Dover TV ratings down

UPDATE #2 The final TV rating for last weekend's Nextel Cup race on ABC was a 3.5/7 share, down 8% from last year's 3.8 final rating on cable channel TNT.

09/24/07 ABC earned a 3.5 fast national overnight Nielsen rating for yesterday’s NASCAR Dodge Dealers 400 at Dover Int’l Speedway, the second race in the Chase for the Nextel Cup. The rating, which translates into 5.5 million viewers, is up 12.9% from a 3.1 U.S. overnight rating for the race last year on TNT. Viewership was also up 16.7% from 4.7 million viewers last year. So they got more viewers on a network channel than a cable channel. Does NASCAR think this is progress? They need to compare apples to apples, not network to cable. Again the final last year was a 3.8.

09/24/07 The overnight TV rating for the NASCAR Nextel Cup Dodge Dealers 400 on ABC Sunday was a 3.3. Last year we had no overnight 'cable' ratings to compare it with, but the final last year on TNT was a 3.8.