The new NASCAR media rights deal has begun with back-to-back declines in viewership for the marquee Cup Series.
The NASCAR Cup Series season averaged 2.42 million viewers across Fox Sports, Prime Video, TNT Sports, USA Sports and NBC, down 2% from last year (2.48M) and the least-watched season on record. This is the second-straight year, and the third of the past four, in which viewership finished as the lowest yet for the Cup Series.
The Fox Sports portion of the season, which includes the Daytona 500, was the most-watched with an average of 3.34 million — down 1% from last year. Viewership was up slightly on both Amazon Prime Video (2.29M, +6%) and TNT Sports (2.1M, +4%). USA Network averaged 1.6 million for its races, down 4%.
Last week’s season finale at Homestead-Miami averaged a 1.4 rating and 2.47 million viewers on NBC, down 6% in ratings and 8% in viewership from last year’s season finale at Phoenix (1.45, 2.77M) and the least-watched final race of a season on record.
Ryan Blaney’s win, which peaked with 3.1 million viewers, was the most-watched race at Homestead since 2021 — a March race that averaged more than four million viewers on FOX. This year marked the first time Homestead hosted the finale since 2019 (3.74M).
All figures are the official Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” numbers. NASCAR shifted away from reporting “Big Data + Panel” after the Fox Sports portion of the season, instead publicizing its numbers using the old “panel-only” standard. Viewership for Cup Series races was consistently lower under “Big Data” than panel-only, with the notable exception of races on Prime.
After Nielsen unveiled a revised version of its “Big Data” metric this fall, NASCAR resumed reporting the data. In a conversation with Sports Media Watch this week, NASCAR Senior Vice President/Broadcasting & Innovation Brian Herbst said the revised “Big Data + Panel” provided “more stability,” addressing concerns NASCAR and other Nielsen clients have had about inconsistent and unexpected results in the early months of the new metric.
Herbst: “Panel to panel is still kind of the cleanest look for us internally, just so I can have a better understanding on demographic splits and geographic splits, which markets are up/down, all that sort of stuff. But we did see a little bit more stability once some of the methodology changes were rolled out end of August, early September.”
The NASCAR Cup Series remains the most-watched motorsports series, comfortably surpassing the IndyCar Series on FOX (1.68M). But IndyCar, which airs on a single broadcast network, was up double-digits (+23%) for a second-straight year to its most-watched season since 2008.
Like IndyCar, the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series also airs on a single broadcast network (CW) and also posted gains this season. The secondary series averaged 1.04 million viewers on CW, up 1% from last year and the most-watched season since 2021. The season finale at Homestead had a 0.7 rating and 1.18 million on CW, up 16% from Phoenix last year — opposite Game 7 of the World Series — and the most-watched finale since the previous one at Homestead in 2019.
Asked if the differing results for the Cup and O’Reilly Series has anything to do with their vastly different distribution, Herbst acknowledged that broadcast television has a higher ceiling than cable or streaming, but cited the “extra promotional megaphone” as an advantage of the multi-platform Cup Series model. “We have three new partners — slightly less new at this point — three partners promoting and marketing the sport in Amazon, TNT/Skydance and now CW that were not promoting the sport three years ago.”
Herbst continued, “We like the balance of broadcast, cable and digital streaming, and we think that gives us a really nice foundation to build off of — not just over the next couple of years, but helpful learnings and data points as we go into the next media rights cycle, which will be in 2030.”
Football competition always impacts NASCAR viewership and this year the effect was particularly pronounced. USA Network was up 3% through its first five races, most of which took place before the football season began. The subsequent five — all of which aired either on college football Saturdays or NFL Sundays — declined 11%.
There has been some discussion about whether NASCAR should continue competing against the NFL. Its COO Ben Kennedy said on the Sports Business Journal podcast in September that the question is being considered as it looks ahead to the next rights deal. “Frankly, should we be going up against the NFL at this point in the year on every single Sunday? It’s a challenging proposition.”
Asked whether it has any plans to change its approach to competing with the NFL, Herbst said NASCAR tries to “optimize our schedule for exposure opportunities and put it in front of as many eyeballs as we possibly can.”
Could that include a return to midweek races, which were floated for years before being tried under emergency conditions in the COVID season of 2020? “I think we had some data points during 2020 during the COVID year that would suggest that midweek racing wasn’t something that would optimize the audience at that point in time. But it’s always something that we would consider if we’re looking at different numbers during [the] NFL portion of the season in particular that would force us to re-look at that.”
Herbst cautioned that any potential changes would not be imminent. “So I don’t think anything in the short term, but in the next media rights cycle, it’s something that we can look to at least consider from a schedule perspective, from a format perspective — and that’s a broader conversation with, not just the media partners, but the tracks, the teams, what would our fan base think of something like that — but more of a big picture discussion, I would say, more in the midterm, less in the short term.”
The current rights deal does not leave much room for flexibility. For example, a late season race on FOX could conceivably be scheduled to lead out of an NFL singleheader, and reap the benefits of that lead-in. (Just last week, a PBR event on CBS averaged 2.43 million in a post-singleheader window, nearly matching Homestead.) But that is not feasible due to the structure of the contract, which awards the various partners specific blocks of the season.
