Nascar’s recent headlines have been dominated by a turbulent offseason which culminated with the resignation of commissioner Steve Phelps.
Appointed as president of Nascar in 2018, Phelps had a significant impact on the sport during two decades with the series. One of his last major contributions was the media rights deal signed in December 2023 worth an estimated US$7.7 billion.
In the current media rights landscape where some sports, particularly in Europe, are seeing their broadcast revenue plateau, increasing the annual value of the contract from US$820 million to US$1.1 billion will have been viewed as a successful outcome for Nascar. But this came with the caveat that the Cup Series would be split between four broadcasters.
It may have been a milestone deal, but the pursuit of greater media rights income saw the cost passed onto consumers. A Nascar fan wanting to watch every event can find the first 14 races on Fox, followed by five each on Prime Video and TNT Sports, before NBC shows the final 14 events.
Practice and qualifying sessions are available on Prime Video – but only during the first half of the season and excluding the Clash, the Daytona 500 and the All-Star Race, all of which air on Fox. This then switches to TNT Sports for the remainder of the season.
What’s more is that this doesn’t include the CW, which is paying a reported US$800 million to air the second-tier O’Reilly Auto Parts Series for seven years.
In addition to the various subscriptions now required to follow the sport, the fragmentation of Nascar’s media rights meant a clear communications strategy was required to ensure fans knew where to find the races.
So, as Nascar prepares to enter the second season of its current broadcast deal, did the new approach pay off in year one?
Strong start to the year under Fox
The new media rights deal needed a strong start in 2025 – and Fox delivered. Average viewership rose on both the main Fox channel and FS1. The former averaged 4.52 million viewers across five races, while the latter averaged 2.46 million, the second-highest figure for the channel since 2018.
There were fears that a greater reliance on network television would see overall viewership fall, but the Fox segment of the season eased those concerns.
“The data point that sticks out during the Fox portion of the season is we had four less broadcast windows in 2025 than we had in 2024 and the average viewers that we had in ’24 and ’25 was exactly the same,” Brian Herbst, Nascar’s chief media and revenue officer, tells BlackBook Motorsport.
“So, to go down by four broadcast windows during the Fox package and then average the exact same number of viewers in ’25, that was a pleasant surprise.”
Indeed, there was virtually no drop off in overall viewership. Fox averaged 3.2 million viewers in 2025, which was consistent with the average of 3.22 million the year prior.
Prime position on Amazon
The first step into the broadcast unknown was on Prime Video. Nascar had never appeared exclusively on a streaming platform before, but hoped doing so would open the door to new – and younger – audiences.
Ultimately, Prime Video averaged 2.1 million viewers across its five races, but the key data point for Nascar was the age of those viewers. While not as youthful as some other sports, a median viewer age of 56.1 on Prime Video was nearly seven years younger than linear network audiences.
In addition to that, Herbst says Amazon “overperformed our expectations” from a marketing and promotional standpoint, helping to bring the series to users of the company’s other products and services.
“If you think about a standard US consumer in 2025 and they’re not a Nascar fan, and they go on their Amazon Prime app on a Sunday afternoon during the Amazon stretch of races in June and they’re just trying buy paper towels … and they’re presented with a Nascar race first,” he continues.
“It was an intention and a goal to show up in unexpected places. [Amazon] did a really good job of doing exactly that, so they brought a lot of innovation from a marketing perspective that we thought would be strong, but they exceeded our expectations.”
In-season tournament delivers for TNT
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD)-owned TNT Sports had a tough act to follow, but the network brought new ideas of its own. In fact, it drew inspiration from its experience of broadcasting the National Basketball Association (NBA), which itself had introduced an in-season tournament during the 2023/24 season.
“The TNT folks … they essentially brought that concept to us after having some success on the NBA side with it,” Herbst reveals. “But that was a fun opportunity for us to have some rivalries and driver-on-driver storylines.”
This also led to different broadcast formats that had never previously been delivered in Nascar. After a tricky start, TNT averaged 2.06 million viewers for its five-race run.
“For the first time in Nascar’s history, they had an alt cast on TruTV, one of their cable channels, that was specific to the in-season tournament,” Herbst notes. “It brought an injection of storylines and characters into the sport in July that we haven’t necessarily seen before.”
NBC bears brunt of playoff struggles
News that the Chase would be returning this season was the first time Nascar had openly admitted that the postseason format wasn’t working, but the proof was in the declining viewership.
Overall, NBC averaged 1.95 million viewers in 2025, the first time the network had ever dropped below an audience of two million, but Herbst claims “the broadcast numbers on big NBC were essentially on par with where we were in 2024”. However, the main NBC channel averaged 2.74 million viewers in 2025 compared to 2.98 million viewers in 2024, which is a noticeable enough drop.
Herbst believes the shift to digital and streaming is happening more aggressively than Nascar anticipated when it signed its new media rights deal, noting that the series needs to be prudent with how it responds.
“We’re not going to overreact to something that is in year one of a media rights deal,” he says. “We expect to grow from here and, with respect to the playoffs, we’ve been discussing that for the better part of the year. We wanted to gracefully crown a champion in 2025.”
Did year one of the media rights deal meet expectations?
In short, yes. The 2025 season may have averaged 2.45 million viewers, a 14.7 per cent year-over-year (YoY) decrease, but this fell in line with Nascar’s tempered expectations for the first year of the new cycle.
“When we modelled out the viewership reset that we were going to expect in the first year of the deal, the number was literally down 14 per cent – so that was the reset we expected,” Herbst explains.
He adds: “I would say through the first half of the year, very happy with Fox and Amazon numbers, just a little softer on the cable side, in particular in the second half of the year, but the broadcast numbers held up.”
Herbst admits that the “cable numbers are probably down a little bit more than we would like them to be”, which will be a concern given only 24 per cent of the season is now on broadcast television – something that will not change over the duration of the current media rights cycle.
Unsurprisingly, Nascar is keen to focus more on integrating multiple media rights partners than the long-term downward trend in viewership.
“You’re talking to the most biased person to ask that question to,” Herbst responds, when asked how he would rate year one of the media rights deal out of ten.
“I think we were really happy with year one, for sure. If you think about bringing on three new media partners in a single year and going from two to five [broadcasters] … that’s frankly a lot of work on the production side, it’s a lot of work on the marketing side, it’s a lot of work on the promotional side.”
Herbst was also impressed that Fox and Amazon cross-promoted each other’s coverage but stopped short of scoring the season out of ten – perhaps wanting to remain cautious ahead of year two.
If viewership trends in the right direction this season, then year one will be looked back on as the foundation for that growth. The hope is that the reintroduction of the Chase will drive audience interest around the end of the upcoming campaign.
On the other side of that, the fragmentation of Nascar’s media rights could exacerbate its audience challenges over the course of the deal, all while Formula One increases in popularity in the US.
Expectations may have been met for now, but there is still some way to go before the new setup will be deemed a success.
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