Nascar averages 2.2m viewers at Sonoma as IndyCar sees Iowa TV ratings dip

• Nascar averaging its lowest-ever viewership after 20 races
• IndyCar averaging 1.36m viewers so far in 2025

Nascar averaged 2.19 million viewers for its Cup Series race at Sonoma Raceway on TNT.

This is a 24 per cent year-over-year (YoY) decrease in viewership compared to last year’s race, although the 2024 visit to Sonoma took place a few races earlier in the season on the main Fox channel.

The main TNT channel accounted for 1.97 million viewers, with an additional 224,000 viewers per minute on the truTV alternative telecast.

Nascar is now averaging 1.95 million viewers after three races on TNT, which is comparatively low for the Cup Series, though each race on the channel has averaged more viewers than the last. The channel is also providing Nascar with promising gains among younger demographics.

While there is no explicit figure provided, Nascar claims that viewers between the ages of 18 and 34 for last weekend’s race were up 29 per cent compared to last year’s Cup Series average on cable.

Much of this younger audience appears to be reached through the Bleacher Report and House of Highlights social platforms, which have generated 85 million views after three weeks. 73 per cent of the audience for these platforms is under 34 years old.

Nascar is also now 20 races into the 2025 season, which offers a good point of comparison for how it is tracking compared to previous campaigns. In short, Nascar has never seen audience averages this low at this stage of the season.

With no competition from Formula One last weekend, IndyCar will be disappointed to have delivered two of its lower audiences of the 2025 season.

The double-header weekend saw 576,000 viewers tune in for Saturday’s race, before Sunday delivered an audience of 719,000, both on the main Fox channel.

It is difficult to compare these figures to last year’s Saturday race as it averaged 72,000 viewers on CNBC after a late scheduling change. Sunday’s race, which aired on NBC in 2024, offers a much more standard comparison and shows that this year’s event saw a 17 per cent YoY decrease in viewership.

IndyCar is now averaging 1.36 million viewers after 12 races, by far its strongest performance since at least 2016 – although this figure has been significantly boosted by the largest Indianapolis 500 audience in 17 years.

Without the Indy 500, IndyCar is averaging just over 838,000 viewers, a far less favourable figure compared to previous seasons.

In fact, this trails average audiences at the same stage of the season in 2023 (907,400 viewers), 2022 (931,000 viewers) and 2021 (867,900 viewers).