NASCAR San Diego TV ratings highlight major dilemma facing the sport

The viewing figures are in for Prime Video's five-race NASCAR Cup Series run after wrapping up at San Diego, and the numbers are...interesting.

The numbers for Prime itself are great – viewership is up, and their excellent hour-long postrace show hit a million-viewer average for the first time, up 8 per cent from 2025.

Those numbers track with the general sentiment about the Prime viewership experience, which has been positive thanks in part to a well-liked announce booth and a lengthy postrace show which gives the panel time to really dig into analysis with drivers.

That reception, for a broadcaster's sophomore season covering a sport, is great. Well done Prime, the following is not about you specifically.

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NASCAR viewers still skew very old

The median age of viewers for NASCAR on Prime was 57.7 years old – the youngest of any network covering the sport. That...is a problem.

Rather, it's representative of a larger problem. NASCAR is still, despite some much-needed rule changes and a great publicity campaign coming into the 2026 season, still struggling to attract younger viewers.

That 57.7 year-old mark is more than five years younger than the average NASCAR viewer on linear television (63.1), with a fairly consistent streaming/linear TV age gap across sports in general.

If you're not following, that means that the hip young end of the NASCAR audience – the streamers, not the sit-on-the-couch-with-the-cable-package lot – are still older than those who watch almost any other sport (except MLB, which has its own fan age crisis) on linear TV.

Put another way: NASCAR's streaming audience is older than the streaming audience of every other sport. It's also older than the TV audience of almost every sport. NASCAR must – must! – find a way to fix that, or its numbers for the racing we love will continue to dwindle and fade as the years go by.