Overall, year-to-year, the NASCAR Cup Series experienced a 14 percent drop in television ratings for the 2025 season.<\/p>\n
To wrap up this season, the Cup Series championship race at Phoenix Raceway drew 2.77 million viewers on NBC, down from the 2.9 million it drew last year. Last year, overall, the NASCAR Cup Series drew 2.892 million, which was a one percent increase from the 2023 season, while 2025 drew 2.476 million.<\/p>\n
NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps says internal projections predicted this with so many races moving off broadcast television and moving to cable channels and the five races that aired on Amazon\u2019s Prime Sports.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the season started, because of the distribution changes to be less broadcast heavy and more cable heavy and streaming, we knew we were going to have a reset,\u201d Phelps said during his state of the sport press conference last week. \u201cWe had projected that that reset and told everyone in our industry that reset would be between 14 percent and 15 percent in Cup.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Phelps praised the Prime Sports portion of the schedule, which was widely praised by fans, and drew an average of 2.16 million over the five races during the middle of the season. Prime Sports and Turner Sports joined incumbent broadcasters FOX and NBC.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone just raised their game,\u201d Phelps said. \u201cAmazon’s production was tremendous. Turner Sports was tremendous. NBC already had a high bar, right? The Turner numbers were slightly softer than we thought they would be, slightly, but in line with the projections.\u201d<\/p>\n
The races on USA Network was frequently struggling to get above a million viewers each week and Phelps addressed that too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say the cable portion of the NBC package has been a little softer than we had expected,\u201d he said. \u201cBounce back on the NBC races, I think we’ll have a decent rating here on Sunday.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgain, the expectation moving forward, now that we have had the reset, is that we are going to grow. We’re going to grow because we have the best racing in the world, our stars are going to be more out there, we’re creating better content, all the things that make fandom.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgain, are we concerned about where the ratings are? No, it’s exactly where we thought they’d be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does that concern team owner Brad Keselowski at all?<\/p>\n
\u201cI think NASCAR and everyone in the industry knew there would be some transition, but we didn\u2019t know what it would be,\u201d Keselowski told Motorsport.com on Saturday. \u201cI think we knew there would be a transition with the viewership habits of our fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will tell you I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of Amazon and streaming races. Conversely, I was disappointed in the races we had on cable and broadcast has done what we thought it would do.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess we\u2019re fixed on this for the next six years so we\u2019ll have to make the most of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile the Xfinity Series experienced its best TV ratings in four years with the jump to having every race on broadcast TV on The CW Network. The races averaged over a million viewers over the course of the year, 1,034,000 to be exact, a 10 percent increase from last year on FS1 and USA Network.<\/p>\n
The finale on Saturday drew 1,015,000 viewers, an impressive number, up against college football and Game 7 of the World Series on FOX.<\/p>\n
Phelps praised this strategic decision as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe also told them we probably have a double-digit increase in Xfinity,\u201d Phelps said.
Then Trucks would be where Trucks are because the distribution stayed the same primarily on FS1 and some FOX.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now as we sit, our ratings in Cup are down 14 percent, exactly what we predicted. I think the FOX portion of the season was really strong in terms of how they did from a ratings perspective.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that Xfinity exceeded a lot of kind of experts’ opinions about what their audience would be. We surmised that the audience makeup of Amazon would be younger, and it was by about six years. Then the production value that FOX and NBC have had traditionally, amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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