FOX encouraged by growth of IndyCar youth audience
FOX Sports has become an important part of the IndyCar’s efforts to attract new and younger fans to follow the series it co-owns.
Ahead of the conclusion of its first season of broadcasting the IndyCar Series on Sunday at Nashville Speedway, FOX Sports shared the latest demographic data produced by Nielsen Research which underscores the rapid change in the open-wheel audience’s composition.
Through last weekend’s Snap-on 250 at the Milwaukee Mile, the year-to-year growth in the move from NBC in 2024 to FOX in 2025 has seen a 28-percent rise in viewers between the age of two and 17. The most remarkable development with IndyCar on FOX’s television audience is found in the prized 18-34 age range where a spike of 86 percent has been recorded by Nielsen.
Expanding the age range to 18-49 also comes with a significant improvement of 54 percent, which lends itself to the overarching trend of IndyCar finding more fans with longer runways to follow the series into the future.
It’s a stark change from as recently as 2023 when Nielsen reported the majority of IndyCar’s viewers were much older, with 70 percent listed as being at least 55 years old. Nielsen also documented the coveted 18-34 viewership base as five percent of the audience in 2023.
Once the Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix is completed on Sunday and the broadcast data is generated by Nielsen, FOX and IndyCar will be able to tally the entire 17-race season and provide hard numbers on where the final age ranges fell in 2025.
“The growth of IndyCar among younger viewers is a vivid demonstration of the power of broadcast TV,” Michael Mulvihill, FOX Sports’ president of insights and analytics, told RACER. “We had a belief that if we simply put every race on the biggest and best platform viewers would find it, and they have.”
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