Nascar viewership down in Nashville as F1 and IndyCar see YoY gains

• Nascar averaging 2.39m viewers through two races on Prime Video
• F1 has never averaged more than current audience of 1.33m across races so far
• IndyCar at 1.77m audience average for 2025, highest figure since at least 2016

The Nascar Cup Series race at Nashville Superspeedway averaged 2.06 million viewers on Prime Video, the lowest figure for the race since it joined the regular season schedule in 2021.

One of Nascar’s newer events, Nashville had previously bucked wider viewership trends in the series by delivering year-over-year (YoY) audience increases since being added to the calendar.

However, this was the first edition of the race not to air on commercial television since its debut, when it garnered 2.59 million viewers on NBCSN.

This season is also the first time the Cup Series has been exclusively aired on a streaming platform. After two races, Prime Video is averaging 2.39 million viewers.

Nascar said this is the youngest audience in 11 years for a Cup Series race immediately after the Coca-Cola 600. Both races on Prime Video have recorded an average audience six years younger than the average on linear TV.

But Michael Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics at Fox Sports, called out that metric on X, claiming that ‘it’s easy to look younger when you lose five older people for one younger viewer you gain’.

That said, Fox Sports may be quietly concerned that Prime Video appears to be more than a match for its cable offering.

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While Nascar was once again the most-watched motorsport in the US over the weekend, Formula One and IndyCar will be encouraged to find the audience gap closing.

Formula One set an event record for the Spanish Grand Prix with an average of 1.17 million viewers on ESPN. That is now back-to-back event records for the series after the Monaco Grand Prix averaged the third-largest US audience ever.

This continues to be Formula One’s best-ever season for viewership in the US through direct race-by-race comparisons, and the 2025 average of 1.33 million viewers only marginally trails the series’ previous year-to-date (YTD) high of 1.34 million set in 2022.

Meanwhile, IndyCar delivered strong viewership on Fox with an average of 1.06 million viewers for the Detroit Grand Prix.

This race has been wildly inconsistent in previous years, hitting a low of 354,000 viewers in 2022 as it has previously struggled to maintain viewership momentum after the Indianapolis 500.

But this is Detroit’s best audience since it moved to one race per season in 2022. Since 2016, it’s higher than all but three of the races held across the double-header weekends prior to this switch.

After seven races, IndyCar is averaging 1.77 million viewers, comfortably its best figure since at least 2016. However, not including the Indy 500, this season is averaging 893,000 viewers. This trails both the 2023 and 2022 seasons, which averaged 956,167 viewers and 947,667 viewers respectively.