All three major motorsports series are seeing viewership growth so far this year, with NASCAR ahead of the pack and F1 making the biggest gain.
FOX and FS1 averaged 3.70 million viewers for their portion of the NASCAR Cup Series season, up 6% from last year (3.48M) and down slightly from 2019 (3.73M). Including exhibition events — namely the preseason “Clash” at Daytona (4.28M) — the Fox networks averaged 3.67 million, up 8% from last year (3.40M), up 1% from 2019 (3.64M) and the highest average since Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s final year in 2017 (4.6M). Keep in mind the addition of out-of-home viewing likely accounts for the gain over 2019.
The averages would have been higher if not for last Sunday’s race at Sonoma, which averaged a 1.3 rating and 2.24 million viewers on FS1 — marking the least-watched edition of the race in at least 20 years and the second-smallest audience of the season (excluding rainouts). Martinsville had just 1.89 million on a Saturday night in April.
Sonoma was the sixth-straight race to decline from last year (excluding a rainout at Dover) after seven of the first eight increased (excluding Fontana, which was not run last year).
NASCAR is touting incremental growth in its African American and Hispanic viewership so far this season, with the former demographic making up 3.3% of the audience (129K) and the latter 3.2% (124K). Each demographic has accounted for a slightly larger share of the audience in each of the past three seasons. In 2019, they accounted for 2.7 and 2.2 percent of the audience respectively.
As for the other NASCAR series, Truck Series viewership is up 4% for the season (~700K) and the Xfinity Series is off 2% (~1.1M).
In other racing action, the IndyCar Series is now averaging 1.72 million viewers across NBC and USA Network (including an additional streaming audience of 61,000 not tracked by Nielsen), up 5% from last year on NBC and NBCSN (1.63M) and the series’ highest average through its first eight races since 2017 (1.76M). Keep in mind this is the first year of a new media rights deal in which races air on broadcast television.
Last Sunday’s race at Road America averaged a 0.7 rating and 1.09 million viewers on NBC (1.11M including additional streaming data), the most-watched edition of the race since 2019. Last year’s race aired on NBCSN.
Finally, Formula 1 is averaging 1.3 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC — up 39% from last year (946K). Last Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix averaged a season-low 832,000, down 14% from last year in a later timeslot (970K) but still the second-largest audience for the race in its short history. Max Verstappen’s win, which peaked with 980,000 from 7:30-7:45 AM ET, was just the second of eight races this season to average fewer than one million viewers.
Average viewership for major racing series through this past weekend
