NBCSN will air IndyCar iRacing event Saturday
INDIANAPOLIS – NBC Sports will broadcast IndyCar’s second round of its iRacing Challenge on Saturday at 2:30 p.m. ET on NBCSN, according to an announcement from the series and the network.
The race will take place on a virtual Barber Motorsports track in place of the originally scheduled Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama that was set for this weekend on the 2020 schedule. Like last weekend’s kickoff IndyCar iRacing event, NBC’s typical broadcast group of Leigh Diffey, Paul Tracy and Townsend Bell will be on the race call.
Wednesday’s news represents a large growth opportunity for IndyCar’s viewership numbers, after the series drew more than 400,000 total live viewers for last Saturday’s kickoff race for the Challenge that ran on the Watkins Glen road course.
That number grew to 600,000 total race views by Monday when including additional personal streams from the 24 drivers who participated in the race, won by Dreyer and Reinbold Racing driver Sage Karam, who drove away from the field from the pole position.
Now on cable TV, IndyCar will have a chance to see how its viewership numbers stack up against NASCAR as both racing series will make up some of the only live sports shown on TV networks this weekend.
During its first two weekends of iRacing cable broadcasts – first on FS1, and then on both FS1 and Fox last Sunday – NASCAR has been on a record-breaking streak in terms of average viewership across an esports broadcast.
Last Sunday during a virtual race at Texas Motor Speedway, NASCAR drew an average of 1.3 million viewers – the most ever for an esports TV broadcast. The record broke the series’ own mark from the week prior in its first iRacing event set at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
During the 2019 IndyCar season, the series averaged 1.105 million viewers over 16 of the series’ 17 races at any given point of a race (not including the weather-affected Iowa race). Particularly on NBCSN, the season opener at St. Petersburg, Florida, a year ago drew an average of 449,000 viewers during the broadcast. NBCSN’s most-watched IndyCar broadcast in 2019 was Pocono, which averaged 553,000 viewers.
At the moment, Saturday’s race is the only one of the remaining five IndyCar iRacing Challenge events scheduled to be broadcast on NBCSN.