After a frantic – and quite scary at times – Belgian Grand Prix weekend, the Formula 1 roller-coaster moves onto Italy for the Italian Grand Prix. If you were on Twitter over the weekend, you would have probably noticed one particular drivers’ tweets appear, and then disappear. Well, that has helped that driver jump over 1 million followers, in a week where a lot of records for this particular blog series went tumbling down.

Drivers – The Top 10
01 – 1,103,800 – Jenson Button (McLaren)
02 – 1,036,876 – Fernando Alonso (Ferrari)
03 – 1,028,627 – Lewis Hamilton (McLaren)
04 – 477,923 – Bruno Senna (Williams)
05 – 424,236 – Mark Webber (Red Bull)
06 – 257,627 – Sergio Perez (Sauber)
07 – 254,819 – Pastor Maldonaldo (Williams)
08 – 191,254 – Nico Rosberg (Mercedes)
09 – 172,677 – Heikki Kovalainen (Caterham)
10 – 169,882 – Pedro de la Rosa (HRT)

Drivers – Biggest Increases
01 – 50,110 – Fernando Alonso
02 – 45,223 – Lewis Hamilton
03 – 21,180 – Jenson Button
04 – 7,620 – Mark Webber
05 – 7,298 – Felipe Massa

Drivers – Smallest Increases
01 – 712 – Charles Pic
02 – 936 – Jean-Eric Vergne
03 – 1,011 – Timo Glock
04 – 1,694 – Daniel Ricciardo
05 – 1,894 – Kamui Kobayashi

Last week I predicted Fernando Alonso would jump to over one million followers. That has happened. What I didn’t predict is that Lewis Hamilton would join him. The reason I didn’t predict that is because of this:

The graph above shows that this past week’s gain by Hamilton is his largest yet since I started doing this blog by a considerable margin, his previous highest was thanks to his victory in the Hungarian Grand Prix. Irrespective of whether his tweets this past weekend were right or wrong, it seems to have done him well in the Twitter stakes, that is for sure, pushing him above one million followers earlier than I anticipated. It now leaves a somewhat bizarre situation in that we have three drivers’ over one million followers, and then a large gap, with no one between 500,000 and one million! Further down, Felipe Massa’s large gain (by his standards) has moved him ahead of Paul di Resta.

Teams – The Top 10
01 – 327,583 – Ferrari
02 – 225,546 – McLaren
03 – 150,131 – Red Bull
04 – 144,598 – Mercedes
05 – 131,426 – Lotus
06 – 84,716 – Caterham
07 – 78,729 – Marussia
08 – 74,874 – Force India
09 – 73,461 – Williams
10 – 71,618 – Sauber

Teams – Biggest Increases
01 – 8,282 – Ferrari
02 – 4,563 – McLaren
03 – 3,599 – Red Bull

Teams – Smallest Increases
01 – 826 – Williams
02 – 910 – Toro Rosso
03 – 1,053 – Caterham

A huge team gain by Ferrari extends their gap at the front, and is also a record high gain for them since I started this series of blog posts.

Driver and Team statistics as of Monday 3rd September 2012.

Romain Grosjean has been banned from the Italian Grand Prix as a result of the multiple car pile up at the start of the Belgian Grand Prix. Within seconds of the decision being announced, Twitter lighted up with a lot of Formula 1 journalists tweeting the news instantly, and others favouriting and retweeting it. The first on my particular timeline to break the news was Ian Parkes. The following is based on my timeline from 16:41 to 16:51, with the amount of times each tweet has been retweeted and favourited up to about 17:20/17:25 UK time.

16:41 – Ian Parkes (Press Association) – 210 retweets, 5 favourites
16:41 – Pete Gill (Sky Sports) – 214 retweets
16:42 – Simon Strang (AUTOSPORT) – 10 retweets
16:43 – Jonathan Noble (AUTOSPORT) – 197 retweets, 10 favourites
16:43 – Jennie Gow (BBC) – 31 retweets
16:43 – Andrew Benson (BBC) – 118 retweets, 2 favourites
16:44 – Will Buxton (SPEED) – 17 retweets, 1 favourite
16:44 – Adam Cooper – 92 retweets
16:45 – Tom Cary (Daily Telegraph) – 20 retweets, 1 favourite
16:46 – Joe Saward – 9 retweets
16:46 – Dimi Papadopoulos – 3 retweets
16:46 – Sky Sports F1 – 536 retweets, 14 favourites
16:47 – Jake Humphrey (BBC) – 727 retweets, 50 favourites
16:49 – F1Fanatic.co.uk – 23 retweets
16:50 – Natalie Pinkham (Sky) – 9 retweets, 1 favourite
16:51 – Lee McKenzie – 281 retweets, 17 favourites

From those 16 tweets, which all say the same thing in one way or another, the most retweeted tweet comes from Jake Humphrey, despite reporting the news six minutes later than the first tweet in the list, thanks to his large amount of followers, especially some with probably little interest in Formula 1. The 16 tweets were retweeted by a massive 2,497 users (you can probably minus 5 percent off that for those that retweeted multiple of the above), while if you include the favourites column, that number increases to 2,598 tweets, although favourites don’t appear on other people’s timelines while retweets do.

As I outline every week in my blog, half of the Formula 1 drivers currently have over 100,000 followers, but over in broadcasting, the Sky Sports F1 account has 154,434 followers which would place it sixth in that list, while Jake Humphrey has nearly 600,000 followers which would place him fourth in the drivers’ list!

Of course, most of the above 16 accounts are Formula 1 specific accounts, more general accounts tend to have a lot more followers, and therefore are likely to get retweeted more often. Either way, the above is just a look at how far and wide 16 tweets can go on the “Twitter universe”. If we didn’t have Twitter chances are you wouldn’t have found that out until a few hours later, or via some other medium, such as a news channel, but because of Twitter the news was found instantly and retweeted to thousands of other people.