When Sunday's IndyCar race at Thermal Club cut to the NASCAR Cup Series race at Homestead-Miami Speedway for more than 20 minutes due to a failed circuit breaker in the TV compound, many fans were justifiably frustrated.
Even more frustrating was the fact that it was considered "bonus" coverage of the Homestead race. But in order to have a bonus, you need to have a regular broadcast first, and the fans who tuned into Fox for the IndyCar race had no interest in watching Fox Sports 1's NASCAR broadcast. Therefore, there was nothing "bonus" about it, and that half-hearted effort to placate fans didn't work.
However, as we usually see among a contingent of IndyCar fans, whenever NASCAR is shown or even mentioned, all you hear are unwarranted criticisms of the sport and other goofy claims like "nobody wants to watch NASCAR!"
That crowd got some pretty discouraging news after Sunday.
IndyCar lost more than 50% of its audience from the season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, which was the most viewed non-Indy 500 IndyCar race since 2011, with an average of only 704,000 fans tuning in to the Thermal Club event.
On the flip side, more than 2.4 million people tuned into the race that supposedly nobody wanted to watch, even with that race being on Fox Sports 1 as opposed to Fox.
While IndyCar's entire 17-race schedule being on Fox, versus a split between Fox and Fox Sports 1 like we saw when the series was on NBC and split between NBC and USA Network, was a huge (actual) bonus for the series in year number one of the new Fox deal, part of the reason NASCAR agreed to its new deal with a continuation of a split is because fans are going to watch whether a race is on Fox or Fox Sports 1.
In fact, of the 38 Cup Series races, only nine are on regular Fox or NBC this year, compared to 19 on Fox Sports 1 or USA Network. Five each are set to be shown on Amazon Prime Video and TNT Sports, the two new partners included in the new seven-year, $7.7 billion deal.
And Sunday was a perfect example of that.
Because as strong as IndyCar's upward trajectory has been overall, NASCAR is still king in the United States, and it isn't close.
Sure, the power outage didn't help, and fans already have more than a few reasons to be frustrated with Fox's IndyCar coverage through the season's first two races. But that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
And of course, we'd be remiss not to mention the fact that maybe, just maybe, waiting three weeks for race number two after such a positive start to the season is a terrible idea from an IndyCar scheduling standpoint.
You cannot take momentum for granted, and you cannot take your viewers for granted, especially those who may have tuned into Fox for their first IndyCar race in St. Petersburg. If there was any year to not have that break between the first two races, this was it. It didn't happen.
Promotion is one thing, and Fox have done a remarkable job of that; their Alex Palou, Pato O'Ward, and Josef Newgarden commercials during the Super Bowl were valued at roughly $30 million, an amount higher than the series' entire $25 million broadcast rights deal.
But execution is another, and even aside from an outage that, for all intents and purposes, wasn't actually that huge of a deal in the grand scheme of things, that has objectively left a lot to be desired so far in 2025.
The next race on the 2025 IndyCar schedule is the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, which is set to be shown live on Fox from the streets of Long Beach, California beginning at 4:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, April 13. Start a free trial of FuboTV and don't miss any of the action!