The gargantuan American collector marketplace is only just waking up to Formula 1, riding a fresh wave of popularity on the back of Netflix's Drive to Survive soap opera for men. And while prices on memorabilia are now beginning to move skyward, it's still grossly undervalued next to more traditional American sports.
Just a few weeks ago, we marveled at the profound effect that one auction could have on a mature marketplace when seven of the 20 highest prices in recorded history were paid within a few minutes for helmets from antiquity. The highest ever price for a military helmet TRIPLED to $3.6 million.
It is ironic that we should be writing about helmets again so soon, this time to report that 17 of the 25 highest prices in history were paid during 2023 for Formula One Motorsport helmets ... at eight different auctions.
The military helmet auction showed what happens to an antiquities marketplace when a museum full of beautiful historical artefacts sells up. The F1 helmet scenario suggested something big was happening and the data we assembled on motorsport memorabilia price trends supports that theory.
Why are prices rising?
The sale of collections accrued by seven-time champion Michael Schumacher and 1992 champ Nigel Mansell during 2023 certainly helped boost the quality of the stock available and it made up a large chunk of that 68% churn rate within the top 25, but there is unquestionably a trend towards higher prices across all F1 memorabilia.
Indeed, it's hard not to see it as a marketplace correction, with perhaps more corrections yet to come.
The reason appears simple – after a long history of trying to make Formula One relevant in America, Liberty Media's reality soap opera for men, the Netflix "Drive to Survive" series, looks to have humanized the sport, resonated with the masses and is beginning to capture the attention of the world's biggest and most affluent collector marketplace – America!
The average American is a lot wealthier than the average non-American, there is more stored wealth in America than anywhere else, and American auctions dominate most auction categories.
Memorabilia prices for non-American sports (F1, soccer and cricket have massive fan bases outside America) have always been undervalued in comparison to America's power sports of baseball, basketball and American football, and that price difference has never been more stark than in America's alternative universe for collectors – the sports card industry.
America is unquestionably the home of the sports card industry and the above list of the most expensive sports cards in each sport gives an indication of the relative demand for sports memorabilia cards in America by sport.
It's a cultural thing. 150 years ago, American tobacco manufacturers began introducing the cards to enhance and differentiate their brand of cigarettes, they were cheap to manufacture, fit inside the existing packet and they were quickly found to drive purchase and brand loyalty. That sales gimmick turned into today's $700 million sports trading card industry. Pokemon and all the non-sports cards aren't in that figure.
So we looked at the history of F1 sports card sales, and found all the highest prices occurred one year earlier in 2022.
Formula One trading cards have been around for decades in America, but Topps (which began making baseball cards and now covers myriad variations of trading cards) minted three new F1 series in 2020 and you can see the value they are commanding at auction just four years later. Nine of the top 10 F1 cards ever sold now come from those series and the entire top 10 highest prices all happened in the last 24 months.
Comparing the prices being paid for F1 trading cards to those of helmets race-worn by the champions of the sport offered some insight. Despite the surge in helmet prices, there's still a significant difference in value between trading cards and helmets, and while race-worn helmets have been accumulating since the sport began in 1950, most are now in private collections or were disposed of because they were deemed worthless.
Topps F1 cards are not yet four years old, there are a lots more out there than there are race-worn helmets.
As Netflix's serialized "Drive to Survive" motorsport opera enrols more people – try to stop watching after you have started – it offers reality television quite unlike anything we've seen before, with a particular appeal for men watching the best in the business go about their day-to-day work under immense duress and there's a report card (the time sheets) at the end of every practice session.
Three Grands Prix in America in 2024 can be expected to continue to move the popularity dial too: the Miami Grand Prix (5 May), the United States Grand Prix (20 October in Texas) and the Las Vegas Grand Prix (November 23) will introduce more people to the sport, particularly the Vegas race which will be televised in prime time on ABC.
The 2023 F1 Season saw significantly increased live viewership of F1, with three of the four largest F1 audience ever (Miami GP 1.96 million viewers, Monaco GP 1.79 million viewers and the Canadian GP 1.76 million), with the inaugural 2022 Miami GP average viewership still the record with 2.6 million viewers. Six other Grands Prix set record American viewership figures in 2023 (Saudi Arabia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Singapore and Mexico).
Beyond America, there are another 21 races playing out in the other major countries of the world each year, where "Drive to Survive" will provide a connection that other sports and other entertainment mediums cannot.
Getting audience numbers for "Drive to Survive" is difficult though The Athletic did a deep dive and came up with Formula 1 U.S. TV viewership averages rising from 608,000 in 2020 to 949,000 in 2021 and 1,210,000 in 2022.
the only meaningful insight comes from media research giant Nielsen which aggregates the number of streams in the six days after the release of each new episode. That seemingly means nothing, given the show is effectively delayed from the previous season
America's appetite for memorabilia can be expected to continue to raise prices globally for F1 memorabilia in general, and it will be intriguing to watch whether F1 memorabilia prices rise with F1 trading card prices – particularly as they seem destined to rise too.
You can find the full listing of the top 25 helmets with images and links here.