3 reasons why the 2023 F1 season might be considered a success

The 2023 F1 season ended the way it began with Max Verstappen winning the race after securing pole position on a Saturday. This was primarily the story of the season as Red Bull built arguably one of the best cars ever in F1 history.

Backed by what is an impeccably impressive operations unit, the team lost just one race in a 22-race calendar and drove the competition into submission. The challenges were few and far for Verstappen all season as he went ahead and broke records just for fun.

While this might be good news for Red Bull and Verstappen, it surely made the F1 product a bit stale. If you know who's going to win the race and secure pole position in the upcoming race weekend then the predictability is surely something that's not desirable.

To add to this, the 2023 F1 season had just far too many races in a season and the fatigue had started to kick in by the end of the season. Having said that, despite all of this, what if we tell you that Stefano Domenicali could view the season that just ended as a success?

In this feature, let's take a look at three reasons why the F1 2023 season could be viewed as a success.

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#1 Increased market penetration in the United States

At the start of the 2023 season, one of the major things that the sport wanted to target was developing an even bigger presence in the United States. For almost a decade, F1 had only one race on the calendar in Austin. In the last few years, there has been this zeal and enthusiasm in the American market towards the sport.

The sport itself has tried to replicate it to an extent. One of the major things when it comes to doing something like this holding successful events in the market you want to establish yourself.

With the Las Vegas GP proving to be a decent success it does appear that the sport is starting to find its footing. Bigger impact in the American market means bigger revenue and from that perspective, F1 hit a home run this season.

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#2 Lewis Hamilton extends his stay in F1

Like it or not, Lewis Hamilton is a massive name in the sport and on a global level as well. If someone ever wants to understand the magnitude of the driver's success then one just needs to look at the fact that the driver has more followers on Instagram than even the official F1 handle.

The Brit driver has a cult following behind him and he has truly broken boundaries and become an icon of the sport. It also cannot be denied that he's getting into his 40s and drivers more often than not do not race at that age.

To add to this, the car is just not good enough to fight for titles or even regular wins. This was precisely why Hamilton's negotiations with Mercedes meandered a tad longer than they ideally would have.

Having said that, when Hamilton announced that he was going to continue beyond 2023, it certainly was a relief. Losing its biggest star during the period of the sport where competition is probably not as high would have been a tough situation to navigate.

Fortunately, F1 won't have to think about that for the next two seasons.

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#3 The sport posts a 24% increase in third-quarter revenue

Finally, when we talk about success, could there be a bigger metric than the revenue numbers themselves? The sport received a lot of heat in the third quarter because the fatigue had started to set in. We were in a situation with the sport where the predictability factor has risen to a major extent.

To make things worse, Max Verstappen was in no mood to slow down and continued his impressive run at the front of the grid. While some naysayers claimed Red Bull's dominance was starting to hurt the sport, others posed the question to Stefano Domenicali as well.

In all of this, when the third quarter report was released and it showed F1's profit in the third quarter jumping 24 percent, it became clear that the sport is in good health and a couple of years of dominance are not going to hurt it too much.