The 68th Daytona 500 received 7.489 million viewers airing on FOX on Sunday afternoon according to data from the Nielsen Panel + Big Data, which has been used since September to measure ratings.
A reminder about Big Panel + Data: Before September, Nielsen used ‘people meters’ in household panels. The new model combines that with data from cable boxes and smart TVs approximately representing 45 million households and 75 million devices.
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Cable and satellite boxes report which channel is being watched, time stamps of when channel changes occur and duration the box remains on a channel. This is called Return Path Data. Smart TVs use Automatic Content Recognition that recognizes content frames, ‘fingerprinting,’ similar to how the Shazam app recognizes songs, using them to identify what kind of content is being played.
Nielsen’s patent shows that ACR “monitors the images on the TV screen” and “images act like fingerprints, which get compared to a large reference library.”
In other words, it’s not an exact science to compare viewership ratings now from before September but both models were the standards of their time. Ultimately, Big Data knows what is on the TV but not who or if anyone is watching where the Panel knows exactly who is watching.
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Anyway, this Daytona 500 number is up from the 6.76 million viewers that watched a rain interrupted and delayed race a year ago. The last Daytona 500 to not be affected by rain in some fashion was 2023, which earned 8.173 million.
However, the race on Sunday was affected by rain too as the start time was moved up an hour to get ahead of a thunderstorm line that arrived just after the race. The Sports Business Journal’s Adam Stern wrote that ‘NASCAR sacrificed about five percentage points from its best-case scenario for viewership by moving the race up an hour to avoid rain, per historical trends.’
Peak viewership reached 9,154,000 during the 5:3-5:45 quarter hour.
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FOX boasted that the race ‘outscored every non-prime Winter Olympics window on broadcast and cable’ and ‘topped all broadcast and cable networks in viewership during the race’ from 2:15-to-5:45.
Meanwhile, the O’Reilly Auto Parts season opener on Saturday earned 1,812,000 Total Viewers on The CW, largely flat from last year. Some additional information was provided by the CW as well:
Race peaked at 2,321,000 total viewers from 7:45-8:00 PM ET Largest Adults 18-49 audience (340,000) for an O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race in nearly 8 years (since 8/4/18 Watkins Glen on NBC) Viewership grew +79% compared to last year’s final race from Phoenix Raceway (11/1/25 on The CW)
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The Truck Series race on FS1 earned 1,387,000 viewers vs. 1,014,000 the year before. This marked a 37 percent year-over-year increase. It was the most watched Truck Series race since 2016 with a 1.6 million peak viewership in the 9:45 to 10:00 quarter hour.
This race featured this first NASCAR race in a decade for Hall of Famer Tony Stewart and YouTuber Cleetus McFarland making his series debut.
The qualifying races for the Daytona 500 on Thursday drew 1.835 million viewers, flat from last year.
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