While NASCAR has plenty of young drivers, Mike Joy, who is the lead announcer for Fox’s NASCAR coverage, feels that the sport needs to appeal more to a younger audience.
Joy discussed NASCAR’s struggle to attract younger viewers as a guest on Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast.
“We have 18 and 20-year-olds coming into the Cup Series and making a mark,” Joy said, H/T Alex Harrington, Motorsport.com. “The fan base is getting older. We’re not attracting the younger fanbase that we need to move this sport forward into the next decade, [and] into the next couple of decades.”
One thing Joy cited as helping drive NASCAR’s popularity in the mid-late 2000s was Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the NASCAR-themed movie starring Will Ferrell.
“That was when we hit our peak for fan engagement and crowds at the racetrack,” Joy said. “I remember going into a Food City in Bristol, Tennessee, and you couldn’t push your cart down any aisle without knocking over a cardboard cutout of some driver hawking something. You couldn’t go in a supermarket without knowing about NASCAR. It was everywhere.”
One thing Harrington said was that the fanbase is now older than it was in 2017, when “the average age of a NASCAR fan in the United States was 58 years old.” That’s nearly a decade older than they were in 2006, when Talladega Nights was in theatres.
And while another NASCAR-themed movie may not be in the cards, Joy stressed the importance of reconnecting with younger fans.
“We lost a lot of that young fanbase that we really need to covet if we’re going to grow this sport again,” he said.