- Coca-Cola 600 delivered just over 3m viewers, largest Prime Video audience so far
- Average viewership falls just below this year’s average on FS1 (2.37m viewers)
- Median age of viewers rises from 56.1 in 2025 to 57.7 this season
Nascar’s audience for its second year on Amazon Prime Video jumped six per cent year-on-year (YoY) to 2.29 million, according to figures released by the streaming platform.
Last season was the first package of Cup Series races to be aired exclusively on a streaming platform. Those five races returned an average viewership of 2.16 million. Both figures are the weighted averages released by broadcast analytics firm Nielsen.
Nielsen assigns specific weights based on market importance. Taking the average of the publicly released figures produces slightly different results. Through this process, Nascar’s average viewership increased five per cent YoY from 2.1 million to 2.2 million.
Looking at how this average progressed through the run of five races across both seasons, they started strong thanks to the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Notably, while last season saw the average audience decrease after each race, this year’s visit to San Diego for the first-ever Cup Series race at an active military base caused a small uptick to end the package.
Drilling down into the race-by-race data, the 2026 visit to Charlotte averaged 3.06 million viewers, the largest audience for a Cup Series race on Prime Video so far. This was up 12 per cent on last year’s race.
Michigan and San Diego also saw their average audiences increase compared to last year. Michigan jumped 17 per cent, the largest YoY increase, while San Diego increased nine per cent compared to the Mexico City race in 2025.
There was a negligible two per cent audience decrease for this year’s visit to Nashville, but the most disappointing return was in Pocono as viewership fell 11 per cent compared to 2025. Pocono was the final race in the five-race package last year, whereas it moved to the penultimate event in 2026 due to the switch from Mexico City to San Diego.
Nascar executives can be satisfied with an increase in viewership for the second year of Amazon’s rights deal. What’s more impressive is that Prime Video got close to this year’s average audience on FS1 (2.37 million). This supports Nascar’s decision to diversify its broadcast strategy as streaming begins to challenge traditional cable channels for audience reach.
Prime Video also revealed that the median age of viewers was 57.7, the youngest amongst Nascar broadcasters. While reaching younger audiences is a key part of this strategy, this is an increase on last season’s median age of 56.1.
Amazon has shown it is capable of handling the rights to major sporting events through its Thursday Night Football (TNF) package with the National Football League (NFL). It averaged 15.3 million viewers last season, up considerably from the 9.58 million viewers across its 15 regular season games in 2022, the first year of its deal.
Nascar will hope to see a similar relative increase across the remaining five years of its contract, but it is clear that more needs to be done to attract younger viewers to the sport.
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