- IndyCar delivers third-highest audience for opening race in past ten years
- Nascar sees second-highest viewership for COTA since 2021 debut
IndyCar opened its 2026 season in St Petersburg with 1.39 million viewers on Fox, before Nascar averaged a disappointing 3.93 million viewers at the Circuit of The Americas (COTA) on the same channel.
For IndyCar, this year’s audience is strong if not spectacular. It’s a marginal year-over-year (YoY) audience decrease of two per cent, but this still represents the third-highest audience for the series’ opening race in the past ten years.
This is the second year of Fox’s exclusive broadcast rights deal with the championship, but the first full season since Fox acquired a minority stake. IndyCar executives will look for the marketing to improve to deliver more consistent viewership figures across the year after IndyCar averaged its largest season audience figure since 2015.
Meanwhile, Nascar’s audience is impressive when compared with IndyCar, but represents a five per cent YoY audience decrease for the race at COTA. More tellingly, it’s the lowest audience Nascar has ever recorded for its third race of the season.
Even so, compared to its previous visits to COTA, this is a strong showing for Nascar, which has seen its second-highest race audience since the event debuted in 2021. But it’s hard to draw direct comparisons as the series usually visits Austin much later in the season and, therefore, normally records lower viewership as the Nascar audience naturally wanes across the year.
In fact, over the past five years, IndyCar’s season-opening audience is making up a greater percentage of the competing Nascar race than ever before, emphasising the increased competition that Nascar now faces.
IndyCar still has some way to go to be a legitimate competitor to Nascar, and there will be increased competition for US viewers this weekend, when Formula One’s new broadcast deal with Apple is set to get underway.
In a show of force, Nascar and IndyCar will stage a joint event at Phoenix Raceway this weekend, which will also help IndyCar to avoid the stop-start feel that usually permeates its first few races of the season.
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