Well, it's probably good news for NASCAR that it took until mid-April for there to be headlines about bad ratings.

After an early season run of ratings for Cup Series races holding relatively steady or improving slightly – the Daytona 500 actually saw an 11% increase in viewership – Bristol was a notable disappointment.

Viewership figures for Sunday's race, won by Ty Gibbs, dipped below the two million for the first time since 2018, dropping from 2.05million in 2025 to 1.95million last weekend.

That also marks the lowest TV audience of any Cup Series race this year, perhaps partially explained by the race once again going up against the final round of the Masters – which peaked at 20 million viewers.

NASCAR TODAY: Kyle Busch issues vow as Hendrick Motorsports dealt Cup Series setback

NASCAR ratings down again at Bristol

It's unclear whether the audience drop is simply a blip or whether it will mark the start of a downward spiral of viewership figures on Fox. Interestingly, the O'Reilly Series race the day prior actually added around 200,000 to its 2025 viewership.

The fans who did watch Sunday's race on TV will also have seen what looked like (and, indeed, were) half-empty stands, with an announced crowd of around 70,000 fans in the 140,000+ capacity venue.

While the sparsely populated stands were made to look worse by Bristol's high capacity, the empty seats in combination with the TV figures will raise some eyebrows at NASCAR HQ.

Some fans on social media even used the half-empty stands to call for Bristol to lose one of its two annual Cup Series races, although that would be a drastic move on NASCAR's behalf.

NASCAR's current TV rights deal has drawn some criticism for how severely the season is split up between different broadcasters, with FOX, Prime Video, TNT and NBC all holding rights at various points of the year – and both FOX and NBC splitting the races across two of their channels.

In fact, the longest run of races on the same TV channel all year is just seven races long, with USA having the first seven races of the Chase.

READ MORE: NASCAR Cup Series winners and losers after Bristol Motor Speedway