IndyCar Road America TV ratings dip following solid post-Indy 500 progress

Indianapolis Star

4 days ago

The hope in IndyCar's jam-packed summer schedule with new exclusive media rights partner Fox was that momentum from one weekend would roll right into the next, creating a fly-wheel effect that would help network race audiences steadily grow and turn the sport's two-week stretch of average audiences above 1 million into a commonplace occurrence.
But Sunday's down-to-the-wire thriller won by championship points leader Alex Palou – the two-time defending series champ's sixth win of the year – drew an audience of 781,000 in the early-afternoon time slot, marking Road America's least-watched IndyCar race on network TV since the track returned to the series' annual rotation in 2016. It comes off the back of post-Indianapolis 500 races at Detroit and World Wide Technology Raceway – the latter IndyCar's first-ever Sunday night primetime race – that averaged 1.061 million and 1.012 million, respectively.
Why the notable drop?
According to a Fox Sports spokesperson, news coverage of the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East drew more than double the average audience (from noon to 6 p.m.) combined across CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and Newsmax (4.214 million) than last year on the comparable Sunday afternoon (1.862 million) and last year's Road America race date that fell two weekends earlier in the month (1.99 million).
In the racing world, IndyCar ran up against IMSA's six-hour endurance race at Watkins Glen, which kicked off just after noon – the first three hours of which aired on NBC, overlapping with the first 90 minutes of Fox's IndyCar race broadcast and roughly an hour or so of the actual racing action.
The series gained a major theoretical boost with a more than two-hour rain delay to the start of NASCAR's Cup race at Pocono that was scheduled for a green flag start just after 2 p.m., but was bumped to 4:30 p.m., 45 minutes after Palou took the checkered flag. Amazon Prime continued to air-elongated pre-race coverage in the lead-up to the delayed race start, though one would imagine anyone who would've been torn between the two races airing at the same time would've switched over to IndyCar with the opportunity to do so.
Sunday's IndyCar audience on Fox peaked at 934,000 from 3:30-3:45 p.m. as Palou hunted down teammate Scott Dixon and eventually inherited the lead after the former was forced to make one final pitstop.
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Through eight non-500 races on network TV, IndyCar's race audiences are averaging just a tick below 900,000 after Road America (894,250 to be exact). NBC's network race average from 2019-2024, excluding the pandemic-altered 2020 season, as well as 500 broadcasts, rain-delayed races and ones that went up against the NFL, came in at 998,342. In order to meet that average by the end of the 2025 IndyCar season, the remaining eight races themselves would need to average roughly 1.1 million.
At this point in NBC's final season a year ago – when only four races outside the 500 had aired on network TV – those races had averaged 869,000 viewers per race, a mark that the 2025 campaign is up on by 2.9%. NBC's whole slate of six network races last year not including the 500, the Thermal exhibition and the finale up against the NFL delivered average audiences of 932,833 per race – a mark the closing stretch of eight races left this year would need to average 971,417 fans watching per race to match across the entire season.
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Through nine races this year, the average per-race audience for 2025 IndyCar all-network TV slate is up 33% year-over-year, according to Fox, with the caveats that last year had Long Beach and Detroit on cable instead of network, Thermal was an exhibition race and the cable race planned for Laguna Seca in 2024 was bumped from USA Network to CNBC due to a NASCAR rain delay, where the race grabbed an average audience of less than 200,000.