After a solid two decades of stagnant or declining viewership, the Indy 500 soared to a 17-year high — and past the seven million mark — in its debut on FOX.
Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 averaged 7.05 million viewers on FOX, per Nielsen fast-nationals, marking the largest audience for the race since 2008 (7.2M) and a 40 percent increase over last year’s 5.02 million on NBC (5.31 million including Adobe Analytics). Keep in mind that Nielsen did not include out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100 percent of markets until earlier this year.
Alex Palou’s win, which peaked with 8.4 million in the 4:15 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the largest motorsports audience on U.S. television in more than two years — since the 2023 Daytona 500 (8.17M). This year’s Daytona 500 averaged 6.76 million, making this just the second time in at least a quarter-century that the Indianapolis 500 has outdrawn its Daytona counterpart. (The previous occurrence was 2021, when Daytona finished after Midnight ET due to rain delays.)
For many years, it would have been surprising enough just for the Indy 500 to outdraw NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 — much less Daytona.
The race was also the most-watched of the annual Memorial Day weekend motorsports events since 2013, when the Coca-Cola 600 averaged 7.13 million.
This year’s 40 percent increase is the second-biggest since 2005, when Danica Patrick’s near win soared 60 percent from the prior year (6.08 to 9.74 million). It trails only 2021, when viewership jumped 53 percent from a record-low 3.67 million in 2020, when the race was run in August due to COVID.
Unlike those two years, there are no obvious explanations for why a race that averaged 4-5 million viewers every year since 2017 suddenly jumped to seven million this year. While this year marked the first Indy 500 to air on FOX, media rights change hands with relative frequency without there being a noticeable impact on viewership. When the 500 moved from ABC in 2018 to NBC in 2019, the jump in viewership was a modest 11 percent (from 4.91 to 5.44 million).
Perhaps the 500 moving to FOX, combined with the Coca-Cola 600 leaving FOX for Amazon Prime Video, played a role. With the 600 leaving broadcast television and the 500 essentially taking its place on FOX, perhaps some of the traditional NASCAR audience opted for IndyCar this year.
It should be noted that the traditional local blackout for the Indy 500 was lifted this year. The blackout has been lifted in the past without anything close to as big an impact on viewership, though it should be noted that those previous instances largely predated the out-of-home era.
