IndyCar delivered its largest non-Indy 500 audience at least two decades for its race in the nation’s capital.
Sunday’s IndyCar Series street race in Washington D.C. averaged 3.28 million viewers on FOX, marking the largest IndyCar audience outside of the Indy 500 in at least 20 years. The previous high over that span was 2.43 million for the 2007 race from Mid-Ohio on ABC, which had a direct lead-in from the final round of the British Open. No other non-Indy 500 race over that span has hit the two million mark.
Kyle Kirkwood’s win, which peaked with 3.48 million in the 2:30 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the sixth-largest auto racing audience of the year — trailing only the NASCAR Daytona 500 (7.49M), the Indy 500 (6.64M), and the NASCAR Cup Series races from Atlanta in February (4.49M), Circuit of the Americas in March (3.93M) and Talladega in April (3.97M). Each of the six aired on FOX.
The race comfortably outdrew the competing NASCAR Cup Series race from New Hampshire on USA Network, which was impacted by weather and averaged 2.0 million excluding rain delay coverage. Outside of the Indy 500, it is not clear the last time an IndyCar race outdrew NASCAR head-to-head.
Compared to other recent street races, the IndyCar event outdrew the NASCAR race on Naval Base Coronado in San Diego earlier this summer, which drew 2.28 million on Prime Video. It topped the most recent NASCAR race on the streets of Chicago two years ago, which averaged 2.06 million on TNT and truTV. The inaugural Chicago Street Race in 2023 was considerably stronger at 4.8 million on NBC across Nielsen (4.63M) and Adobe Analytics (164K).
As for the other major racing series, Formula 1 is no longer on Nielsen-rated television thanks to its new Apple TV+ deal, but its Miami Grand Prix topped out at 3.07 million on ABC in 2024.
Note that comparisons even to just two or three years ago are skewed by Nielsen methodological changes, specifically the expansion of its out-of-home viewing sample and shift last year to a new currency that integrates “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes into its traditional panel.
FOX is now averaging 1.875 million viewers for IndyCar racing this season, up 32% from last year (1.42M), an increase beyond the range attributable to those methodological changes.
