What happened to Nascar’s TV ratings

By Mike Mulhern
Media General News Service
Published: September 11, 2008

LOUDON, N.H. - What has happened to NASCAR’s once-soaring TV ratings?

It appears that they’ve crashed and burned over the summer.

And now the sport starts its fall championship chase in a hole, trying to regain momentum among those stock-car racing fans parked in front of their TV sets.

Certainly the bar for this weekend’s TV ratings game here at New Hampshire Motor Speedway isn’t set too high: last fall’s 3.3 on ABC.

(Ratings are a measure of the percentage of all 114.5 million TV homes in the United States that are watching a particular show, according to Nielsen, which said there are 290 million people watching in those 114.5 million households.).

The races will be ABC productions from here on out, the final 10 Sprint Cup title chase races, albeit with the same production crew and on-air talent that ESPN has used this season.

From the ESPN side, the slump clearly isn’t from not throwing enough time, money, energy and people at the NASCAR coverage. No other network has ever put as many assets into the NASCAR game as this bunch.

Still…..

It appears that five factors have led to the TV slump:

First, Turner’s annual six-week early summer TV stint was a bust, and that was a decided drag on the rest of the game.

Second, NASCAR executives not only shot themselves in the foot with that Sunday afternoon tire debacle at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in late July, turning the sport’s second-most important race into a fiasco of 10-lap runs, but their damage-control game plan to get out of that PR jam has been a zero, if there was any game plan at all. As in the wake of the tire debacle at Atlanta in the spring, NASCAR officials briefly pontificated and then did their best to ignore the situation. So what other tire problems lurk ahead?

Third, NASCAR’s Nationwide series, which still has no definitive personality other than as Sprint Cup Lite, has done little to pump up the weekend stock-car TV audience, nothing to really fire it up.

Fourth, the Olympics blew NASCAR away for several weeks in August.

Fifth, NASCAR’s winged car continues to be a major problem — it’s incredibly costly, the racing is worse than ever, and NASCAR executives continue to refuse to address the situation. NASCAR bosses have ordered drivers and crews to stop complaining about the car: Just shut up and drive.

However in hauler after hauler, crewmen are tearing their hair out: “Do you think we like to come to the track each weekend and put on a stinky show?” a championship-contending engineer said. “The car of tomorrow is simply bad physics.”

And it shows. Just consider the whipping Kyle Busch has put on just about every rival nearly every week. Carl Edwards is the only driver who’s been able to stay close to Busch, although Jimmie Johnson now seems to be catching fire.

This Cup season has been just a three-man show at best.

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So how does Julie Sobieski, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions, with motor sports her specialty, view the state of NASCAR on TV this season?

No, NASCAR isn’t going bust, Sobieski said. Rather the sport has found itself the past few weeks in the eye of a perfect storm:

“Everything started off this year on a really great track. Ratings were up across the board on Nationwide (which ESPN has been carrying all season). Fox ended up strong on the Cup on their part of the package. TNT ended up doing well, vs. last year.

“So everything has moving in a real positive trend.

“But where things started to fall off this year were things out of our control. Certainly the competition on the track has been great, especially heading into the chase.

“But we’ve had a number of weather issues on the Cup part of our package.

“And the Olympics were a huge factor, impacting ratings not only on the NASCAR side but other sports, like the NFL, as well.

“The Olympics are a powerful force. And everyone on the sports’ side was impacted, particularly with the Michael Phelps story.

“We still feel good about where we are. It’s just been factors outside our control, like Hanna at Richmond.

“But if you pull those components out, Nationwide coverage is still up, even considering the Olympics — up 12 percent over last year for us, which is a really strong turnaround that we’re excited about.

“And with all the top drivers in the chase, we’re looking ahead to that.”

The Indy tire debacle, the winged car problems — too many plain bad, boring races, Turner’s six-week package — didn’t provide much punch to carry over the good vibes from Fox’s opening half of the season. Plus there is the still relatively weak national impact of Speed Channel’s coverage — although Speed certainly provides heavy saturation programming. Speed, as a channel, doesn’t have nearly the national reach it should have, about six-plus years into its NASCAR operations.

None of that helps NASCAR on TV.

But Sobieski looks on the bright side of things.

“The Indianapolis race, which was ESPN’s second-half kickoff race in July, was up three percent in ratings over last year and up five percent in households,” she said. “Even though there was the issue with the tires, it was still the most watched auto race ever on ESPN.”

But ESPN’s races after Indy were either just even or down in ratings, showing no carry-through. When people left that track, or turned off the TV set that evening, NASCAR seemed to take a decided downturn.

Maybe if NASCAR executives had done a stronger, more forceful job of damage control, things might have gone differently.

Sobieski didn’t care to criticize NASCAR directly.

“Pocono (the next weekend) was a challenge right out of the gate, with the rain delay,” she said.

Montreal’s Nationwide race that same weekend was yet another rainy disaster; NASCAR ordered teams to use those eight-year-old rain tires to run a few laps, and then NASCAR finally pulled the plug on that internationally celebrated event well before the scheduled conclusion.

“And Watkins Glen (the weekend after that) was up against the Olympics. Michigan and Bristol were also up against the Olympics.

“So there were a lot of factors playing into those weeks.

“And Richmond this last weekend, with those phenomenal stories, was a perfect chance for us to get back on track; but unfortunately the hurricane hit and pushed us up against opening weekend of NFL. And then the Tom Brady story got everybody’s attention early in the day as well. So, despite the great stories that have been going on — and we were in a great position coming out of Indianapolis — unfortunate factors have played against us.

“Hopefully now, moving into Loudon, we’ll start to see those trends turn around.”

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One curious, and perhaps unsettling, angle behind the scenes is some growing discontent among NASCAR fans about ESPN’s coverage. Although it’s anecdotal, there are clear signs that ESPN isn’t seen at the moment with the same “love” that the cable-sports operation engendered during its first 20-year run with NASCAR.

ESPN not only carried NASCAR races when no one else wanted them, but ESPN reporters were seen as feisty and undaunted in digging out the news.

Now, after six years on the sidelines, ESPN is back, and back in force, throwing everything it’s got into its NASCAR coverage. ESPN has dozens of announcers and reporters, an army never before seen in this sport. And it’s got 17 different “platforms” for disseminating its news, from the web to Spanish-language radio.

Is ESPN actually giving NASCAR fans too much? Too many announcers, too many things?

Sobieski said: “ESPN is proud to be back with NASCAR. We have a long history with NASCAR. And we expect to be with the sport for a long, long time.

“Our production team, everyone across the board, has a tremendous passion for the sport. We’re always trying to do the best to serve the fans, because we’re all sports fans.

“Certainly the passion of our announcers and our producers for this sport is second to none. We have one great super-team that covers Cup and Nationwide.

“We’ve got a lot of hours of NASCAR programming on the network every weekend, and we have a deep team that allows to get perspectives from Cup champions and owners and crew chiefs, who can speak to the race from so many different perspectives. And they’ve got great chemistry.”

So why the complaints? Perhaps two minor incidents have hurt, a spring move of a race from ESPN2 to ESPN Classic, for an NBA game, and a Labor Day move of the start of a Nationwide race from ESPN2 to Classic, because of a lengthy college football game. ESPN and ESPN2 each reach about 98 million homes; ESPN Classic reaches only 64 million.

Is that part of ESPN taking NASCAR for granted?

Sobieski disagrees. And she said part of the plus for NASCAR being on ESPN is that ESPN is easily the top sports network in the country.

“We have NASCAR programming in the mix with a lot of programming, and the benefit of being with ESPN is that you’re surrounded by sports fans watching live events, and we deliver them from event to event. The downside is that sometimes events run long. Sometimes it’s NASCAR running long, and sometimes, unfortunately, it’s the front-end of a NASCAR race getting impacted by another like – like this time, college football.

“It doesn’t happen often. And it’s something we pay a lot of attention to on the planning side, so it’s balanced and we can protect all of our ‘windows’.

“The good thing about us having multiple networks is we do have a place to serve those fans.”