Superstar Racing Experience announced this week its new home for 2023 and beyond on a “multiyear media rights agreement”: ESPN.
The announcement is a win, win, win for all three parties involved. Just looking at the ratings, the numbers didn’t really support another year of Saturday night racing on CBS, without timeslot or format changes. SRX being able to find a new broadcast partner instead of having to go through those changes stops a lot of bad will that was potentially going CBS’ way. As cool as it was to see auto racing again on CBS after decades without it, it’s also understandable that it would allow the SRX property to lapse given the numbers.
SRX seemed like a bit of an oddball in the CBS lineup anyway, as the lone race series on a network that hadn’t shown racing outside of Formula E in 20 years, and of course Formula E is such a tiny presence that nobody was thinking about it. Going to a more sports-centric cable channel may be able to help them out a bit, even if their overall numbers are going to naturally go down in the transition from network to cable.
Midweek races were a death note for NASCAR in the ratings back in 2020, even if they were a necessary evil due to COVID-19. But those races were done on a very haphazard schedule with no sense of scheduling or consistency; there’s a chance the numbers will even out with a consistent every-week schedule like they do with other sport leagues running midweek in the summer.
Thursday nights are a great move if the ratings can bear out, because that’s going to allow SRX to not have to compete head-to-head with any other non-local racing series. The race industry at large will be able to watch SRX more, as most will not be either racing or right in the middle of a race weekend they need to focus on.
ESPN gets a sports property that consistently did a little under 1 million viewers on network on Saturday nights and is putting them on Thursdays in a dead time of the year for sports, potentially a big boon. It should not affect NASCAR contract talks, as if they get that property or not should already be decided by the time the SRX season actually starts. I went back on Showbuzz Daily and reviewed the programming that ESPN ran from those Thursdays this past year, and in that 9 p.m. EST time slot they had:
July 14: NBA Summer League, 0.09 18-49 demo rating (49th)
July 21: Episode two of Derek Jeter documentary The Captain, 0.22 (6th) (Went up against the first Jan. 6 committee…
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