Amid rising temperatures and changing clocks, the return of the Formula 1 Grand Prix marks the beginning of the summer season. The F1 certainly wasn’t shy about making its return, either, as Melbourne’s season-opening 2025 GP saw multiple crashes, safety cars, team debuts, changing weather conditions and a dramatic finish in which Lando Norris narrowly claimed victory over reigning champion Max Verstappen.
Among the paraphernalia of a somewhat chaotic return, Betby was, as always, compiling the data. As the F1 Grand Prix season returns with a bang, as an eventful Australian GP saw bettors back Norris and Mercedes.
Top 10 most backed winners:
Indeed, with regard to the most-backed racers, it was almost a straight split between the top two finishers. Race winner Lando Norris was in fact the most bet-on racer by a hair over Max Verstappen, with the pair accounting for 20.43% and 20.37% of overall bets, respectively. Although many bettors will have been kicking themselves for swinging the way of Norris when the driver entered the pits midway through the race to change rubber, despair will have turned to elation once the rain started to pour, forcing Verstappen into the pits to change his slack tyres and allowing Norris to reclaim a lead.
Elation is indeed the appropriate wording, considering that bets on Norris made up 28.28% of Betby’s race turnover – indicating that those betting on the McLaren driver were betting big. Similar can be said of Mercedes Williams who, despite not being the most heavily backed team, accounted for 12.74% of Betby’s race day turnover – with winning team McLaren trailing behind with 8.65%.
Interestingly, the market seems to have been far off the pace with its wagering on this particular race with Oscar Piastri, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton being the third, fourth and fifth most wagered on drivers in the race – despite placing ninth, eighth and tenth, respectively. As shown above, none of these racers were particularly heavily backed. With Hamilton only making up 2.07% of Betby’s turnover during the race.
Cautious betting being exercised on Hamilton for his Ferrari debut is no surprise and we can, perhaps, put the rest of the market’s incognisant betting down to the fact that it was the first race of the season.
Live vs Prematch:
With regard to the tournament as a whole, pre-match bets unsurprisingly reigned supreme – accounting for 89% of Betby’s traffic, with live bets picking up the remaining 11% of slack. Live turnover, however, was slightly higher at 20%, highlighting that bettors were perhaps getting a little braver with their betting as the race went on.
Elsewhere, the final race also predictably made up the vast majority of both bets (88.17%) and traffic (91.21%) for Betby, with the GP Practice 3 and qualifying trailing far behind.
Race event betting:
Focusing finally on the most popular betting markets, wagering on the race winner was by far the most popular vertical, accounting for 37.5% of bets and 38.98% of turnover. This, paired with markets such as GP race team winner and GP race Norris and Verstappen to finish in the top 3, were all markets that saw a similar percentage ratio between bets and turnover – highlighting that those betting on these markets were fairly confident in their predictions.
As evidenced below, however, there is a clear outlier in the market category – as the Australian GP race special accounted for 12.47% of overall turnover, despite only accounting for 3.75% of overall bets. Therefore, this tells us that a lot of money was wagered overall on this relatively small market – further suggesting that it could be one to watch for F1 enthusiasts moving forward.
Top 10 most popular marakets:
As the season marches on to its next meetup for the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai this weekend, there is no telling how the markets will unfold.
