Prime Time for Nascar

Cable World, Oct 14, 2002

Byline: JON LAFAYETTE

Already the second most-watched sport on TV - behind NFL football - Nascar may throw its ratings into overdrive by moving more of its races into prime time.

"Seeing more prime-time events is a direction we're certainly looking at," said Paul Brooks, VP of broadcasting. "It's an area of great interest to us, to get the sport to reach a potentially new audience."

Three Nascar races are currently running in prime time. The Winston Cup race in Charlotte reached 5.3 million viewers on FX, while two on Fox Broadcasting attracted more than 8 million. Brooks said fans like racing under the lights because it gives those who travel to events an extra day to get home. And it gives organizers more flexibility - if a Saturday night event gets rained out, it can move to Sunday.

Two years ago, Nascar took the rights to its events, which had been controlled by individual racetracks, and consolidated them into a single media package. TV rights are now split among a core group of networks - NBC and Fox on broadcast and TNT, FX and Speed Channel on cable. The arrangement has led to more exposure and higher ratings for cable outlets.

TNT's coverage of Nascar Winston Cup Races delivered more viewers in the 18-to-49 demographic - 2.8 million - than any other sports package on cable, other than the NFL. FX's telecast of a Winston Cup Race ranked just behind TNT, with 2.3 million viewers. By comparison, the NBA playoffs on TBS and TNT drew fewer than 2 million viewers in the demographic. Three Nascar events were among the top 50 programs on ad-supported basic cable during the season. The Pepsi 400 race on TNT Aug. 18 drew a 5.3 household rating, representing 4.5 million homes.

Nascar has also been working with In Demand to give fans a behind-the-steering-wheel view of the races in the form of Nascar in Car. Neither In Demand nor Nascar would provide the number of subscribers who have signed up. "It's been a great program for us, for Nascar and for the cable operator," said Rob Jacobson, EVP at In Demand.

Nascar in Car was launched in June. By switching between digital channels, subscribers can watch races from inside several of the drivers' cars.

The program is still a work in progress. "We've played around with the programming a little bit, added a leader board, tweaked some of the graphics," Jacobson said. The biggest change was to drop the broadcast race feed in favor of another in-car camera. The Nascar package is different from In Demand's NBA and NHL offerings of out-of-market games. "Those provide fans with games they can't get otherwise," he said. "This is for fans who wants to enhance and augment coverage they're already getting."

"We don't have out-of-market games to repackage and sell," said Jeffrey Pollack, Nascar's managing director of new media and broadcasting. "We had to come up with a creative solution."

Pollack said Nascar in Car is part of Nascar's efforts to reach fans on a variety of platforms, from the Internet to radio.

Ratings of races on Turner have shown double-digit growth two years in a row. "If you'd asked me at the end of last season is there still room for this kind of growth, I would have said yes. But we never would have guessed we'd have seen the increase we've seen this year," said Steve Raab, SVP of sports marketing and programming at TNT.

"Our broadcast partners have done a tremendous job with the product," said Nascar's Brooks.

In addition to the ratings, Nascar programming has helped networks increase their distribution, first with FX and now with Speed Channel, which will add more live racing coverage now that it has acquired the rights to Nascar's Craftsman Truck Series beginning with the 2003 season. The truck races had previously been on ESPN.

Just last week, Medicaom signed a deal to increase distribution of Speed Channel. Nascar programming already generates the network's highest ratings.

Before Speed Channel was acquired by Fox and became a part of the Nascar rotation, 72% of Nascar fans didn't know about it. "For us to be a U.S.-based motorsports network and not have a Nascar relationship, that's kind of like a football network being all about soccer," said Jim Liberatore, president of Speed Channel.

Liberatore said that since adding Nascar programming, ad sales have tripled. "When you're a part of that Nascar profile and the ratings start to come up, you really get on a lot of radar screens we weren't on."