Ratings: Midweek NASCAR, Bundesliga, Encores

Thursday’s NASCAR Cup Series race from Charlotte, which was postponed from Wednesday due to rain, averaged 1.51 million viewers on FS1 — the smallest Cup Series audience on any network in at least 20 years. The previous low was 1.77 million for a fall 2018 race at Richmond.

The low comes with a number of caveats: the one-day postponement, the still-unfamiliar circumstance of a midweek race, and competing breaking news coverage.

Chase Elliott’s win declined 28% from the previous midweek race, Darlington on a Wednesday night (2.09M).

In other action, Monday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race from Charlotte averaged 878,000 viewers on FS1 — up 2% from last year on a Saturday afternoon — and Tuesday’s Truck Series race there averaged 778,000.

Last Saturday’s Bayern Munich-Eintracht Frankfurt Bundesliga match averaged a 0.15 rating and 303,000 viewers on FS1, marking the league’s third-largest audience ever on the network, based on records published by World Soccer Talk. The top two came the previous week.

FS1 also scored its fourth and fifth-largest Bundesliga audiences over the past week, with Dortmund-Bayern Munich averaging 290,000 on Tuesday and Wolfsburg-Dortmund 284,000 last Saturday.

A re-air of last year’s Indianapolis 500 averaged a 0.44 rating and 645,000 viewers on NBC last Sunday, leading the weekend’s sports encores. Last weekend marked the first time since the majority of events were called off in March that no encore cracked 700,000 viewers.

Ranking second among encores, the final round of last year’s PGA Tour Canadian Open averaged a 0.46 and 623,000 on CBS last Sunday. A 1989 heavyweight boxing match between Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno ranked third with a 0.34 and 554,000 on ESPN last Saturday.