GP of Indianapolis TV Rating (3rd Update)

Simon Paegnaud's sensational defeat of Scott Dixon kept viewers glued to their seat

UPDATE CORRECTION: Our spreadsheet of historical ratings had an error. It indeed was a 0.55 final rating last year. Our spreadsheet had 0.8, but that was last year’s overnight. We reported last May: The Verizon IndyCar Series IndyCar Grand Prix at IMS Saturday on ABC pulled in a 0.8 TV rating (1.14 million viewers) between 3:30 PM and 6:00 PM ET, up 14% from last year's overnight TV rating of 0.7. The final rating dropped to 0.55 but we did not update our spreadsheet.

Therefore, this year's 'final' rating was actually up 29% over 2018, which is great news.

05/14/19 Well the final TV rating is in for the GP of Indianapolis on NBC last Saturday and it was a 0.71, down 11% from the 0.80 final rating on ABC last year. All the Hoopla that NBC would increase the TV ratings. So much for that notion.

1,066,000 viewers were tuned in this year, down 6.5% from 1,140,000 on ABC last year.

Perhaps the Indy 500 will see an increase. After all, wasn't that why IndyCar picked NBC over ABC for higher ratings despite ABC offering far more races on network TV than NBC?

05/13/19 1.07 million viewers were tuned into the broadcast. Contrast and compare that to the horrible NBCSN viewer numbers for IndyCar. As we have always said – 100% of IndyCar races should be on NBC and 0% on NBCSN.

Top five markets:
1) Indianapolis: 6.7
2) Ft. Myers-Naples: 1.9
3) Louisville: 1.6
3) Dayton: 1.6
3) San Diego: 1.6

05/13/19 The GP of Indianapolis IndyCar race on NBC Saturday recorded a 0.85 'overnight' rating, the highest 'overnight' rating for the race in 5 years. The last time the race drew a higher 'overnight' was in 2014 when race drew a 0.89.

The 0.85 overnight rating is 31% higher than last year’s race (0.65) but the 'final' rating usually drops when it comes out Tuesday.

As a matter of reference, last year's 'final' rating on ABC was a 0.55 with 780,000 total viewers and 181,000 in the all-important 18-49 year old age group. We would expect this year's final numbers to exceed them.