NASCAR’s two new media-rights partners drew nearly equal average race viewership figures this season.
The rest of the Cup Series’s regular season and playoffs will air on NBC Sports platforms, following 10 races split between Amazon Prime Video and TNT Sports platforms.
Amazon and TNT—NASCAR’s new streamer and cable channel that helped launch seven-year, $7.7 billion media deals this season—each had five race broadcasts this summer. Amazon averaged 2.16 million viewers per race, and TNT averaged 2.1 million viewers per race, according to Nielsen figures (which did not include any viewership data from HBO Max’s simulcast streams of TNT races).
Amazon had races in Charlotte, Nashville, Michigan, Mexico City, and the Poconos, while TNT had races in Atlanta, Chicago, Sonoma, Dover, and Indianapolis. The 2025 NASCAR Cup Series schedule is quite different from the 2024 calendar, so it’s nearly impossible to make year-to-year comparisons with TV ratings from the same period last year, which included a two-week break in July and August as NBC Sports broadcast the Paris Olympics.
Amazon’s 2.16 million average and TNT’s 2.1 million average are below the 2.5 million figure cable channel FS1 averaged for its eight races earlier this season, according to Sports Media Watch. However, they are both close to the 2.17 million average viewership for the 19 Cup Series races on cable channels in 2024, according to The Daily Downforce.
Payday
TNT’s five races coincided with NASCAR’s debut In-Season Challenge.
Joe Gibbs Racing driver Ty Gibbs took home $1 million for winning the single-elimination tournament, which began with 32 drivers pitted head-to-head, bracket-style at each track, in addition to that race’s standings.
That’s a nice payday for Gibbs, who is 19th in the Cup Series playoffs standings, just outside the top 16 who will get in after the next four races.
