This weekend’s Daytona 500 will be the first of 36 races taking place during the 2024 Nascar Cup Series season.
The premier class of the stock car racing series returns having completed arguably its most important piece of business during the offseason, striking new seven-year domestic media rights deals with Fox Sports, NBC, Warner Bros Discovery and Amazon reportedly worth a combined US$7.7 billion from 2025.
Having that deal locked in will be a big relief for the series, but how healthy is Nascar heading into the 2024 season?
As the new campaign gets underway, BlackBook Motorsport delves into some of the data in SportsPro’s Nascar commercial guide – a one-stop shop, exclusively for SportsPro+ premium members, to access the latest business intelligence and data pertaining to the series’ commercial dealings – to see what the numbers say.
Beloved at home but behind overseas
Nascar has long been regarded as the most popular motorsport series in the US but, despite introducing several international initiatives in recent years, it has struggled to gain as much traction overseas.
According to Ampere Analysis, a SportsPro commercial guide data partner, that prestige in its home market is still enough for the series to generate the second most media rights revenue of any motorsport property globally, behind only Formula One.
However, it is unsurprising to find that more than 99 per cent of that broadcast income comes from the US and Canada, with only US$5.3 million of the series’ total annual media rights revenue of US$831.6 million for the 2023 season coming from overseas.
Nascar viewership has stagnated in recent years after a period of decline between 2015 and 2018. Last year’s average audience across the Cup Series season was approximately 2.9 million viewers per race, a slight dip on 2022, but still significantly higher than the average US viewership for Formula One races.
In fact, Ampere’s consumer survey data suggests that the US remains the only market where the proportion of fans willing to pay to watch Nascar (three per cent) surpasses that of Formula One (1.5 per cent).
The race for younger fans
Nascar has made a conscious effort in recent years to engage with younger audiences, but Ampere’s data reveals that there is still some work to be done.
The data and analytics firm estimates that 34 per cent of Nascar’s fanbase in the US is aged between 55 and 64 years old, compared to 26 per cent of the country’s Formula One fans.
The series’ strongest markets outside of the US are Mexico, where 6.1 per cent of the country’s sports fans follow Nascar, and Canada, which illustrates why the organisation is trying to do more to grow outside North America.
Team Penske take pole on the sponsorship grid
Nascar’s standing in the US has helped it build a healthy sponsorship portfolio, which includes premier partners Busch Light, Coca-Cola, Geico and Xfinity, alongside more than 50 official partners.
The series’ teams are also hot property for brands, with GlobalData estimating that Nascar outfits generated more than US$750 million in sponsorship revenue between them in 2023.
However, much of that wealth is concentrated among the biggest names on the grid, with US$507.6 million of the overall figure generated by five teams.
Team Penske led the way in 2023 with US$140.94 million of sponsorship revenue, followed by Richard Childress Racing (US$104.55 million), Joe Gibbs Racing (US$98.95 million), Hendrick Motorsports (US$92.67 million), and Stweart-Haas Racing (US$70.49 million).
It’s not a popularity contest – but if it was…
Then Joe Gibbs Racing and Hendrick Motorsports would come out on top, based on an assessment of the social media followings of Nascar’s teams on X, formerly Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
The two teams each boast around 1.4 million followers across those platforms, while Stewart-Haas Racing (1.1 million), Team Penske (483,500) and Trackhouse Racing (470,800) complete the top five.
Interestingly, Joe Gibbs Racing ranks third on Instagram and fourth on Twitter, but claims its place at the front of the pack by virtue of its TikTok following being nearly triple that of the second-most-followed Nascar team on the short-form video platform.
In terms of those behind the wheel, Kyle Busch is the most-followed Nascar driver, with 1.8 million followers across X, Instagram and TikTok. He’s followed by Chase Elliott (1.5 million), Denny Hamlin (1.1 million), Bubba Wallace (960,100) and Kyle Larson (900,300).
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