In the first Sunday without NFL or college football, the Daytona 500 easily took the TV podium with the most-watched telecast, even with a four-hour rain delay.
William Byron’s second straight victory in NASCAR’s “Super Bowl” got an average audience of 6.761 million viewers, a 12% increase against last year’s event which was postponed to the following Monday due to bad weather. The 2024 race pulled in 5.96 million viewers, a 27% decline from the year before.
A late afternoon storm prompted the racing circuit to move up the start time of the race to 2 p.m. ET, but the rain arrived several laps in, taking the cars off the track.
The rain delay, by itself, would have bested the rest of the TV schedule for the weekend, with 5 million viewers sticking with Fox from 2:15 p.m. until 5:30 p.m.
NASCAR’s senior VP of media and productions Brian Herbst said that NASCAR fans are almost conditioned to expect fluidity for races due to weather conditions. He also points to Fox’s real-time storytelling.
“I’ll give a lot of credit to Fox,” Herbst said in a phone interview. “You almost had an in-race preview of what the rest of the race was going to look like, because Fox was able to get access to the drivers to tell that story and almost set up and preview the back half of the race.”
Part of the storytelling also comes from external figures entering the race world. President Donald Trump attended the event, and Anthony Mackie, the star of Captain America: Brave New World, was the ceremonial Grand Marshall of the race.
Herbst said the 500 itself “is the crescendo of Daytona Speedweek,” citing viewership for the races between Wednesday and Saturday that lead up to the Sunday spectacle, saying there’s “a drumbeat of programming, content and racing that leads you up to that big figure that on Sunday.”
The full Daytona weekend was a strong one for NASCAR, which began the first year of a seven-year, $7.7 billion media deal with FOX, NBC, TNT and Prime Video each holding rights. Last Wednesday’s Daytona qualifying on FS1 was up 12% YoY with 916,000 viewers, while the Daytona Duels on Thursday night also rose by 12% with 1.84 million viewers.
For the first Xfinity race on the CW as part of a separate $800 million media rights package signed last summer, 1.825 million people watched the United Rentals 300, mounting the best viewership for the series since 2022 and nearly doubling the 934,000 viewers for last year’s race on FS1. Only the Fresh From Florida 250 for the Craftsman Truck Series, seen by 1.01 million people, slipped versus 2024, with a 4% decline.
The viewership lift for the Great American Race comes amid the headwinds of linear TV’s shrinking usage rate, which has declined by 8.8% over the past year. Going back to 2023, TV usage has declined by 15.6%.
The rain delay pushed the event into prime time, allowing Fox to take some TV share from the NBA All-Star Game on TNT, as well as another big TV event, NBC’s SNL50 in celebration of Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary.
Herbst noted that the Daytona 500 tends to draw more casual viewers than any other racing broadcast during the season, with a subset of viewers who come in for the last 50-60 laps of the race. “We had about a million more viewers watching that checkered flag than we had only 30 minutes before,” Herbst said. “So there's a group that comes in at the end of the race to watch the last 20 or 30 laps that may not have been there with 70 laps to go.”
(This story has been updated in the second paragraph following a company correction.)
