MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/. Up to 70% of an overall volume of tickets for the Russian Grand Prix of the 2016 FIA Formula One championship in the country’s Black Sea resort city of Sochi had been sold with over as month remaining before the race, a senior racing promoter told TASS on Wednesday.
Sergey Vorobyov, head of race promotion company Sochi AutoDrom, said in an interview with TASS that "we have already sold over 60% of all tickets and about to hit the mark of 70%"
"We are very satisfied with the sales," he said. "We have no doubts that there will be a full-house during the race days as all of 55,000 tickets [available] will be sold out."
Ticket sales for the Russian 2016 Sochi GP were officially launched last December with the price ranging at that time between 1,900 rubles ($28) to 18,800 rubles ($279).
Also, a promotion action titled: "Return to the Russia Grand Prix" was launched on December 4 and until April 15 offering a 10% ticket price discount for spectators of the 2015 FIA Formula One Sochi Grand Prix.
This year Russia is holding its FIA Formula One racing Grand Prix for the first time in spring, namely on April 29-May 1, as compared with the two previous races held in autumn of 2014 and 2015.
In 2014, over 166,000 people, including at least 500 high-ranking guests from Russia and abroad, visited Sochi between October 10 and 12 for Russia’s first-ever Formula One Grand Prix, according to data from organizers.
Live television coverage of the race, provided by Russia’s Rossiya-2 channel, gathered over 3.4 million people across Russia, three times as many compared with the figure of Russian viewers watching other F1 Grand Prix races on average. The winner of Russia’s 2014 Sochi race, Lewis Hamilton, said it was the best F1 racing of the year.
The contract to include Russia in the calendar of F1 racing for the 2014-2020 period was signed in 2010 in Sochi by then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Formula One chief executive Bernie Ecclestone.
In late 2014, Sochi Autodrom was awarded the trophy of Formula One’s best racing track of the year. The Race Promoters' Trophy is a rotating award, engraved with the names of other top F1 tracks dating from 1975.