Racing: Why are motorsports lacking young fans?
By Asher Fair
The MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL in addition to college sports have tons of fans of all age groups. But motorsports are lacking younger fans. Why is this the case?
I have made this reference before, but I will make it again. We live in a world where teenagers and younger children are more likely to tell you who the third string quarterback of the Cleveland Browns is than they are to tell you who won last year’s Indianapolis 500.
Racing, particularly auto racing, simply does not get the attention that most other sports do among younger generations. Sports involving some kind of objective with a ball or a stick often take priority among children and young adults over racing to the point where they would automatically assume any form of motorsport they see on TV is NASCAR whether the cars even look anything like stock cars or not.
I remember being in high school towards the end of my senior year leading up the Indianapolis 500. I was sitting at a computer and continuing where I left off watching the previous year’s Indy 500 on YouTube.
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As I’m watching, a fellow student who was sitting beside me asks, “You ever watch a full jawnt?”
Correctly assuming he was asking me if I ever watched a race from start to finish, I answered, “Yes, every race”, and he seemed to be in utter disbelief before exclaiming, “DAYUMM!”
In that same class, I was also asked if I was watching IndyCar, Formula One, or if they were the same thing. On the bright side, at least that person didn’t ask me if I was watching NASCAR.
But all jokes aside, why is this the case? Why is the younger generation so disinterested with racing as opposed to most other sports? I think the answer lies in promotion, and by promotion I don’t necessarily mean advertising. In fact, I won’t even discuss advertising in this article.
Children are encouraged to start playing sports at extremely young ages, far younger than the generations that make up the bulk of today’s race fans were. In fact, they are pushed harder than ever before to do so, and most children do end up playing at least one school sport from their elementary school days to their high school days.
But one sport that schools don’t and can’t offer is auto racing, which puts auto racing at an immediate disadvantage among the younger generations. When kids are having football, basketball and baseball shoved down their throats from their first day of kindergarten through high school and sometimes college, obviously they’re going to want to watch more of those sports and take after those professional athletes. Who are Jimmie Johnson, Scott Dixon and Lewis Hamilton, anyway?
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Is middle school or high school auto racing even a viable option? Probably not. In fact, definitely not, at least not in the year 2017 anyway. So unfortunately, it may take some thinking outside the box for the popularity of racing to increase among younger generations
But as I also mentioned above, some young children simply have never been introduced to the sport. So who knows? Maybe if someone actually exposes them to it, they will grow to love it. And that starts with race fans of all ages doing their part to make the presence of auto racing felt much more than it is now.