FOX Sports has released viewership numbers for the opening round of the 2025 IndyCar season, showing a sizeable increase over last year’s event.
According to the network, Sunday’s race from St. Petersburg averaged 1.417 million viewers and peaked at more than 1.8 million.
The race reached approximately 45% more people than last year’s season-opening round, which reached 975,000 through broadcast partner NBC.
The 1.417 million figure ranks it very highly among the series’ historic television viewership numbers, and makes it the most watched IndyCar event outside of the Indianapolis 500 since 2011.
For comparison, the 2024 Indy 500 averaged over five million viewers. The marquee event is an outlier, however, and the other races from 2024 averaged just 637,000 viewers per event.
There was a lot of interest in the television ratings for the first race of the series’ new partnership with FOX Sports.
FOX has invested considerable resources in IndyCar over the past few months, including producing multiple high-quality commercials that have been run during the Superbowl and played often on all of FOX sports’ other broadcasts over the past few months.
The network also brought in well-known commentator Will Buxton to be the lead presenter, hoping to bring in new viewership from multiple different areas.
At least for the first event, it appears that the extra investment has worked. Many fans tuned in to watch Alex Palou secure the early advantage as he tries to win his third consecutive championship.
The network will continue to monitor viewership closely to see if interest in the series continues throughout the year.
Every race of the 2025 IndyCar season will be broadcast on the network’s main FOX channel, which helps make it accessible to anyone who wants to tune in.
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