NHRA has spent years trying to put its product in front of people who weren’t necessarily looking for drag racing. Sunday in St. Louis, FOX could deliver another one of those audiences by the millions.
The NAPA Auto Parts NHRA Midwest Nationals at World Wide Technology Raceway will receive a coveted broadcast position adjacent to FOX’s football coverage Oct. 4. For most markets, NHRA’s Countdown to the Championship race will follow the early football game from 4:30-6:30 p.m. ET.
If recent history is any indication, that’s considerably more than a favorable television slot. It’s an opportunity to put NHRA in front of a mainstream sports audience that might not otherwise go looking for drag racing.
Last year’s race at Texas Motorplex showed what can happen when those viewers stick around.
The Dallas event averaged 2.065 million viewers on FOX and reached a peak audience of 3.631 million, according to NHRA. Those were the largest television numbers in the sanctioning body’s history.
Now St. Louis gets its turn to shine.
This will be the sixth consecutive season FOX has positioned an NHRA Countdown race adjacent to a football broadcast. It will be the first time the Midwest Nationals has landed in that window, and the timing couldn’t be much better.
St. Louis is the third stop in NHRA’s six-race Countdown to the Championship, meaning the championship fights will reach their halfway point Sunday. World Wide Technology Raceway has also consistently produced sellout crowds for one of the more established stops on the NHRA schedule.
This weekend, however, the audience outside the gates could dwarf the one sitting inside them.
That’s the real value of the football adjacency. NHRA doesn’t have to convince two million people to hunt for drag racing somewhere else on the television dial because FOX can put the sport directly in their path.
There is a difference between having that audience handed to you and keeping it.
Drag racing is particularly suited for that challenge. A viewer stumbling into an NHRA broadcast doesn’t need 20 minutes of explanation before something happens; two 12,000-horsepower nitro cars can fire, stage and cover 1,000 feet in less than four seconds.
For a sport built around sensory overload, that’s a pretty good introduction.
Some markets will get the arrangement in reverse, with NHRA airing from 2-4 p.m. ET and leading directly into FOX football. Either way, NHRA gets valuable network television space alongside one of the strongest audience generators in American sports.
The established drag racing fan isn’t the target of this opportunity, it’s the football viewer who isn’t.
