The price of a F1 Grand Prix

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We head to Montreal, host city of the Canadian F1 Grand Prix.

It's the country's largest tourist event, with an estimated 345,000 fans attending in 2023.

And the sport is growing in popularity, thanks in part to the Netflix series, Drive to Survive.

So how valuable is a Grand Prix to a country's economy? And which other cities are trying to get in on the action?

Produced and presented by Megan Lawton

(Image: The start of the Canadian Grand Prix at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Quebec on 9 June 2024. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, bonjour, and welcome to Grand Prix weekend in Montreal, the largest city in Canada's
0:09.4	French-speaking province. You're listening to Business Daily on the BBC World Service.
0:14.8	I love the sport. I love the drivers. I love the strategy. I love the cars. I'm Megan Lawton, and I'm headed down the cobbled streets of the city's old town where there are checkered flags on every corner and hundreds of fans wearing branded caps and t-shirts.
0:30.1	We started to follow F1 since it came out in Netflix a few years ago. Canada's Formula One is the country's largest tourist event. Last year,
0:39.5	345,000 fans attended. I've been to Montreal every year since 2003, except for the COVID
0:46.1	years when it was cancelled. We've been coming together for 10 years. With the hundreds of thousands of
0:52.7	fans comes plenty of spending.
0:55.0	In this program, I want to find out how much.
0:57.9	I think you have to budget around 5K for a trip like this.
1:01.6	Any estimate of how much you spend for a weekend like this?
1:04.1	Oh, I don't want to know that.
1:05.5	Yeah, we don't want to, yeah.
1:07.6	Too much.
1:08.0	They're the easiest customers.
1:10.0	They don't mind spending.
1:11.7	Like, I just had a family that just spent 500 just like that.
1:14.6	Because to host a race weekend, a city will need to pay.
1:18.1	They're spending money in the city, in the local economy.
1:21.2	It's huge for cities,
1:22.5	and that's why they're willing to pay this money to Formula One
1:25.2	for the right to host a race.
1:26.5	Welcome to Montreal. We're moments away from Lights Out for the Canadian Grand Prix.
	...

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