IndyCar maintains recent TV audience despite head-to-head battle with Brickyard 400
- IndyCar registered an average audience of 734,000 for Sunday's Fox broadcast of its race at Laguna Seca.
- This year's Laguna Seca race broadcast marks the second-most-watched IndyCar race there since the series' return in 2019.
Despite running against one of NASCAR’s Crown Jewel events – the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Brickyard 400 – Sunday, IndyCar's race at Laguna Seca held serve in its recent run of average audience sizes on Fox, registering 734,000 viewers for Alex Palou’s dominant run to his eighth win of 2025.
The average audience size matched IndyCar’s from the previous weekend for the Toronto street race, and it exceeded both races at Iowa Speedway, though it also continued a run of six consecutive IndyCar races that have failed to hit 800,000 viewers in a season where nine of 14 races have failed to do so.
According to previous viewership data provided by NBC, Sunday’s IndyCar race at Laguna Seca marks the series’ most-watched race at the track since IndyCar returned in 2019, though each race at the track from 2019-23 (four total, as IndyCar skipped its 2020 due to the pandemic) ran during the opening weeks of the NFL season and experienced a significant drop in ratings even while running on network TV. (Note: Fox’s release Tuesday says IndyCar’s 2021 race drew an average audience of 750,000, though NBC at the time reported an averaged Nielsen-rated audience of 715,000. A Fox spokesperson told IndyStar the viewership discrepancy comes due to Nielsen reprocessing data since the pandemic which has changed some ratings figures from that time).
Though not a truly accurate comparison due to the conflict with NFL regular season action, NBC’s network average for IndyCar races at Laguna Seca was 623,000.
Last year’s race at the track that was held in June and scheduled to run on USA Network – the first instance of a Laguna Seca race running on cable since the series’ return in 2019 – but that was bumped to CNBC due to USA’s broadcast of that day’s NASCAR Cup series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway running long due to weather delays. It drew an average audience of less than 100,000 viewers.
As the IndyCar paddock takes a quick breather after five races over four consecutive weekends, Laguna Seca’s audience figures give the series and its new exclusive broadcast partner an average audience of just 707,600 through its jam-packed July slate, down compared to network-only figures from recent years with NBC, including: last year’s non-500 network-only slate with (868,571) and without (932,833) the finale that ran against Week 2 of the NFL season.
Sunday’s race at Laguna Seca marked IndyCar’s sixth race this year that ran up against significant competition from NASCAR – including its second race that ran head-to-head with its biggest North American-only racing competition, the other being The Thermal Club’s debut as a points-paying race that ran up against Homestead’s Cup series race as well as the second round of March Madness action. IndyCar races at Long Beach (Cup at Bristol), Road America (Cup rain delay coverage from Pocono), Mid-Ohio (Cup at Chicago) and Iowa Race 1 (Xfinity at Sonoma) saw the bulk of on-track action face significant head-to-head competition.
IndyCar’s next race at Portland International Raceway Aug. 10 is likely to run almost entirely against the Cup series race at Watkins Glen, though the final races of the year at The Milwaukee Mile and Nashville Superspeedway will not face Cup series competition with NASCAR holding a Saturday night race at Daytona, followed by a Sunday evening one at Darlington.
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