NASCAR exec discusses later start times

This year, NASCAR has been impacted particularly hard by adverse weather, forcing some races to conclude later in the day or even be bumped to Monday. That’s led to some clamor for the sport to start races earlier, but that hasn’t totally come to fruition quite yet.

In an interview with Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch , NASCAR Senior Vice President, Broadcasting & Innovation Brian Herbst said that for every hour later a race starts, viewership increases by five percent.

So why does NASCAR stay with mid-and-late afternoon starts? “I’d say it’s a balancing act, like almost everything that we do here,” NASCAR Senior Vice President, Broadcasting & Innovation Brian Herbst told Sports Media Watch on Wednesday. Beyond having to balance the concerns of the tracks, the teams, the drivers, the sponsors and the media partners, NASCAR must also balance two separate groups of fans: those in attendance and those watching on television.

The impact of an earlier start on that television audience is not trivial. For every hour a race is moved back, NASCAR estimates a five percent viewership hit. “If you look at it purely from a data perspective, you’re averaging 3 million viewers per event. That 10 percent from 3:00 pm to 1:00 pm is about 300,000 viewers, just broadly speaking,” per Herbst.

A recent example is the annual Cup Series race from Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which gained about 500,000 viewers after moving from a 1 PM ET start in 2021 to a 2:30 PM start in 2022. “If the overarching goal is to drive fan interest in the sport and make sure there’s as many people that are paying attention to your sport as possible, trying to get those 300,000 extra viewers on a typical Sunday is important.”

Not all people in the NASCAR world feel the same way. On his podcast this week , Denny Hamlin said NASCAR should take less money from media rights deals for better start times. NASCAR’s next round of media rights deals with Fox, NBC, Amazon, and Warner Bros. Discovery begins in 2025.

Both sides have fair points, but given that NASCAR holds races all across the country, consistent start times might be difficult. For instance, if all races started at 1 p.m. ET, that would mean a 10 a.m. PT start for races being held on the west coast, which doesn’t seem ideal for fans attending in person.

We’ll see if changes come to the schedule next year with the new media rights partners coming into the picture.

[ Sports Media Watch ]

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