NASCAR TV Ratings Strong At Road Courses In 2016

NASCAR may only visit road courses twice during the season, the ratings say the fans love them and want more.

Most people are saying that the decline from a 2.4 in 2015 to a 2.1 Sunday in ratings for the race from Watkins Glen on Sunday was a bad thing. I am not in that camp. The race aired on USA network for the first time and all the preliminary broadcasts were on CNBC. For NASCAR to draw 3.8 million viewers, just 100,000 fewer than last season, while going head to head with the first weekend of the Olympics is quite an accomplishment. It did lead all cable sports broadcasts for Sunday. Top that off with a sell out at the track and you have a very successful NASCAR weekend.

In all honesty, I would have been happy with a drop in the 20%-25% range with the stiff competition from NBC networks itself. Even the Xfinity race from the glen was able to get over a million viewers on CNBC Saturday against heavy Olympic coverage over all the NBC family of networks. I wrote about this after the Brickyard 400, if the fans want to watch, they will find NASCAR racing. These numbers also prove that fans like road course racing. Jeff Gluck of USA Today posted a poll he has been running all season showing two of the top four rated races for fans in 2016 have been Sonoma and Watkins Glen.

You can write the emotional Tony Stewart victory as a reason for the Sonoma results, but Watkins Glen was just fans enjoying the races. The storyline during the race did not include Tony Stewart or Jeff Gordon, yet the audience for the race continued to build until the end according to NBC.

On the social media side, things were not quite as upbeat as the viewership numbers. Neilsen introduced the long awaited update of their social media ratings. It now includes more from Facebook and deeper mining of keywords in postings on multiple platforms. I know NASCAR has long said that their presence on Facebook was not being represented, but without an unbiased source for the information it was always questionable at best. Well now we have a much more detailed view of NASCAR on social media.

Not surprisingly, the olympics dominated the social media landscape for the week. What was a bit of a shock, four MLB games and a soccer match rounded out the top ten with NASCAR nowhere in sight. For Sunday alone, the race from Watkins Glen did place fourth, virtually tied with golf in posts and unique authors. It will be very interesting to see how NASCAR is able to do with this new reading from Neilsen after the olympics end.

Related Story: The Good, Bad and Ugly from the Glen

Next week is a week off for the Spring Cup series, but it returns in two for one of the most anticipate races of the year. The night race at Bristol is a fan favorite and right in prime time. It will be very interesting seeing the numbers on the viewership and social media side to see if NASCAR is starting to turn around a little. That would be a great story for NASCAR and its broadcast partners.