Mike Joy: NASCAR ‘not attracting the younger fanbase that we need’

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.