The excitement in NASCAR does not appear to be dwindling in terms of on-track action, but is that translating into results for broadcasters? Not really. Over time, there has been a sharp decline in overall viewership, with Bob Pockrass recently shedding light on the biggest reasons behind it.
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From a peak viewership of over 7 million per race in the mid-2000s to barely 2.5 million viewers per race in 2024, the contrast has been stark and worrying.
Pockrass was engaged in a conversation on the Awful Announcing podcast when he said that one of the reasons for the downfall could be the lack of stars such as Rusty Wallace or even Danica Patrick. He believes that such popular names had fans more interested in watching races than most of the ones on the track today do. But there was another crucial point he made.
Pockrass firmly opined that the decline in the general love affair for cars and the lack of aggressive brand loyalty could be reasons why NASCAR isn’t so appealing anymore.
He said, “10 or 15 years ago, if you were in the Talladega parking lot, you would see on the back of cars, you’d see on the windshield, you’d see cartoons of Calvin and Hobbs peeing on a logo of another car manufacturer, right?”
“If it were a Chevy, they were peeing on the Ford logo. If it were a Ford, they were peeing on the Chevy logo. And I think, you know, NASCAR is partially just a victim of the lack of a car culture. There certainly is less of an affinity to a certain brand.”
The change in society’s thinking dictates where the auto industry is going. And those changes are something very challenging to predict.
Denny Hamlin’s opinion on the dropping TV ratings
Hamlin is someone who has a little bit more to worry about dropping TV ratings than the average driver, considering he co-owns 23XI Racing. In an episode of the Actions Detrimental podcast earlier this year, he gave out his thoughts on the declining viewership and ratings. One of the strongest points he made was that NASCAR is stuck with its current TV deal (until 2031) and can’t do much.
He added, “(The ratings are) just not good. I mean, we signed the deal that we signed. We obviously lost a significant amount of network races in this TV deal. In each one of the TV deals that we’ve signed over the last few years or the past few agreements that we’ve had, we’ve always just taken the most amount of money.”
Hamlin believes that fans running around from one channel to the next throughout the season is one of the crucial reasons for the drop. Just as many other stock car aficionados do, he just looks at the past when NASCAR was a sport strong enough to even beat the likes of the NFL in terms of viewership and yearns for those days to return.
