JULY 31, 2002

TV figures sliding in Italy

One would think that success for Ferrari would have the Italians glued to their TV screens but according to the latest figures published by the Italian TV station RAI, which owns the rights for free "terrestrial" coverage of F1 in Italy, even the Italians are switching off rather more than they used to do. The number of people watching the first 11 races of the year averaged about 10.7m. This is pretty impressive given than Britain can only raise 3.5m viewers for each race but, significantly, it is around 7.5% down on the figures of last year.

In part this is due to the consistent winning achieved this year by Ferrari but it may also be due to the fact that in recent years Ferrari has been so successful that there is no longer the hunger that existed when Ferrari had won nothing for nearly 20 years.