Rolling into this weekend’s Indianapolis 500, both the NTT IndyCar series and Fox are moving at top speed toward their goals for the collaboration.
In June 2024, IndyCar announced that it was shifting partners from NBCUniversal to Fox and putting all 17 of its races, plus two days of qualifying rounds for the Gainbridge-sponsored Indy 500, on live network broadcasts. The circuit saw immediate dividends during its opening race in St. Petersburg, when Fox drew an audience of 1.42 million—a viewership level IndyCar hadn’t hit since the 2011 Indianapolis 500 and 45% higher than last year’s opener on NBC, according to Sports Media Watch.
As Fox announced during its upfront earlier this month, IndyCar viewership is up 25% on Fox from the same time last year. That didn’t happen in a vacuum, as Fox began marketing IndyCar in fall and early winter during its college football and National Football League broadcasts, using its other Fox Sports properties to boost awareness of IndyCar.
“We were able to use that platform to start advertising and talking about IndyCar and the drivers to a wide audience, and that was an important part of the liftoff of the new season and the new relationship with Indy continued that through the playoffs and the Super Bowl,” said Robert Gottlieb, president of marketing at Fox Sports. “We’ve used our NASCAR broadcast, beginning with the Daytona 500, which has large amounts of motorsports fans, and we’re able to talk to them a lot about IndyCar, and so that all led to a pretty virtuous circle that delivered us to our opener at St Petersburg.”
Gottlieb considers the Indianapolis 500 broadcast an inflection point for Fox’s IndyCar coverage, with much of it building to this stage. During the Super Bowl, Fox’s IndyCar ads focused on 26-year-old Mexican driver Pato O’Ward, who dabbles in Formula 1 with McLaren and came in second at last year’s Indy 500 after a raucous final lap. The campaign also featured reigning champion Josef Newgarden, who’s going for his third-consecutive victory after winning the previous two races in Indianapolis on the last lap.
