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Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 had its biggest television audience in 17 years.
Alex Palou’s victory averaged 7.05 million viewers on Fox, according to Nielsen. That is the largest audience since 2008, when Scott Dixon’s win averaged 7.25 million on ABC. That was also the first year of a combined open-wheel series between the Indy Racing League and Champ Car World Series.
The viewer numbers peaked at 8.44 million for the race’s conclusion from 4:15-4:30 p.m.
This is the first year that Fox has the IndyCar package. IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway had a long relationship with ABC from 1965 until 2018 while NBC aired the prestigious race from 2019 through 2024.
It was a 40% increase from last year, when the race averaged 5.02 million on NBC in a race that was delayed by four hours.
It was only the second time since 2001 that the Indianapolis 500 has outdrawn the Daytona 500 in TV viewership. The Feb. 16 race averaged 6.76 million, but was delayed twice by rain for a total of 3-1/2 hours.
TV ratings got a boost from this year’s decision to lift the traditional local blackout, which has prevented central Indiana viewers from watching the live broadcast of the race throughout much of its history, except for a few exceptions.
Last year’s race was shown live locally because of the 4-hour rain delay. The blackout also was lifted in 2020 when COVID-19 prevented spectators from attending the race and in 2016 for the sold-out 100th running of the event.
This year’s blackout was dropped because the track’s grandstands were sold out well before the day of the race.
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The 500 is fantastic!! You’d think, though, that the geniuses handling traffic might figure out how to get cars moving!! We sat eastbound on 16th Street for well over an hour….no movement…these folks shut it down! I don’t know how to fix this but maybe we could hire Elon Musk for 3 minutes to figure it out!! I realize that post-race traffic is a relatively new phenomenon…It’s only been 114 years to figure it out…but damn, folks, this is worse than a joke!
350k people leaving at the same time and you expected a speedy departure. An hour isn’t that bad.
We didn’t have that problem. The problem we experienced, though, was encountering road closures for construction (i.e., Dandy Trail and Washington St.), and ended up having to take a much longer route around the city to get home. We parked on the west end of the city park there by St. Christopher. We went west and got as far away from the track as possible.
Were you coming from the track itself, like the infield? I recall reading somewhere that they hold car traffic because of all the pedestrians. Maybe that’s what you encountered?
I agree some of their route closings seem inexplicable but at the same time I’ve been stuck that long leaving concerts and other major events with a fraction of the attendance. I’ve been stuck more than 30 minutes trying to get out of a parking garage after a Pacers game.
The Fox broadcast was very good. EXCEPT, they were in commercial at the start when the green flag was thrown. That is one of the most exciting parts of the race. Cars were alteady spread when they came back live. Who was the genius that thought the commercial was more important???
Pre-race interviews and discussion was very interesting.
Largest viewership because it was televised in their own area. Duh
The Central Indiana blackout region usually accounts for between 300k to 400k viewers. That’s a piece of the story, but it’s not as much as you’d think.
Record viewership and that’s with Chris Myers in the booth.