The NASCAR season has wrapped up, which makes this a good time for the sport to take an honest look at itself. Every league has things to improve, whatever the season looked like. For NASCAR, though, this offseason feels especially important.
The central question is how to get people watching and paying attention again. Denny Hamlin raised that point on his podcast after Sunday’s championship race, arguing that NASCAR is losing ground in the wider sports world.
Hamlin said the current championship format is meant to give the title a broader sample of results, and that he thinks it does. But the sport still has to make itself matter to more fans. That, he said, is a challenge NASCAR can’t avoid.
The latest ratings make the concern hard to dismiss. The Homestead race drew a 1.37 rating and averaged 2.471 million viewers, nearly 11% fewer than last year’s championship at Phoenix. Season viewership was down 2% overall.
There’s plenty of debate over what’s behind the decline. Is it the fans, the cars, the racing, the number of channels carrying events—or some combination of all of those?
Fans spent much of last offseason criticizing the old playoff format as too gimmicky. NASCAR changed it, returning to a version of the Chase, but the championship race still struggled to draw viewers. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the new approach, even if fans had called for the change.
The Next Gen car is another frequent target. Fans complain that it’s slow, doesn’t look like a traditional stock car and doesn’t race well. Drivers have their concerns, too, though they may be less inclined to air them publicly.
Hamlin’s view is that neither the car nor the format is the main issue. The bigger problem, he argued, is promotion. Outside the Daytona 500, NASCAR could do more to make its events feel like must-watch occasions.
He suggested trying to claim a summer weeknight, perhaps Thursday, when the sports calendar is relatively quiet. It’s an idea worth considering. NASCAR has experimented with midweek night races before, but Hamlin said those events didn’t get enough promotional support.
There may be other schedule changes to explore, too: build a stronger presence in spring and summer, avoid competing with football in the fall, and perhaps finish the season around Labor Day. That would mean rethinking the calendar, not just making small adjustments. It’s a big move, and maybe not an easy one—but the schedule and marketing are areas NASCAR can actually control.
The car is unlikely to disappear, and the format was only just changed. For now, the sport may have to work with both and focus on making races more visible and appealing.
Hamlin has put the issue plainly: NASCAR has a relevance problem. The offseason gives the series a few months to figure out what it wants to do about it.
