Overall, year-to-year, the NASCAR Cup Series experienced a 14 percent drop in television ratings for the 2025 season.
To wrap up this season, the Cup Series championship race at Phoenix Raceway drew 2.77 million viewers on NBC, down from the 2.9 million it drew last year. Last year, overall, the NASCAR Cup Series drew 2.892 million, which was a one percent increase from the 2023 season, while 2025 drew 2.476 million.
NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps says internal projections predicted this with so many races moving off broadcast television and moving to cable channels and the five races that aired on Amazon’s Prime Sports.
“When the season started, because of the distribution changes to be less broadcast heavy and more cable heavy and streaming, we knew we were going to have a reset,” Phelps said during his state of the sport press conference last week. “We had projected that that reset and told everyone in our industry that reset would be between 14 percent and 15 percent in Cup.”
Phelps praised the Prime Sports portion of the schedule, which was widely praised by fans, and drew an average of 2.16 million over the five races during the middle of the season. Prime Sports and Turner Sports joined incumbent broadcasters FOX and NBC.
“Everyone just raised their game,” Phelps said. “Amazon’s production was tremendous. Turner Sports was tremendous. NBC already had a high bar, right? The Turner numbers were slightly softer than we thought they would be, slightly, but in line with the projections.”
The races on USA Network was frequently struggling to get above a million viewers each week and Phelps addressed that too.
“I would say the cable portion of the NBC package has been a little softer than we had expected,” he said. “Bounce back on the NBC races, I think we’ll have a decent rating here on Sunday.
“Again, the expectation moving forward, now that we have had the reset, is that we are going to grow. We’re going to grow because we have the best racing in the world, our stars are going to be more out there, we’re creating better content, all the things that make fandom.
“Again, are we concerned about where the ratings are? No, it’s exactly where we thought they’d be.”
Does that concern team owner Brad Keselowski at all?
“I think NASCAR and everyone in the industry knew there would be some transition, but we didn’t know what it would be,” Keselowski told Motorsport.com on Saturday. “I think we knew there would be a transition with the viewership habits of our fans.
“I will tell you I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of Amazon and streaming races. Conversely, I was disappointed in the races we had on cable and broadcast has done what we thought it would do.
“I guess we’re fixed on this for the next six years so we’ll have to make the most of it.”
Meanwhile the Xfinity Series experienced its best TV ratings in four years with the jump to having every race on broadcast TV on The CW Network. The races averaged over a million viewers over the course of the year, 1,034,000 to be exact, a 10 percent increase from last year on FS1 and USA Network.
The finale on Saturday drew 1,015,000 viewers, an impressive number, up against college football and Game 7 of the World Series on FOX.
Phelps praised this strategic decision as well.
“We also told them we probably have a double-digit increase in Xfinity,” Phelps said.
Then Trucks would be where Trucks are because the distribution stayed the same primarily on FS1 and some FOX.
“Right now as we sit, our ratings in Cup are down 14 percent, exactly what we predicted. I think the FOX portion of the season was really strong in terms of how they did from a ratings perspective.
“I think that Xfinity exceeded a lot of kind of experts’ opinions about what their audience would be. We surmised that the audience makeup of Amazon would be younger, and it was by about six years. Then the production value that FOX and NBC have had traditionally, amazing.”
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