02/02/2023
NEWS STORY
As his company prepares for its first season in F1 as title sponsor of the Haas team, MoneyGram chief executive, Alex Holmes sees no end to the sport's current boom.
Though some of the stats being handed out are questionable, to put it mildly, clearly the Dallas-based P2P payments and money transfer company believes that Formula One is in the midst of a global boom.
Much of that is down to a combination of Drive to Survive and the pandemic, with TV viewers initially finding the Netflix series a perfect way of whiling away the time during lockdowns and F1 being one of the few sports to manage putting a decent race schedule together in both 2020 and 2021.
While we wait to see if the boom continues, MoneyGram chief executive, Alex Holmes is confident that a peak in popularity is some way off.
It (the sponsorship) is just huge for us in terms of people beginning to associate the MoneyGram brand in a very different way," he tells Reuters.
"It seems like the excitement in the U.S., particularly with Vegas coming, is just going to grow," he adds. "Personally I see the next several years as continued expansion."
According to ESPN, the 2022 F1 season was the most-viewed on U.S. television with an average 1.21 million viewers per race, an increase of 28% on 2021.
Particularly impressive is the claim that the number of female viewers is up 34% and averages 28% of the audience, while more and more young fans are tuning in.
"I have kids of college age and they have friends and those friends have watch parties on Sunday mornings," says MoneyGram's marketing head, Greg Hall. It's not what I was doing in college, it really wasn't there.
"A lot if it is being led by that 18-25 group who are watching, and the parents are starting to watch, and it is really bringing people who maybe weren't race fans and now are becoming race fans.
"Where does it peak? I don't know," he admits. "We've got a multi-year deal and we certainly see this accelerating for the next several years. We're pretty confident in that, we really like the trajectory it's on."