Josef Newgarden joins the Fox TV studio during qualifying for the 109th running of the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. After the first year of the broadcast deal with FOX, IndyCar is seeing the benefits. (Photo by Michael L. Levitt/Lumen via Getty Images)
Lumen via Getty Images
With the 2025 IndyCar season nearly in the books, it’s clear that moving to FOX Sports has increased the profile of the open-wheel series. Here’s how the broadcast team of Will Buxton, James Hinchcliffe, and Townsend Bell sees the future of the sport, how the tech additions to the broadcast are helping to draw viewers, and what the investment by FOX into IndyCar is shaping what’s to come.
By most every measure, the first year of IndyCar on FOX and FS1 has proven to be a success. FOX Sports has highlighted the series on traditional linear television, which has bolstered viewership. Through the first fifteen races of the season, the IndyCar series on FOX and FS1 averaged a +28% increase from 2024’s 1,106,000 viewers, compared to the last year on NBC/Peacock (1,416,000 viewers). As but one example, the Grand Prix of Portland was up 86% compared to last year’s 380,000 viewers for the Portland race that aired on USA Network.
Even more so, IndyCar is experiencing significant growth in the critical younger demographic compared to last year. According to Nielsen, ratings are up +81% in the 18-34 age demo, and +52% for the 18-49 age bracket.
For the first Indy 500 on FOX, the 7.05 million viewers made it the most-watched in 17 years (7,245,000 viewers in 2008) and up +40% from last year’s broadcast on NBC (5,024,000 viewers).
FOX Sports has made a significant technology investment in the series, and that’s played a part in bringing an immersive experience for the fans watching on television from high-speed drones, custom-built for FOX Sports and operated by Beverly Hills Aerials, to helicopters for wider aerials, the use of Racing Force’s Driver’s Eye that places a camera inside the helmet of select drivers, the use of “ghost car” technology that shows how cars are performing against each other in sections, rover cam RC car technology, and the heads-up display on the dash of the cars that shows speed, what gear the car is, etc. there’s plenty of eye candy for viewers.
IndyCar Broadcast Team On The Increased Visibility And Growing The Sport
At the Portland race, I caught up with the FOX Sports IndyCar broadcast team of former drivers Townsend Bell and James Hinchcliffe, along with the addition of longtime Formula 1 reporter, announcer, and analyst Will Buxton, about how they see FOX Sports’ role in elevating the broadcasts, and how they see growing the audience with IndyCar.
“I think first and foremost, IndyCar has a very strong product, and what FOX Sports has helped do is kind of bring some more tools – you know, the bells and whistles – to make the broadcast side of it a little bit stronger and keep pace with what other series are doing globally, not just F1, but others as well,” said Hinchcliffe, who has been a full-time IndyCar analyst since his career ended in 2022 and is now with FOX Sports.
“It’s really fascinating to see what happens when a network goes all in on a sport like Fox has,” said Bell, who came over from NBC and reunited with FOX Sports, re-joining the company after working for the SPEED channel as part of its F1 coverage. “I think the fruit to be born out of that will take a while to play out, but it starts with an incredible commitment. This is my 14th season broadcasting IndyCar, and I’ve just never seen the kind of engagement that we’ve seen this year from the top down at the network, to use every single tool in the toolbox to elevate the sport, put it on broadcast Friday, Saturday, Sunday, on big broadcast every single Sunday, if you just look at what Fox did around the Indy 500 to bring in all the star power from their NFL and their baseball properties, the whole family of Fox kind of came to bear for that event, and it paid off.”
Will Buxton, who joined in 2024 as the play-by-play voice for the inaugural IndyCar season on FOX, brings a unique perspective. Having begun his network television career on SPEED Channel in 2010, Buxton has become internationally known through his work in Formula 1 and the Netflix docuseries Drive To Survive. When he arrived back in IndyCar, he stated clearly that he wanted to help grow the sport. After the first season, he sees that as a continuum.
“I think you have to look at this as a long-term project,” Buxton said of growing IndyCar. “We know enough about the business, about television, about sport. The change doesn’t occur in an instant, it doesn’t occur overnight, it doesn’t occur in a season. It takes time.”
Buxton added that his recent experience of working in Formula One, and working for Liberty Media Corporation, which took over ownership of Formula 1, made it critical that to grow the sport, you have to be aware of laying down the foundation.
That growth is only going to come in time,” added Buxton. “I look back on Formula One viewership in America, because I used to broadcast with NBC and with SPEED channel before that. We were hitting 400 500,000 viewers a race. And ESPN had very similar figures for the first three years that they aired Formula 1. But the positives that I can see from this year are an immediate uptick in viewership since moving over to FOX. It gives all of us at the network and everybody at IndyCar a very good indication of what our baseline viewership is, and we can then know what we have and what we need to build on. So I see this as a transitional year. It’s a year of, kind of, getting all your ducks in a row, figuring out where we are planting the seeds, and then in the years to come, we water them, we shine light on them, and we wait to see the green shoots.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2025/08/22/after-first-year-fox-broadcast-deal-moves-indycar-into-high-gear/