Races Watched 2025

At the beginning of 2024 I started to log all the races I watched. Now with two years of data I wanted to see what the numbers look like. Spotify Wrapped has a lot to answer for.

I wish I’d started doing this years ago. I’d love to know how the numbers compare to 2008 through to the early 2010s. I started this blog in ’08 and I watched a heck of a lot of races in those years. I used to post weekly reviews of what I was watching at the time, but never collated it.

There are people I follow online who watch more than me, and who should take the title of ‘I Watch Too Much Racing’. Shout out to Matt White, who inspired me to start tracking, as he posts all his races to socials – and got over 750 in ’25!

In a few days I will share the best races I saw in those two years. 2024 & 2025.

[Editors note: Calendars are bubbling away in the background, I’ll focus on those fully after I’ve done these.]

Races

In 2024 (blue) I had a big push in the spring but then felt burned out. It almost felt a chore to keep up and I kept things to a bare minimum, just F1 and IndyCar, with a couple of IMSA races to round out December.

2025 (orange) was the opposite. I never got started until February, then in the spring we had bad news in the family, obviously I placed my attention there rather than watch anything. When I decided to start up again I caught up all the F1 and IndyCar and also picked up my project to watch the 2024 BTCC.

That meant I caught up fast, so by August it became the game to try to beat 2024’s total by December. I made it by just two: 134 to 132

I actually felt better about it as well, not so burned out. I was still sick of F1 by the end of November, even with a brilliant title fight to enjoy.

Hours

Note: I count this by approximating the green flag to chequered flag time. I don’t include practice, qualifying, pre-race or post-race.

The gap of 20 hours in January was never closed down, and by the end of the year it was a gap of 33 hours. 133.4 hours versus 166.7 hours.

How to explain this? Simply the choice of racing. Last year I included sportscar racing. I just couldn’t find the time this year and that shows in the stats.

A lot of 30-minute BTCC and 20-minute support races on the excellent ITV4 coverage, racks up a lot of races in about 4 hours. A single endurance race doesn’t really move the race counter but it can add 12 or 24 hours.

Series

With apologies for those using screen readers, I can’t see an easy way to paste an Excel table here so I’ve used an image, and it’s difficult to express that in alt text.

Races:

F1 dominated with 30 races per year.

One big change in recent times is F1 growing to be all-consuming. We’re now expected to watch 30 races per year including the Sprints. A far cry from the days of 16 Grands Prix when I first started.

This creates a time sink. It sucks away a lot of time, energy and oxygen from other series. It is the reason I can’t keep up with MotoGP, Formula E, WEC or IMSA. I think it is deliberate.

I’ve long been an advocate for quality over quantity. I would prefer 17 or 18 quality Grands Prix, and no sprints, in order to allow other series to breathe. However, the body slam of constant F1 has pushed it to new heights, and that in turn appears to be helping other motorsport rather than hinder. I wonder if I’m a minority here.

BTCC is second. Most of the rest of the list are support races for BTCC. I’d like to thank ITV4 once again for bringing these to us. Amazing coverage. I record the 7-hour show and watch all of them. Many only appear at certain venues in the year, so the next track on the BTCC schedule might include a different slate of supports.

You MUST watch every variant of Minis and MINIs. Find them on YouTube. The best.

IndyCar is my other big series. I’ll always watch IndyCar.

Hours:

This is where you really see the effect of endurance races. I only saw three IMSA races in 2024 (part of Daytona 2024 live and a couple of 2019 races) and this was worth nearly 19 hours. I also managed a 4-race Asian Le Mans season and some of Le Mans.

In 2025 I only watched a short IMSA race, being the 2019 Lime Rock 2hr 40min GT-only race, and one ELMS & LMC weekend.

Backlog & 2026

Long-term followers on Twitter & Bluesky will know about my behemoth of a backlog spreadsheet.

My ambition for 2026 is to get caught up with the BTCC’s 2025 season early, and do my best to stay in touch with this season’s rounds much closer to when they actually happened. I want to get trackside again while having some clue what is going on. I highly recommend going to BTCC, I guarantee you’ll not be bored.

The other reason is BTCC is filling up my Sky DVR and I need the space. I also have a lot of MotoGP highlights too. Hence I want to use the rest of this off-season on as much of those as possible, too.
[Sidebar: I’ve had an offer of Sky UHD. My older box doesn’t support UHD although my TV does. I would need a replacement box, but that means losing all those recordings.]

All of this means my other project got mothballed: Catching up 5 years of IMSA & WEC so that I can join in with GTP & Hypercar. There just hasn’t been time.

That’s the thing about endurance racing: the races are really long.

Having seen every IMSA race since the American Le Mans Series era, and every WEC race since before WEC existed (the ILMC) – let’s go back to the old Le Mans Series circa 2009 – both up until mid-2019, I’m not interested in skipping past those years and joining in from today. I have to complete the set. Even though I know there are some dire times in WEC from 2019 to 2023. I am motivated to see the end of LMP1 & DPi and the start of LMH/LMDh. I am not giving in.

Of my personal favourite series, as of 1st January 2026, these are my next races:

F1: Up to date;
IndyCar: Up to date;
BTCC: 2025 Donington Park National;
MotoGP: 2024 Lusail;
Formula E: 2024 Mexico City;
IMSA WSC: 2019 Road America;
WEC: 2019 Silverstone;
ELMS: 2019 Silverstone;

Never Gonna Happen

If I can’t find time for my favourite series, I’m surely not going to manage the ‘nice to haves’. You could call this the “Never Gonna Happen” list.

GP2/F2: I thought GP2 was great. I stopped about 2012 but I always wanted to go back, carry on from where I left off and run into the F2 era. I don’t even think that’s possible in any legal way. Any idea how I can do this?

IMSA: The one that really bugs me is IMSA Challenge, I still have 5 years under the Conti Tire name, let alone the Michelin Pilot era. Yet I absolutely loved that series back then.

GT3: I feel like I should know what’s going on with all this, particularly the SRO series. In 2023 I watched the 2011 Blancpain GT season and enjoyed it enough to want to catch up some more, it never happened. Blancpain became GTWC Europe, they’ve also expanded to America, Asia, Australia. There’s GT4. And that’s without even talking about DTM, British GT, 24H Series. Is it all worth it? Surely there’s a load of fluff in here?

WTCR: I saw the whole WTCC to the end (yes, including TC1), and the TCR International Series, but when they merged I never touched it. Was that wrong, or right in hindsight? Is the World Tour actually worth bothering with? Nobody ever talks about it, so I assume it isn’t.

NASCAR: I get so frustrated with the deliberate take outs and the whole idea of the playoffs, but it’s an important area of the sport and it’s a complete blind spot for me. I kind of want to go back and explore from the 80s to today, as someone never immersed in it.

WRC: I used to follow it when I could find the free-to-air highlights. Then various Seb’s won everything for years and years and I stopped caring. I have no idea what’s happened for the last decade. I miss it.

For what it’s worth, this is where I got to on the nice-to-haves, a position that hasn’t changed in years. Excluding some live events I dipped into (24h NBR, 12h Bathurst).

GP2/F2: 2013 Sepang;
IMSA Challenge: 2014 Laguna Seca;
IMSA Proto / VP: 2018 Daytona;
SRO IGTC: 2018 Suzuka;
SRO GTWC Europe: 2012 Monza (it was still Blancpain GT back then);
British GT: 2014 Oulton Park;
WTCR / World Tour: 2018 Hungaroring;
24H Series: 2012 Barcelona;