With the race becoming national news ahead of the green flag, NASCAR at Talladega delivered unusually strong ratings for a Monday race.
Monday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega averaged a 2.1 rating and 3.36 million viewers on FOX, marking the most-watched Monday race — excluding the Daytona 500 — since Texas in 2014 (3.51M).
Ratings and viewership topped the previous Cup Series race at Homestead a week earlier, which was delayed several hours due to rain and finished late in the evening (1.8, 2.78M).
Compared to last year’s spring Talladega race, which was run as scheduled on a Sunday in April, ratings fell just 25% (from 2.8) and viewership 26% (from 4.52M). Compared to last year’s fall Talladega race, which was also postponed to Monday but aired on NBCSN, viewership increased 118% from 1.54 million.
Despite airing on a weekday afternoon, Talladega averaged the largest audience of any sportscast in two weeks — since the Cup Series race at Atlanta on June 7 (3.96M). It topped Saturday’s Belmont Stakes on NBC (3.33M).
Talladega was not the typical NASCAR race, coming 24 hours after reports surfaced that a noose was left in the garage of Bubba Wallace, the only African American Cup Series driver. There was immediate concern that Wallace — who has been outspoken on issues of racial inequality over the past month and was a driving force behind NASCAR banning the confederate flag from events — had been the victim of a hate crime.
On Tuesday, NASCAR announced that per an FBI investigation, what was believed to be a noose was in fact a garage door pull rope that had been “fashioned like a noose” since last fall.
[Numbers from Fox Sports; news from ESPN.com 6.23]
