In its return to NASCAR, TNT Sports averaged about as many viewers as the sport’s other newcomer this season, Prime Video.
The five-race NASCAR package on TNT Sports averaged 2.1 million viewers, slightly lower than the preceding five races on Amazon Prime Video. Both TNT and Prime came in under the eight-race FS1 portion of the season, which averaged 2.5 million — but also benefited from taking place during the higher-viewed early portion of the season.
TNT finished its run with its largest audience of the season, 2.45 million for Sunday’s Brickyard 400 across TNT (2.3M) and truTV (169K). While that was the smallest audience on record for the race (dates back to 1994) and marked a sharp decline from last year’s 3.63 million on NBC, it was also the largest Cup Series audience since the Coca-Cola 600 on Prime.
(For more on viewership from Indianapolis Motor Speedway, see the Sports Ratings Tracker.)
The five-race average was hamstrung a bit by a rain-wracked Saturday night race from Atlanta that drew just 1.61 million, far below the other four races, each of which topped the two million mark.
The TNT races averaged 177,000 viewers in adults 18-34, up 48 percent from last year’s Cup Series average on cable. That includes 234,000 for the Brickyard 400, nearly double last year’s cable average.
But with a median age of 62, the TNT races were not as young-skewing as those on Prime Video — which averaged a median age of 56 — and came in only slightly younger than the Fox Sports portion of the season (63). A key factor in the older skew is that none of the TNT Sports figures include viewership on HBO Max, which is not included in the company’s Nielsen-reported data.
TNT’s share of the television audience increased 20 percent from last year’s NASCAR cable average, though as television usage declines, any viewership figure will necessarily account for a greater share of viewing.