Nascar expects “significant” Amazon promotion during five-race Cup Series run on Prime Video

• Coca-Cola 600 viewership in region of 2.5m
• Nascar’s Ben Kennedy points to Earnhardt and Garage 56 docuseries on Prime Video as additional marketing assets

Nascar is set to benefit from “significant” promotion from Amazon Prime Video during its five-race Cup Series run on the streaming service, according to the series’ chief venue and racing innovation officer Ben Kennedy.

Starting with last weekend’s Coca-Cola 600, the Nascar Cup Series is being broadcast exclusively on a streaming platform for the first time in its history, a significant step for a sport that has been accused of being slow to modernise.

Prime Video’s global head of sports Jay Marine revealed in the build-up to Nascar’s visit to Charlotte that Amazon was “excited to reach younger audiences” for the series, a sentiment shared by Kennedy. 

“The amount of promotion that [Amazon Prime Video is] doing around Nascar and for the Coke 600 and what they’re going to do for these next five races is going to be significant for us,” he told BlackBook Motorsport.

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Viewing figures for Nascar’s debut on Prime Video are yet to be officially announced, but BlackBook Motorsport understands they will be in the region of 2.5 million. The Coca-Cola 600 has averaged 3.61 million since 2021.

Nascar commissioner Steve Phelps had previously said that he expected viewership on Prime Video to be “at least as good as what we’d see on cable”. The Nascar Cup Series has averaged 2.2 million viewers on cable since 2020.

While Nascar can claim an encouraging debut on Prime Video, Kennedy added that the series has been working to ensure it remains visible on the platform outside of races and maintains momentum. 

He continued: “We also launched a documentary on Dale Earnhardt last Thursday, that’s already been number one on Amazon Prime. I was on Amazon Prime last night and it was still number one, so [that ranking] for the first four or five days is great.

“We have another documentary coming out with Amazon Prime here in a couple of days documenting the Garage 56 efforts where we developed a car to tick the [24 Hours of] Le Mans a couple of years ago for our 75th anniversary.”

Nascar moves onto Nashville Superspeedway for its next race on Prime Video. The race has averaged three million viewers across the last four seasons, so it will be intriguing to see how sticky the platform’s audience is for the second race of the partnership.