Nascar hits season-low viewership in Michigan with 1.77m viewers on Prime Video

• Viewership down 16.2% compared to last year’s Michigan race, which averaged 2.11m viewers on USA Network
• Last year’s comparable weekend in Sonoma averaged 2.9m viewers on Fox

Nascar averaged 1.77 million viewers for its Cup Series race at Michigan Speedway on Amazon Prime Video, its lowest audience of the 2025 season.

The audience was a 16.2 per cent decrease on last year’s race at Michigan, which averaged 2.11 million viewers on USA Network. However, the 2024 edition took place much later in the regular season in August and was postponed until Monday night, impacting viewership.

Looking at the comparable 2024 race at Sonoma Raceway, which aired on Fox on 9th June, there is a much more significant year-over-year (YoY) audience decrease of 38.9 per cent.

Nascar is now averaging 2.18 million viewers through its first three races on Prime Video after hitting 2.72 million in Charlotte and 2.06 million viewers in Nashville. Nascar states that it is averaging 2.27 million viewers through its first three races on Prime Video.

Considering this is a new broadcast partnership, the viewership so far is not an overly disappointing result for the series. The three-race run that began with Charlotte last season averaged 2.82 million viewers and, while not an exact science, Prime Video is currently 22.5 per cent down on that benchmark.

The promising news is that, over that same three-race run, Nascar is posting YoY gains in the 18 to 34 demographic (up 32 per cent), the 18 to 49 age range (up 11 per cent) and viewers aged between 25 and 54 (up 21 per cent).

Nascar commissioner Steve Phelps said in March that he expected Prime Video’s audience to be “at least as good as what we’d see on cable”, setting a clear benchmark for viewership performance. Attracting a younger audience is also a positive sign for the series’ long-term health.

In many ways, Nascar’s performance on Prime Video so far has echoes of the National Football League (NFL) during its first year on the streaming platform.

Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football (TNF) package averaged 9.58 million viewers across its 15 regular season games in 2022, a considerable decrease on the audience of 16.2 million that Fox attracted the year prior.

However, Amazon was keen to highlight its youthful NFL audience, claiming it had the youngest median age of any NFL broadcaster since 2013. Viewership was also up 11 per cent from last season among the 18 to 34-year-old demographic.

Factoring in the latter stat, that means the NFL saw a larger drop in overall viewership and a smaller gain in the 18 to 34 demographic in the first year of its deal with Amazon compared to Nascar so far.

Jay Marine, Amazon Prime Video’s global head of sports, said in 2023 the platform was “playing the long game” with its TNF rights. Prime Video averaged 13.2 million viewers for the 2024 NFL season, an 11 per cent increase compared to 11.86 million viewers in 2023.

With Prime Video locked in for another six years as part of Nascar’s new US$7.7 billion broadcast deal, the series will be hoping to replicate the viewership gains seen by the NFL.