Steve Phelps cites NASCAR TV ratings as point of pride from 2024 season

The 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season is now one month in the books, a season in which viewership was up 1% from the 2023 campaign.

Given the disastrous start to the season from a ratings perspective, in which weather impacted many of sports’ premier events such as the Daytona 500, NASCAR President Steve Phelps said that being positive over last season in viewership was one of the things he took the most pride in from 2024.

“The close finishes, that was really cool,” Phelps recently told Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic. “The continued schedule innovation, I think our fans have come to expect that, and you’ll see that again in ’25. It’s pretty cool that 23XI competed for a championship so soon in their life cycle of being a race team. And one of the things I’m most proud of is, if you look at the [TV] ratings, we started off minus-27 [percent] and somehow, we finished in the positive numbers from a viewership standpoint.

“I think that is a testament for the strength of the fan base and where the sport is and the popularity of the sport.”

While overall viewership was up, ratings for the Cup Series championship race at Phoenix were slightly down from the previous season. The race, won by Joey Logano, drew 2.895 viewers on NBC.

Steve Phelps addresses ratings after multiple rain-impacted races during season

During his “State of the Sport” address two days before the championship race, Phelps cited the impact weather had on The Clash at the Coliseum, Daytona 500 and Coca-Cola 600. Phelps touted the resilience of the sport and said that “support is growing.”

“Ratings, I’ll spend a little time on ratings, because it’s super important,” Steve Phelps said. “I want to go back and have a little story time. The beginning of this year, in early February, we had an event, The Clash at the Coliseum. And we were looking at a historic atmospheric river event, I believe, is what they called it. It was just — a lot of rain, I guess we’ll go with that.

“So, we did something we had never done before. We pulled a race up a day, and we raced on Saturday night. Got crushed in the rating. Fans didn’t know when it was, how we’re going to get there. Saturday night is the lowest-rated day of the week, but it was the right thing to do. It was a financial bath for us, but it was the right thing to do, for the industry.

“Go two weeks down the road [Daytona 500], and we had more rain. And so, we delayed the start of that race a full day, and we took a ratings bath. So, we were down -27. Then, we had a rain-shortened race at the Coca-Cola 600. A rain-interrupted event at the Chicago Street Race. So, three of your biggest races are down double-digits. So mid-teens for the 600 and for the Chicago Street Race, and then -27 [Daytona 500].

“If you would ask me at the beginning of the year, ‘I will bet you that you can dig out of a 27% hole at the 500, and then two double-digit ratings declines on your next two highest-rated races,’ or two of the three highest-rated races, I would have said, ‘There is no way that’s going to happen.’ As we sit here for our Cup race, we are in the positive numbers. And what does that say to me? It says the sport is resilient, and the support is growing.”