NASCAR got paid. Now it has a viewership problem

NASCAR got a 40% rights fee bump in its latest TV deal. The cost? Fewer people actually watching the races.

The recent Cup Series race at Bristol on FS1 averaged just 1.945 million viewers. According to Braylon Breeze of RaceDay Report, that is the first time a Fox Sports race has averaged fewer than 2 million viewers without a rain delay.

Cable is a shrinking platform, which makes NASCAR’s media rights deal, signed in 2023 and implemented in 2025, all the more head-scratching. In previous set of NASCAR media rights agreements, the NASCAR Cup Series aired nine races on Fox and seven on NBC. In the newest agreements, there are only five races on Fox and four on NBC.

Cord-cutting certainly wasn’t a foreign concept in 2023, so why would NASCAR make such an agreement?

Well, NASCAR reduced the total number of races on Fox and NBC in order to create new summer packages for TNT and Amazon’s Prime Video, creating incremental value by splitting its inventory between more partners. Additionally, Fox and NBC needed to keep some races on their cable channels, FS1 and USA Network, in order to retain lucrative carriage fees. (USA Network has since been spun out into Versant.)

While viewership for entertainment programming on cable has decreased significantly, viewership for live sports and news continues to be strong relative to cord-cutting. NASCAR’s high ratings and race consistency make it especially appealing. Cable providers won’t pay high carriage fees without consistent, must-watch content to keep subscribers from leaving. So, it makes sense that Fox and NBC would pay more for NASCAR in order to keep their cable networks in business.

But while this is great for NASCAR’s media rights revenue, it is not good for racing fans, as recent viewership shows. While sports may be keeping cable alive, the platform is still approaching death. Data from Nielsen’s Gauge for February shows that cable accounts for only 20% of Americans’ television viewing, compared to 21.7% for broadcast and 48% for streaming.

NASCAR has found viewership success on broadcast television. While NASCAR’s Cup and Truck Series viewership at Bristol, both on FS1, were down 5% and 2% respectively from last year, viewership for the Xfinity Series, which airs on broadcast network The CW, was up 22%.

Broadcast may be the answer to NASCAR’s recent viewership woes, but it’s not immediately clear how it could make changes to the current media rights contracts. The circuit’s current media rights deals extend through 2031, with no publicly reported exit clauses.

The larger, across-the-board viewership decreases for entertainment programming could mean that 1.945 million viewers, once commonplace, is now a strong viewership number on cable.

NASCAR may have maximized its media rights revenue, but it’s doing so by placing races on platforms fewer fans are actually watching.