Last year, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) proudly announced its new TV rights deals, starting its race streams in close association with streaming giant Amazon Prime. Yet, despite occasional high points, the sport just recorded another drop in viewership at the Charlotte ROVAL, raising a critical question: Has the deal delivered the results executives promised?
Has NASCAR Nation Tuned Out Amid the Sport’s Broadcast Shake-Up?
A total of 1,544,000 fans tuned in for the Round of 12 playoff eliminator at Charlotte, the Bank of America ROVAL 400, on USA Network. In comparison, last year’s race on NBC drew in 2.4 million viewers.
Similarly, the regular-season NCS race at Michigan Speedway drew an average of just 1.77 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video, marking the lowest audience of the 2025 season. This marked a 16.2% decline compared to last year’s Michigan race, which averaged 2.11 million viewers on the USA Network.
It’s worth noting, however, that the 2024 event took place later in the regular season in August and was postponed to Monday night, factors that likely influenced its viewership.
Despite sharing its broadcasts among long-time partners FOX Sports and NBC, as well as newcomers Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery, NASCAR continues to face the hard reality of declining viewership and ratings, which begs the question: Has the sport achieved the results it set out to deliver?
“Way too many races on USA and FS1. If they would quit that and use Fox and NBC more numbers would be way better,” wrote one fan on a popular Reddit subreddit, where the NASCAR community was buzzing over the recent viewership dip.
A second user also echoed a similar sentiment, arguing that the drop in numbers are mainly because more races are now featured on USA and FS1, “I don’t think it’s spread over too many networks, too many races are just on USA/FS1.”
While NASCAR’s push to stream races was largely aimed at engaging its growing younger audience, a Reddit user argued that the summer schedule shouldn’t have been split between Amazon and TNT: “I think the summer package should have been just one channel, not 5 on Amazon Prime and 5 on TNT.”
Another factor many point out is the introduction of races in streaming platforms. Most old-school fans of the sport are still very much reliant on cable TV operators, whereas the young pool prefers streaming platforms. On that premise, a user wrote,
“I think it’s just a by-product of NASCAR taking dollars over terms. They could have asked for more network races, but didn’t. They could have sold streaming rights separately, but didn’t. They wanted the big chunk of money over having a deal that best served existing fans and helps cultivate new ones. It’s not as much of an issue for me since prior to 2001, you had to scope 6 different networks to see if the race was on one of them, but cable was far more normalized than it is now.”
Meanwhile, a fifth fan got NASCAR veteran Denny Hamlin‘s comments into the mix, denouncing the sanctioning body’s intention, “I think it was Denny who said it best, NASCAR took the most money, not the best deal, for the long run. This is the problem with NASCAR the body it’s all about the max dollar for them not the sport itself. Good example of this is NASCAR poaching team sponsors for years.”
As NASCAR continues to navigate its $7.7 billion TV and streaming landscape, the numbers and fan feedback make clear that the sport’s bold media gamble has yet to pay off fully. Declining viewership across traditional networks and streaming platforms suggests that balancing attracting younger fans and retaining the sport’s long-time audience is still a work in progress.
While the potential for growth through streaming remains significant, the current ratings trends and vocal fan concerns underscore that NASCAR may need to rethink how it packages and distributes its races if it hopes to satisfy all segments of its audience and secure long-term engagement.