F1 driver market 2027: which driver takes his audience with him, in data

Fourteen of twenty two seats are open for 2027.

BoxBoxd

4 min read 12 August 2026

Fourteen of the twenty two seats for 2027 are still open. Every negotiation in that market prices one asset nobody measures, the audience a driver carries out of the door with the audience a team keeps when he leaves. The panel measures both.

Which driver takes his audience with him?

The portability reading: the share of each driver following that supports a team other than his own. High means people follow the person, low means they follow the car.

Oscar Piastri leads at 62.5%, Fernando Alonso reads 56.2, Carlos Sainz 43.5 and Lewis Hamilton 36.2. At the bottom, Max Verstappen reads 28.5 and Charles Leclerc 10.8.

The order surprises both ways. The most portable audience on the grid belongs to a driver whose team is winning, while the least portable belongs to the most famous name in the market. A Piastri transfer takes most of his room with him. A Leclerc transfer leaves nine tenths of it at Ferrari.

Oscar Piastri

62.5%

Fernando Alonso

56.2%

Carlos Sainz

43.5%

Lewis Hamilton

36.2%

Max Verstappen

28.5%

Charles Leclerc

10.8%

And how much of his team he holds

The mirror reading prices the other side of the table: the share of each team audience that names the driver as its favourite, which is what a team loses on the day he signs elsewhere.

Max Verstappen holds 82% of the Red Bull Racing audience, the heaviest dependence measured. Alonso holds 52.4 of Aston Martin, Leclerc 44.9 of Ferrari, Piastri 27.9 of McLaren, Sainz 22.8 of Williams and Hamilton 19.3 of Ferrari.

Read together, the two tables split the market into four kinds of asset. Verstappen is maximum team risk with modest portability. Piastri is maximum portability with modest team risk.

Leclerc is the safest driver to lose and the least useful to sign. Alonso, at his age, remains both portable and load bearing, the rarest profile on the grid.

Max Verstappen

82%

Fernando Alonso

52.4%

Charles Leclerc

44.9%

Oscar Piastri

27.9%

Carlos Sainz

22.8%

Lewis Hamilton

19.3%

What the one measured transfer says about promises

Declared portability is a promise, so the panel checked it against the one big transfer this grid has produced. 93.3% of the transferring driver audience said it would follow. 67.9% measurably did.

A quarter of the people who promise to leave stay with the team, which is the discount rate every declared portability number above should carry into a negotiation.

Even discounted, the spread survives: a 62.5% declared portability discounted by a quarter still carries close to half a following, while a 10.8% portability rounds to nothing whatever the discount. The ranking holds, only the absolute promise softens.

Two prices, not one number

A manager sells what travels. A team buys what stays. Those are two different numbers for the same driver, measured on the same audience. Almost every deal in this market is negotiated with neither of them in the room.

With fourteen seats open, the 2027 market will reprice half the grid. The portability table is the manager side of every one of those files, the retention table is the team side. The transfer discount is the honesty layer between them.

Source: BoxBoxd, the motorsport social network. The Brand Recall Index is measured on the BoxBoxd audience through the 2026 season, where a blurred sponsor logo is shown with no name attached and three questions follow: name the brand, name the team, place the branding on the car.