There are 36 races to win at the NASCAR Cup Series level, and winning the Bristol Night Race is easily within the top half dozen, if not directly behind NASCAR’s de facto crown jewel races in prestige.
A Saturday night showdown between the Cup Series’ finest drivers at the Last Great Coliseum — a 0.533-mile short track in Bristol, Tenn., with high-banked turns and stadium-section seating that can house nearly 150,000 cheering, screaming fans — is one of NASCAR’s greatest traditions.
For one Saturday night each summer, the NASCAR world makes the pilgrimage to Bristol Motor Speedway for 500 laps of action-packed, close-quarters racing. The cars zip by the start/finish line every 15 seconds, and the drivers have to navigate the 2,000 turns, the treacherous high banking, the accidents and their own tempers before the king that successfully vanquishes all his foes is rewarded with the victorious gladiator sword.
The Bristol Night Race is not only of the most prestigious races on the calendar, but also one of the most exciting.
And with that excitement, it’s sad to see such an extraordinary event suffer a slow, suffocating decline into irrelevance at the hands of one of the nation’s favorite pastimes: college football.
We’re already into the third week of college football season, and the Bristol Night Race is forced to compete against the marquee college football matchups on an annual basis, with zero success.
Just look at last year’s event, the one where Denny Hamlin beat everyone’s favorite driver: 1.562 million viewers on USA Network, for a race that was run at its scheduled time. Look at the prior years when the race was broadcast on NBC Sports, and it’s not much better: 2.1 million viewers in 2020, 2.2 million viewers in 2021 and 1.776 million viewers in 2022.
One of NASCAR’s most prestigious races has turned into a shell of itself, becoming one of the Cup Series’ least-watched events on an annual basis. And the fact that a race as important as the Bristol Night Race has been pushed off network television to be broadcast on cable is nothing short of absurd.
This hasn’t always been the case.
The move to mid-September was made at the start of the 2020 season, which was intended to put Bristol in the playoffs as the final race of the Round of 16. Before that, the Night Race had been traditionally run the weekend before Labor Day, as that Saturday night sweet spot on the schedule was right before the starts of both the NFL regular season and the college football season.
The race was a ratings boon many moons ago, and from 2011-14 the race was broadcast on ABC to what would now be tremendous success. All four editions of the events racked in at least five million viewers, with a viewing audience of 6.322 million for 2013.
But the new TV deal started in 2015, and Bristol that season was not broadcast on NBC, but rather NBC Sports.
The results were drastic: a viewing audience of only 3.6 million people for 2015, down from the 5.079 million that ABC had in 2014.
From there, the only way to go was down. The 2018 and 2019 Bristol Night Races had audiences of 2.33 million and 2.5 million, respectively, as the last editions of the race run in August. Then came the move to September for 2020, where the ratings have since reached the deep trenches of 1.5 million.
If the last several years are anything to go off of, the ratings for this Saturday’s (Sept. 17) will most likely hover around 1.5 million, if not drop below it. But the kicker here is that, as a track, Bristol is still a huge draw.
After the end of the three-year dirt experiment, Bristol’s spring date was back on the concrete for 2024, and notably, broadcast on FOX. That race, which featured an unprecedented amount of tire wear and lead changes, drew 3.809 million people for more than double the viewing audience that the far more prestigious Night Race drew last September.
And while the TV ratings for the Night Race are disgustingly low, what isn’t low is the at-track attendance and the fan hype surrounding the event. Sure, it may not draw the gargantuan crowd sizes that it did in NASCAR’s heyday, but the Bristol Night Race is still one of the biggest parties on the NASCAR schedule outside of races at Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway.
The fan and driver excitement for Bristol has been there for years, and that should be reflected in TV scheduling.
In a perfect world, the Bristol Night Race would move back to late August or any other summer weekend before the start of football. It would either be broadcast on network by NBC or TNT, and the ratings would start climbing after several years of falling.
The backbone of NASCAR is made up of the crown jewels races that every driver is chasing and that every fan is anxiously looking forward to each year: the Daytona 500, the Coca-Cola 600, the Southern 500, the Brickyard 400 and so on.
The Bristol Night Race has all the tools necessary to be the fifth race on that list. It should be prioritized on the calendars and TV broadcasts so that it can blossom as the must-watch summer TV event that it once was and should still be.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf