NASCAR Pulls Into Prime Time

This article is more than 2 years old.

NASCAR continues to gain speed in the race for prime-time television space, landing a new slot on NBC's nighttime schedule and upping the ante in the competitive landscape of sports broadcasting.

On Oct. 11, the UAW-GM Quality 500--one of the sport's biggest races--will be broadcast live at 7 P.M. from Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C. The General Motors -backed race gets a shot at stardom thanks to the tremendous success that NBC had when it aired the Pepsi 400, another major NASCAR event, on July 8. The race sponsored by PepsiCo , was the seventh-most-watched program that week, commanding 20 million viewers.

But as NASCAR's value to both broadcasters and advertisers grows, it loses the very characteristic that originally made the sport so appealing to them: relative affordability. For years, the media saw NASCAR as an inexpensive way to land the valuable but elusive young male demographic, while the cost of broadcasting rights to other sports continue to spiral upward.

NASCAR is now in the third year of its $2.4 billion, six-year contract with General Electric -owned NBC and AOL Time Warner's TNT, which together air half of the season, and News Corp. 's Fox and F/X networks, which air the rest. That's a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the $18 billion that the National Football League scored in its eight-year TV deal, which expires in 2005.

NBC and TNT say that NASCAR's ratings jumped 59% over the 2000-2002 period, and that the numbers continue to grow this year. With such televised success, the broadcasting bidding war that will take place three years from now is bound to escalate sharply.

There already are signs. In June, Nextel Communications agreed to pay roughly $700 million over 10 years (see "Nextel's Push To Talk Profits") to replace the sport's longstanding title sponsor, Winston, which had paid $200 million for a five-year deal. The Nextel deal set a record for sports sponsorship deals, and the wireless telecom had to fight with McDonald's and Coca-Cola for the privilege of paying this king's ransom.

Traditionally, NASCAR races have been Sunday afternoon television fare for fans, but as the sport grows in popularity, and as that popularity has become more widely recognized by the media, it looks as if NASCAR might someday be as much of a network sports fixture as the NFL. An NBC spokesman says that in 2003, NASCAR will have had seven out its 38 races broadcast in prime time, and that next year there will be at least eight prime-time races.


NASCAR's increasing popularity is in large part thanks to its network deal. Prior to the deal, it used to be tough for fans to find NASCAR on TV, since it bounced around from Walt Disney 's ESPN to Viacom 's CBS. "For years, fans didn't know where to go," says Bill Carroll Bill Carroll , Katz Television Group's vice president of programming, who works as a liaison between advertisers and television stations. "Now NASCAR is being consistently promoted, and people know where to find them."

As a result of this improved accessibility, NASCAR is catching on in urban markets well beyond the Southeastern U.S. states long considered the sport's stronghold. This year's NASCAR ratings jumped by 57% in Hartford, Conn., 50% in Portland, Ore., and by 26% in Boston.

And as long as viewership numbers continue to climb, undoubtedly so too will the networks' willingness to bid up what were once bargain broadcasting rights.

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