NASCAR has yet another broadcast partner, with ESPN joining the ranks to stream the O’Reilly Series races. With that, NASCAR has an array of broadcast partners from its $7.7 billion media deal, which already includes the likes of Fox, NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon. But the more these broadcast partners increase, the more the NASCAR schedule is split up. This situation has worsened to the point that Steve O’Donnell himself ended up admitting it indirectly.

Talking to SiriusXM about the future of the sport and how the NASCAR broadcast is trying to work with fans, O’Donnell said, “You know some of the moves we made, we needed to do that in terms of trying to get the sport to as many people as possible. You know we made the move to someone like Amazon, where 70 percent of our fans already had Amazon. We felt like that was a good move. The FOX platform, I think you will see in the future, will be a part of other streaming platforms.”

Although what followed later proves that the complaints raised by the fans are eventually becoming his headache. During his interview, O’Donnell had to admit that they have to spread the message. But why would a sport like NASCAR, which is a giant in the American motorsports culture, need to do that?

“You know our job is we got to do a much better job giving the message: Where can you find the races? Make them as accessible as possible, and then as we look at future broadcast packages, make sure we do that in a smart way… We want the fans to be able to find it, enjoy it, and get to know the sport we all love,” O’Donnell said.

The NASCAR broadcast is indeed becoming too confusing for the fans, especially the older group of fans who don’t have much idea about how the current services work.

For example, the CW Network broadcasts NASCAR O’Reilly Series races live on TV, but its app does not offer live race streaming. Instead, fans have to wait until the next day to watch. Ironically, practice and qualifying sessions are streamed live on the app. So for their ease, The CW should’ve simply added live race streaming to their own app. However, they chose ESPN, and now fans need to subscribe to ESPN Unlimited at times.

Additionally, their latest decision has only become a bigger headache for NASCAR fans. Now, they need to subscribe to another service if they want to watch racing on the go, and they lost the privilege to watch the qualifying and practice sessions for free. It seems like while trying to give the fans more, The CW instead took a step backwards and terribly misjudged the need of the hour.

In fact, with the emergence of the new media rights deal, there was even a viewership decline that headlined what questions needed to be asked. Moreover, for the last year of the previous agreement, 21 races in the Cup Series were broadcast. Now, that number has decreased dramatically.

And the same was the concern for O’Donnell as a president, too, as he addressed the falloff because of the confusion.

“You’ve got this portion of the season where you gotta turn to fans, you gotta tell them exactly where the race is and pound that home every single day and see what happens this year,” O’Donnell said earlier this year.

“It’s going to be a big focus for us. If you see, kind of, that falloff, we’re going to continue to make efforts, because we need Turner to succeed, we need [USA Sports president] Matt Hong and Versant and his team to succeed. They’ve got a big bet on us and we’ve got a big bet on them to make sure we carry this thing through all the way to Miami and the championship.”

That said, he had a big takeaway from last year that he will be looking forward to tackling now.

“And I think one of the lessons we learned is that focus, kind of, second half of the season, we kind of really gotta, ‘Let’s go.’ We know we’re going to be good [on] Fox. We know we’re going to be good [on] Amazon. What can we do to refocus fans, ‘Alright, make the transition over to Turner,’ and then we’re on our way with Versant. So that’s going to be a big focus for us, especially with the new playoff format,” O’Donnell continued.

That becomes imperative with F1 pulling ahead

One of the prime issues with the NASCAR broadcast is the rising cost of NASCAR streaming. Currently, the best way to watch races without any complexity on TV costs nearly $1,000 for the year. It is a shocking number when compared to Formula 1’s streaming plans in America. In the United States, Apple TV is the exclusive home to F1, and it costs only $99 a year.

That is 10 times less than what it costs to watch NASCAR the entire year. And with Apple TV, users simply need to tune in, and they can readily access all sessions during the race weekend for Formula 1. Considering how close NASCAR and Formula 1 are in terms of their rivalry, it feels like a no-brainer that any fan who wants to watch peak motorsports would like to choose Formula 1 if they are not a diehard NASCAR fan.

The results speak for themselves here. In the last five matchups, Formula 1 has trailed closely or beaten NASCAR events multiple times when it comes to same-day broadcasts. In fact, the only time NASCAR had a massive lead over Formula 1 was during the Yellawood 500 race. It drew 2.55M viewers against Formula 1’s 1.5M viewers for the United States Grand Prix.