Albert Park will host the F1 2025 season opener on March 14-16 before the circus heads to China and Japan.
Last year, Albert Park saw a four-day crowd of 452,055, surpassing the marker laid down in 2023 by almost 7500.
The venue has a far greater capacity though organisers cap attendance to around 130,000 per day to ease pressure on ingress and egress.
Available amenities and access to food and drinks are also a key consideration.
Speaking to Speedcafe in October, Australian GP boss Travis Auld admitted this year’s event would see a slightly higher daily capacity.
“We have a methodology in which we look at all the numbers added up and make sure we’re not going over our capacity,” Tom Mottram, chief events officer for the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, elaborated when speaking with Speedcafe.
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“But we have slightly increased our attendance in 2025.
“We’re always conscious of maintaining that customer experience and not going over on our capacity, we’ve got some key thresholds as to what holds that capacity for us, but we have made some upgrades to the park.
“We’ve added an additional lake pontoon and additional overpass, so we can make sure that people can get around the park as safely but also as efficiently as possible.
“It has allowed us to up our capacity slightly each day.”
One of the changes for 2025 is the construction of an all-new grandstand at Turn 6.
The fast right-hander has become a favourite with drivers since being reprofiled for F1’s 2022 return.
As revealed by Speedcafe, changes for this year have seen the exit kerb reprofiled in an effort to avoid the sort of heavy crashes experienced by George Russell and Alex Albon over the past two years.
Work has also been done realigning the barrier and increasing the run-off area on drivers’ left exiting the turn.
In addition, an 840-seat grandstand has been erected at the corner, which leads onto the long blast down Lakeside Drive, around the back of Albert Park Lake.
“We’re always looking for new locations,” Mottram explained.
“We can build grandstands because there’s such a high demand for them, and we can obviously build these in the park where we reckon there’s great track viewing.
“Turn 6 has always been one we’ve looked at in the past.
“It is an amazing view coming up from [Turn]5 into 6, and with the changes we made to the track in 2021, that has been a really exciting turn.
“It’s a little bit tricky with some trees and stuff there, so we found a unique way to build this grandstand.”
The new grandstand comes as organisers look to the 2026 event.
By then, construction of the ANZAC station will be complete, increasing the convenience for fans entering and exiting the venue from Gate 5 at its northern corner.
“We expect to see a lot more patronage coming through that north-eastern side of the park, with a lot more patronage expected through that top end of the park.”
Tickets to this year’s event were scheduled to go on sale on October 7, but were delayed by a day after Ticketmaster suffered a global outage.
Ticketmaster is 31 percent owned by Liberty Media, which also owns the commercial rights to Formula 1.
Fans attending this year’s event will also be able to see The Living End and Spiderbait as part of the Crown Lakeside Festival, headlined by Fatboy Slim to close out the Australian GP weekend on Sunday night.
Tickets to the 2025 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix sold out in under an hour.
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