity was increased from 39,000 to 44,000 across the circuit’s grandstands.
Capacity has been increased further in 2025, which is set to be another record-breaking year. A new 840-seat grandstand has been constructed at Turn 6, while a lake pontoon and an additional overpass should aid fans in their quest to get around the track as efficiently as possible.
There’s already an eye on 2026, by which time the new Anzac Station will be operating near the venue’s most northerly entrance (Gate 5), which – in theory – should further ease fans’ daily commute to the track and perhaps convince organisers to increase their capacity even further without risking detriment to the trackside experience.
Albert Park has the longest contract with Formula 1 of any venue on the current calendar. Melbourne is signed up as host of the Australian Grand Prix until at least 2037, having signed two contracts in the space of six months in 2022.
In 2023, on his last race weekend as CEO of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, Andrew Westacott said that the lengthy new contract means that Albert Park has time to experiment with its race weekend. The idea of the Australian Grand Prix becoming a night race usually ends up being discussed every few years, while ideas about extending the event into a week-long motorsport festival have also been mooted. There’s also the possibility of extending the race’s entertainment opportunity – an area in which the event perhaps lacks compared to other big races on the calendar. Speaking in 2023, Westacott was certain that the race will innovate as time goes on:
“The preference is in the sunshine [instead of a night race], but what I would also say is, as you evolve, the one thing that Victoria does well is innovate in major events. You’ve got to look at the 15-year horizon now and that’s why the Victorian government saw that this [new race deal] was important to secure – you can actually do things into the future. The great thing is we’ve had a partnership with Formula 1 since 1996 and therefore you can do these things with a very strong relationship. So be open-minded is probably the simple answer.”
Hope is renewed, too, for Australian success in Formula 1 thanks to the arrival of Oscar Piastri. After rising through the junior ranks with Formula 3 and Formula 2 titles in successive years, Piastri made his F1 debut with McLaren in 2023 and is now a legitimate front runner with the reigning Constructors’ Champions. He secured the first two Grand Prix victories of his career in 2024. Further success for the Melbourne native will surely boost ticket sales.
Whatever the future holds for the Australian Grand Prix, Melbourne is here to stay. Should the current momentum continue, it may be only a matter of time before Albert Park’s attendance figure is high enough to challenge that of the 1995 Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide.
Are Australian Grand Prix Attendance Figures Accurate?
Calculating race attendance figures is not an exact science and methodology differs from venue to venue. However, few races’ attendance figures come under as much scrutiny as those at the Australian Grand Prix.
Allegations of inflated figures are not helped by the fact that attendance figures for the Albert Park race have always been estimates, as revealed in 2008. It was also revealed that attendance figures included competitors and staff, as well as free tickets – whether they were used or not. The Save Albert Park group claim that including these numbers inflates the attendance figure by around 15,000 per day of the event.
This fact came under scrutiny again in 2022, when the promoter argued that detailed figures are not disclosed as they are “sensitive from a security and safety perspective”. In September 2023, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation went to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to fight an order to reveal its crowd-counting methodology.
