Marc Márquez proved he was human. Márquez won the sprint race from Austin but fell in the grand prix and Francesco Bagnaia took his first victory of the season. The conditions left riders scrambling down pit lane to switch bikes before the start of the MotoGP race. Driving standards were the focal point in Martinsville. Red Bull swapped Liam Lawson for Yuki Tsunoda. It rained in Sonoma, and it made the mess of GT World Challenge America's opening weekend. Competition aside, this week was consumed with what was a rough second act of the 2025 season for IndyCar.
The Honeymoon is Over. It is Time for Action
I thought I would be writing this the week after Long Beach. I expected after having three IndyCar races spread over seven weekends with races head-to-head against NASCAR, the NCAA basketball tournaments and The Masters would be when people would express severe dissatisfaction after a smashing season opener where everyone believed they were on a rocket ship. Little did we expect it would all come crashing back to earth immediately after the second race of the season.
The Thermal Club television rating was down 50% from the St. Petersburg season opener. IndyCar had fewer viewers than all there NASCAR national series competing at Homestead. One of those races was on a Friday night against a packed night of the first round of NCAA tournament and the other was on Saturday afternoon as the second round was getting underway. Formula One had more viewers for the Chinese Grand Prix, and even if you want to say most of those viewers watched on DVR and not live at 3:00 a.m. Eastern, it actually sounds worse because more people preferred to watch something taped than a live race where they had no clue what would happen next.
Forget the technical issues that caused the IndyCar broadcast to be lost for 20 minutes with the NASCAR Cup race from Homestead as emergency filler programming on network television. The Thermal Club viewership numbers sparked a backlash as soon as the numbers came out.
There was plenty of blame being tossed around.
Viewership was down due to Thermal Club! The race itself was horrible! It was because it was head-to-head against NASCAR and college basketball! Three weeks between races was the main culprit! It is the chassis! It is the hybrid! It is Álex Palou's fault! The race should be at Texas!
We heard it all, and factions arose quickly in the aftermath of the last week. For all those that were upset at the decrease, there was an undercurrent of those spinning the Thermal Club rating as not being that bad and expected. If the network is expecting the decrease then they aren't that upset when it happens. The race was defended as it did have over 200 passes and was on point with the action we see at other famed road courses on the schedule. We also had a race where second-place erased an 11-second lead in a matter of laps and made the pass for the victory on the racetrack. What else could a viewer want from a race?
Things can be two things. In the case of the second race of the season for IndyCar, many things can be true at once.
It can be true that the Thermal Club race was a good race. It can be true the location and the backdrop of the event has turned people off. It can be true a three-week gap between the first two races is a momentum killer. It can be true the audience is divided when racing head-to-head against the NASCAR Cup Series. It can be true causal viewers are captured in the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament and will never know a race is happening. It can also be true that a new television deal is not going to make IndyCar exponentially more popular within two events than where it has been for the last two decades and this race falls around where the average has been for the series for a long time.
It can also be true that the St. Petersburg number wasn't some massive jump considering the viewership for the 2023 race on NBC race was essentially identical.
IndyCar's issues are greater than whatever network is broadcasting the races, and it will take more than a few promos during the Super Bowl to truly grow the series. It is all fine and dandy that 126 million people watched the game and likely saw an IndyCar promo, but six weeks after the fact it is clear airing three commercials didn't change a thing. Sure, more people than ever became aware but as quickly as Josef Newgarden's torso was on the screen the audience moved on. Just because it was on their television screen does not mean they were paying attention.
It takes more than 30 seconds to attract a viewer. We can keep beating this drum until someone at 16th & Georgetown gets it, but growing the series requires making the drivers relatable to the audience to a point the viewer genuinely cares about those competing. That is what Drive to Survive did. It took people into a sanctum previously unvisited, and people became attached to the point they could not leave and needed more.
For too long IndyCar has been hoping little work will lead a big reward. It is the grandma at the slot machine hoping a nickel will turn into a fortune. That is what the Super Bowl commercial was. It was hoping three 30-second ads would lead to a 50% or 100% increase in the average viewership. It is going to take a lot more than that, but that isn't the only thing that must change in IndyCar's thinking.
The "Come to Jesus" moment has been due for quite sometime, and IndyCar must admit where it is at in the pecking order. The Indianapolis 500 is the outlier and perhaps the worst one the series could ask for. Five million people watching a race in May is not a true indication of IndyCar's popularity. The races like Thermal and Gateway and Mid-Ohio are where IndyCar actually stand. Indianapolis is not the issue. It is everywhere else where the series must do work.
Reasons become excuses when the general mood is disgust. Some of the explanations for the ratings drop are true, but what is tiring when it comes to IndyCar is too many of these reasons are seen as unconquerable when they actually aren't.
Take racing head-to-head against NASCAR.
It is understandable that when the two races are put against one another, more people will choose to watch the NASCAR race than the IndyCar race, even if you can watch the entire IndyCar race and still tune into the NASCAR race when there is nearly 90 minutes of racing left and all the memorable moments have yet to happen.
As easy as it is to say, "Don't race against NASCAR," that isn't practical.
Even with a shared partner in Fox, NASCAR isn't going to do IndyCar any favors. NASCAR is racing at 3:00 p.m. at Homestead, Bristol, Martinsville and anywhere on the East Coast to maximize viewership, and Fox wants to maximize viewership as well on FS1. That means a West Coast IndyCar race is going to be head-to-head, but IndyCar cannot decide it will never race on the West Coast because of NASCAR's start times. IndyCar cannot also bounce the races around and race at 9:00 a.m. Pacific so the race is over before NASCAR starts.
IndyCar also cannot do the opposite and wait to race at 4:30 p.m. Pacific after the NASCAR race is complete. Fox didn't sign IndyCar to run in primetime on network television. IndyCar will get the network time slots that Fox is willing to give. IndyCar could run in Sunday primetime when on the West Coast, but those races will have to be on FS1, and for some reason, despite IndyCar being a predominantly cable series for over three decades, everyone is now allergic to a race being on cable, even if it could be for the greater good of the series.
At some point IndyCar must accept the battle in front of it, but it also must recognize the current condition is not permanent.
It is automatically accepted people are going to watch NASCAR over IndyCar. Why?
Why isn't that something IndyCar tries to change?
There is no decree from above that this is how it always will be. While IndyCar spend the better part of the 1990s and the start of the 21st century doing all it could to kill the series fighting over bullshit, NASCAR bloomed into a cultural force that can still thrive even if it is far from its greatest heights. That is a hard thing to overcome, but it is not impossible.
Most people watching Formula One today in the United States were watching zero motorsports ten years ago. Formula One's audience is not a bunch of NASCAR defects who were looking for something more satisfying. They are mostly new people who never considered motorsports until Formula One was brought to the table in a digestible form. Formula One has become something they are passionate about and are invested when it comes on. There are people out there, different people, who will fall in love with motorsports if presented the right way.
There is nothing stopping IndyCar from becoming a must-watch series. It is Herculean to shift viewership behaviors, but that is the battle ahead of IndyCar. It must turn the series into something where people think, "I must see this live." Whether that is because the drivers are people the viewers are enamored with or because the racing is compelling, that is the task at hand for IndyCar.
At some point, it is no longer NASCAR's fault that IndyCar's ratings are poor. It is really on IndyCar for the IndyCar ratings being what they are. Instead of punting and acting like these are viewers that are never obtainable, the line must be drawn that it has been the series' inability to garner sizable interest for the last few decade as the reason why the second race of the season can barely draw more than 700,000 viewers on a Sunday afternoon in March.
The fix will not happen overnight, but there are many minor things IndyCar can tweak to at least put it in a better position. At some point, the series must take a risk, and a lot of those risks involving "doing." It must add two or three races to fill the three-week gaps between events. The downtime early in a season is not helping the series, and the series cannot worry about the bottomline. It must accept a short-term loss in hopes of a long-term gain.
IndyCar has been dealing with lengthy gaps between races at the start of the season for about a decade now and they clearly aren't good for the series. It is time IndyCar does something about it. The Grand Prix of Arlington should help matters. The inaugural running has been announced for March 15, 2026, and that will likely be the second round after St. Petersburg. Arlington joining the schedule next year should not come at the loss of another round. If you swap Arlington in and take Thermal out, guess what? There is going to be a month gap between races because we know Long Beach will be April 19, and we will be right back where we started.
Considering the short window the IndyCar season fills from start to finish, it should maximize that time. It really doesn't have any other choices.
Eliminating the multi-week gaps in the season is a small thing but the minimum change IndyCar must make. It is the first step. IndyCar cannot afford any longer to take it.
Winners From the Weekend
You know about Francesco Bagnaia and Marc Márquez, but did you know...
Jake Dixon won the Moto2 race from Austin, his second consecutive victory. José Antonio Rueda won the Moto3 race, his second victory of the season.
Denny Hamlin won the NASCAR Cup race from Martinsville. Austin Hill won the Grand National Series, his second victory of the season. Daniel Hemric won the Truck race, his first career Truck victory, and it came 11 years, five months and two days after Hemric made his Truck Series debut.
The #34 JMF Motorsports Mercedes-AMG of Mikaël Grenier and Michai Stephens and the #99 Random Vandals Racing BMW of Kenton Koch and Connor De Phillippi split the GT World Challenge America races from Sonoma. The #52 Auto Technic BMW of Zac Anderson and Colin Garett and the #97 CrowdStrike Racing by Random Vandals BMW of Kevin Boehm and Kenton Koch split the GT4 America races. George Kurtz and Kyle Washington split the GT America races.
Toprak Razgatlioglu swept the World Superbike races from Portimão. Can Öncü and Bo Bendsneyder split the World Supersport races.
Cooper Webb won the Supercross race from Seattle, his fourth victory of the season. Cole Davies won the 250cc race.
Coming Up This Weekend
Formula One will have an interesting weekend in Japan.
NASCAR has a race at Darlington.
European Le Mans Series opens its season in Barcelona.
Supercross crosses the country to Foxborough, Massachusetts.
