NASCAR has recently made a few small changes to the schedule, where they wanted to change some of the day races to night races. However, their main reasoning for the same was so that the fans do not have to roast out in the summer heat. However, spotter Brett Griffin believes that hosting more and more night races would have an added benefit to the sport.
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The spotter, while speaking on the Door Bumper Clear podcast, recently mentioned all the reasons as to why a race on Sunday night would make sense over any other time. He cited the references to the timings at which the NFL games are broadcasted amongst several broadcasters.
Griffin also mentioned that the rating for night races would be significantly higher than that of daytime races.
Spotter Brett Griffin wants NASCAR to add more night races
During the podcast, he mentioned, “I grew up a NASCAR diehard fan. I pulled for Dale Earnhardt over Michael Jordan. I absolutely love racing. Do I miss the 12:30 start? Yes, but let me ask you something. You’re a sports nut. When is the biggest NFL game played on Sunday? Is it the one o’clock game? Is it the four o’clock games? No… But it’s the Sunday night game. NBC has that big Sunday night game. ESPN on Monday. They don’t play it a bit freaking 5:30…”
“The Sunday ratings in Chicago were phenomenal. Obviously duh. But I think a lot of that helps that it started later and went later and here we are again starting later… I really hope the ratings come out today, tomorrow, and I hope they’re over 3 million.”
Furthermore, he added, “And if they are, I think unfortunately NASCAR employees are gonna just have, the industry’s gonna have to embrace the fact that the ratings are going to be better at night and we have to race when the ratings are going to be at their highest point. Otherwise, the sponsorships are devalued, right?”
NASCAR’s two-night race experiment was a good idea
This year NASCAR tried night races at Nashville and Atlanta Motor Speedway. They had tried to see if it made sense to have the races after the sun went down. Well, as per the statistics that came in, it may seem that NASCAR’s little experiment was highly successful.
The Nashville race had been a sold-out event. Meanwhile, the TV viewership under NBC Sports held at 3.23 million. This was a significant number considering it was the second-highest viewership number for NBC and also a 16% rise in viewers since last year.
Furthermore, following the recent Atlanta race, the viewership peaked at 2.56 Million. While it was not higher than last year’s numbers, it was pretty close since the viewership amounted to 2.6 Million last year. All in all, NASCAR now understands that the night races are not just to help out the fans from the intense heat, but also to help them in terms of their overall popularity.
Therefore, in the near future, we should be anticipating more and more night races joining the Cup Series schedule.
