NASCAR’s TV Ratings are Lower than Ever. Can Netflix Turn the Tide?
With engines about to fire in Daytona, the biggest story in the NASCAR Cup Series isn’t centered around a single driver or team, but a five-episode Netflix series.
And for good reason. People in the NASCAR garage and in its offices want to know if Netflix will do for NASCAR what it has done for Formula 1.
And wow has the streaming giant delivered for F1 — better than Dale Jarrett in a UPS truck.
Since “Drive to Survive” debuted before the 2019 F1 season, U.S. television viewership averages for F1 races more than doubled from 554,000 in 2018 to 1.21 million in 2022, according to The Athletic. This has coincided with increased viewership for each “Drive to Survive” season. More than half a million viewers binged season five during the first week of its release in 2023 (Season six debuts on Feb. 23).
Will NASCAR reap similar rewards? The anticipation in the garage is palpable, but no one is really stating why. Hint: It’s not to see if Bill Byron gets endorsed by LEGO (He is quite the builder).
So let’s get to the heart of it.
The 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season was the least-watched season on record, according to Sports Media Watch. Ratings dropped 5 percent last year to an average of 2.86 million viewers per race and 12 of the final 13 races saw declined TV viewership from 2022.
That’s not a story you are going to catch on FOX or NBC, where they’ll tell you that the sport is growing faster than Denny Hamlin’s house. I hear he just added pickleball courts.
The truth is NASCAR’s fan base isn’t growing at all. It’s changing, but the number of fans tuning into races each Sunday has been steadily decreasing for nearly two decades.
In 2013, NASCAR’s average TV viewership (5.8 million per race) was more than double what it was in 2023.
If you go back to the sport’s height in 2005, the numbers are even more startling. A peak TV audience estimated at 19 million watched the season finale at Homestead — a race in which there was little drama because Tony Stewart had a 52-point to start the event.
A peak audience of 3.8 million watched Ryan Blaney outduel three others for the championship last year.
Context is important here, particularly when we start talking about TV two decades ago. Yes, many Americans are now glued to TikTok 11 hours per day and no longer care about television.
TV viewership is dropping overall and sports leagues — outside of the NFL — haven’t been spared. Viewership for the NBA Finals and the MLB’s World Series have each dropped 30 percent in the past decade, according to Bloomberg.
But not 50 percent — and certainly not 80 percent — like in the examples above. NASCAR’s steep declines can’t solely be attributed to a changing media landscape, but to its own missteps. That’s a blog for a different day.
But this is why that palpable excitement I mentioned earlier reeks of desperation.
Docuseries amnesia
Early signs haven’t been promising. When “NASCAR: Full Speed” was announced, it’s as if everyone forgot that a nearly identical series aired in 2022 on USA called “Race for the Championship.” USA’s docuseries brought us into Kyle Busch’s home and the race shops, showed us the drama of the playoffs, and gave us even more content, frankly.
NASCAR’s ratings dropped five percent the next season.
Netflix has a larger reach, but the company did very little to showcase “NASCAR: Full Speed” on its app upon its release. Maybe that will come with future seasons, once a fan base is built on the app, but that won’t help NASCAR see the results it’s looking for now.
The docuseries was intriguing and painted the sport in a positive light, but it also lacked some of the essential elements that have propelled “Drive to Survive.” First, NASCAR can’t compete with the wealth and pageantry of F1 — the beautiful sights from Monaco, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz pulling up in a Ferrari streetcar, etc. Second, much of the F1 show’s appeal is in its name: Drive to Survive — the insinuation that young drivers, particularly, at the back of the grid are under intense pressure to perform at an extremely high level or find another profession.
“NASCAR: Full Speed” only showed life at the sport’s premier teams. It had an opportunity to highlight the pressure Bubba Wallace was under last year driving arguably the fastest car on the circuit and it missed the boat.
Unfortunately, I’d wager that a Netflix docuseries alone won’t reverse NASCAR’s trend. To really attract fans and increase TV viewership, NASCAR is first going to have to improve its on-track product while also figuring out how to better market its stars.
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