A Rolex to remember
It was an instant classic. In the same way last May's Indianapolis 500 became an immediate thriller, but longer. Much longer. One week after the Rolex 24 At Daytona concluded, I'm still smiling, thinking about the transformative nature of the latest IMSA season opener.
As I noted when the formula launched, 2023 was the year of GTP and it has continued to grow from the initial four manufacturers who founded the category to six when Aston Martin joins next month at Sebring. And with the addition of Ford and its Mustang to a packed field, 2024 was the year of GT racing in IMSA's WeatherTech Sportscar Championship. So what's 2025?
It's everything we witnessed at the Rolex 24: Hardcore, hip-checking, nose-punching competition. Great cars — and a great many cars, 61 in total — locked in a torrid IMSA cage match with WWE-style fighting and dramas that won't be easily forgotten.
Drivers hammered each other on the opening lap and it continued through to the end as relentless aggression, misfortune, adversity, and reliability woes ensured the 63rd edition of the race was interesting for the majority of its 1440 minutes. We even got the world's best racing meme, courtesy of Corvette Racing and Tommy Milner.
Penske pulled off a remarkable back-to-back overall win. Ford broke through the first big win for its Pony car, as did Corvette with the Z06 GT3.R, but not with the factory team in the GTD PRO class; in the pro-am GTD division with the Canadian AWA team. BMW was on pole and in contention for most of the GTP race, which was an encouraging development, and LMP2 was the real test of endurance as it seemed like nobody wanted to win.
And when the class was won, the Tower Motorsports team was disqualified for an indisputable technical infraction…which it disputed, of course, and its appeal was denied…which awarded the victory to United Autosports. Even after the race, the drama continued.
And the range of numbers that have come in from the Rolex 24 in recent days suggest the feeling experienced on the ground at Daytona were real and trending upward for IMSA.
The series' broadcaster has yet to confirm the ratings, but the race's opening stanza on NBC is said to be up eight percent over 2024, which is good; it's the overarching metrics across all of the television and streaming metrics that represent major movement for IMSA.
Including cable with the USA Network and streaming on Peacock where a peak Total Audience Delivery (TAD) of 1.4 million viewers was produced, an average TAD of 901,000 people followed the race, which was a staggering viewership increase of 140 percent from last year. The year-to-year growth in streaming was also impressive at 33 percent.
Positioned against NASCAR's ratings for the Daytona 500 or IndyCar's Indianapolis 500, IMSA's Rolex 24 watchers are a comparatively small group, but the encouraging news here is in the rise of that viewing base from 2024 to 2025. With 24 hours of continuous racing segmented and spread across NBC, USA, and Peacock, the Rolex 24 is never going to be a ratings winner like the marquee 500-milers, but the spikes in linear and streaming Rolex audiences have broken a years-long trend of small ratings for IMSA's big opening race.
Fans get a last look at the cars in the garage areas prior to the race. James Gilbert/Motorsport Images
Like NBC, the track hasn't published attendance figures — that's fairly common for Daytona — but the rumor on Sunday as the final hours of racing were underway put the four-day crowd over 100,000, which was highlighted by a bigger assembly of fans in the Turn 1 grandstands than I've ever seen at this race. It obviously wasn't packed like the Daytona 500, but there were a lot of people — and a lot of younger and newer fans — to wade through in the infield and in the garages. Having been to far too many Rolex 24s where I can walk anywhere without being slowed by crowds, the change is welcomed.
I've also been to more than a few Rolex 24s where a specific car or team dominated and had the race won long before the checkered flag was unfurled. Those Rolex 24s were tedious affairs. As the clock wound into the last 30 minutes on Sunday, the top three in each of the four classes were caught in serious battles for victory as leads changed hands, and in GTP, the first three cars to reach the finish line were separated by 4.4s.
The same was true in LMP2 with the top three being close, and in GTD PRO, the top three were 5.7s apart at the stripe. GTD is where the real party took place as the top eight hit the finish line separated by 10.5s. All after 24 hours of racing.
Digital growth is the arena where IMSA might have made the biggest strides at Daytona as its use of YouTube as its strongest international promotional tool, and its content on the most popular social media platforms reached new heights.
The series put out a press release during the race that said its airing of the live event on YouTube — exclusively for those outside North America — had garnered 2,000,000 viewers. Once the race was over, the final tally had risen considerably and was just a tick under 3,000,000 at 2,930,130.
As a result of introducing so many new people to IMSA and the Rolex 24, the series' YouTube subscriber base exploded once more. It was at 602,000 on January 1, and at the time of writing, was up to 750,583, a jump of 24.7 percent via the 148,583 people who've started following IMSA's primary digital video outlet since the new year. There was also a point during the race where the subscriber number hit 720,000, which surpassed the 719,000 held by its European friends at the FIA World Endurance Championship.
At 750,583 YouTube subscribers, IMSA ranks second among domestic racing series behind its parent company NASCAR (1,340,000) and has distanced itself from IndyCar (392,000) and the NHRA (235,000). IMSA's first-time use of a drone for its full-field shoot produced over 3,000,000 views, which was record, and on social, it had 10 Rolex 24 posts with more than 1,000,000 views apiece, which was another record for the series.
These are all huge wins for IMSA, but I don't view the TV, crowd, and digital metrics in a tribal manner for the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. I'm hoping the numbers are indicators of what's to come for every major domestic series this year. NASCAR's return to Bowman Gray generated encouraging ratings last weekend, and with IndyCar's move to FOX, the series and its paddock expect a meaningful hike in its audience size with all 17 races featured on the network.
Add in the newfound and ongoing passion for Formula 1 in the U.S. which has been setting attendance records with its three visits and continues to build an impressive fanbase and ratings across ABC/ESPN, and it feels like racing is taking a step forward at home. There's a curiosity for racing that appears to extend beyond monoliths like NASCAR and F1, and that also makes me smile.
It was a Rolex 24 to remember, and if I'm right, we'll be saying the same thing when the metrics arrive after the 500s and the other keystone races we love.
Story originally appeared on Racer
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