IndyCar TV ratings for Sonsio Grand Prix take notable dip. What it means for Fox's tenure so far

Indianapolis Star

13-05-2025

INDIANAPOLIS — Following a marginally more closely contested IndyCar race on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, but one again won by Alex Palou all the same, Fox Sports captured an average audience of just 710,000 for Saturday's Sonsio Grand Prix, the second lowest audience of the year and the lowest the race has seen since at least 2016.
This year's race preceding Indianapolis 500 practice week did face stiffer NBA playoff competition than a year ago (Knicks-Celtics this year versus Thunder-Mavericks), along with a PGA Tour tournament that saw year-over-year gains in its own viewership, but it also marks Fox's second IndyCar broadcast that saw a downturn in ratings from a year ago (along with Thermal), along with another race (Barber) that was up significantly over 2024 but relatively flat against other recent broadcasts. Long Beach's audience this spring, though up on 2024 from a strict numbers standpoint (552,000 versus 307,000), marked the historic race's return to a network window after airing on cable in 2024, and this year's audience metrics out-rated only two NBC IndyCar network broadcasts from 2019-2024 — both of which faced NFL competition near the end of the season.
On the backs of a mega audience for the St. Pete season opener — 1.417 million, the largest non-Indy 500 IndyCar audience in 14 years — Fox's early tenure as IndyCar's exclusive U.S. broadcast partner still has the network up 15% on last year's average through the same corresponding broadcasts (including Thermal, even though it was a non-points race). But that boost shrinks to just 1% when looking at IndyCar's first five non-Indy 500 network broadcasts in 2024 (excluding Long Beach and including Road America).
Year over year, NBC's slate in 2024 is actually up on Fox's in 2025 by taking the average audience of IndyCar's first five points races (i.e. not Thermal in 2024) that aired on network TV (outside the 500), meaning St. Pete, Barber, IMS road course, Road America and Mid-Ohio, versus Fox's first five this year: 946,000 (2024) vs. 863,000 (2025).
Given the notable increase in Fox's commercial promotion of the series over the offseason and into this year — including three driver-centric commercials that aired during Fox's Super Bowl coverage — when compared to NBC's approach in recent years, Penske Entertainment officials made clear coming into the 2025 campaign they expected to transition from consistent "single-digit growth" into "rapid growth" with the help of Fox Sports and its enthusiastic Hoosier CEO Eric Shanks. "There's a whole other level of trajectory for IndyCar going forward," Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles told reporters on the eve of the season opener in St. Pete.
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All eyes now focus in on Fox's first Indy 500 broadcast May 25 and the audience it'll be able to capture as it prepares to launch Season 3 of "100 Days to Indy" days before the race on its streaming arm, Fox Nation, along with Fox's increased reach on practice coverage that will air on cable all month (NBC's only ran on streaming), its sizable network qualifying broadcast windows both Saturday and Sunday and its various other Indy 500-related documentary-style programming that it hopes will help create an attention-grabbing runway on the way to the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.
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The TV audience for the Indy 500 hasn't eclipsed 6 million since 2016 (6.01 million), with the high since then coming with Helio Castroneves' historic fourth victory in 2021 (5.63 million). Only four times since the 100th running in 2016 has the race's TV-only audience even surpassed the 5 million mark, including last year's, which averaged 5.02 million, 5.31 million including streaming, an element that Fox doesn't yet have in its arsenal but will in 2026.
Since three consecutive years with average TV audiences for the race above 6 million from 2014-16, the 500's TV metrics have been up and down, with a steady two-year dip in 2017 (5.46 million) and 2018 (4.91 million), before a jump back up in 2019 (5.45 million). After the lowest-rated race during the COVID-19-altered 2020 race (3.67 million), Castroneves' win added back nearly 2 million viewers, the following year lost nearly 1 million right back (4.62 million; 4.8 million with streaming in 2022). Drama-filled endings won by Josef Newgarden in the two years since (4.71 million in 2023, 4.92 million including streaming; and 5.02 million in 2024, 5.31 with streaming) gave the broadcast a notable boost.