How IndyCar plans to expand its fan base in 2025

IndyCar’s new television partner has brought many good things to the series in the first two months of the year, but a broadcaster like FOX can’t serve as IndyCar’s lone marketing tool to expand its audience and attract new fans.

Looking through the series’ fan demographics report published in December of 2024, IndyCar is trending in the right direction in important areas. Using Nielsen TV data from 2023, 45 percent of IndyCar’s viewers were 65 or older. Using a different data source with YouGov in 2024, the 65+ audience was reported at 17 percent. The 25 percent from 2023 listed for fans aged 55-64 shrank to 12 percent in YouGov’s 2024 profile, and the 13 percent in 2023 for fans 45-54 was documented as 12 percent in 2024.

Assuming the year-to-year change in metrics between the differing tracking agencies is accurate in the switch from Nielsen to YouGov, IndyCar got younger, with the 45-65+ group going from 83 percent in 2023 to 41 percent last year. The greatest spike is found in the 25-34 range, which went from seven percent in 2023 to 24 percent in 2024. IndyCar lists the average age of its fans as 44, and there was no appreciable change in gender profile with 61-percent men/39-percent women in 2023 and 62/38 in 2024.

Penske Entertainment communications VP and new IndyCar chief marketing officer Alex Damron walked RACER through some of the series’ plans for the season and explained how Penske and IndyCar intend to complement all that FOX is doing to make the series bigger and better in the sports entertainment marketplace.

ALEX DAMRON: We feel like we're in a period of time where we can transition from steady growth to very rapid growth, and that's because FOX provides us a platform to showcase the sport to more people, and they’re a partner that wants to work hand in hand with us to raise awareness and market the sport in new and exciting ways for us.

We've been working incredibly hard to build out a yearlong marketing and promotional plan for the sport that is well supported with IndyCar-led initiatives, but dovetails incredibly closely with what FOX Sports is trying to accomplish as well. We really want to work together to drive the sport forward and be an exceptional example of a series, or league, if you will, and media partner relationship in the near term.

Our goals are to raise awareness, increase relevancy, and map out the IndyCar fan journey with a lot of the work that we're doing. And what I mean by that is, we know we're going to have more viewers this year, but we also want to have more ways for them to engage with IndyCar. That's why we made an investment in a new fantasy platform. That's also why we're working on updates to our website that will make it more user friendly, but also more mobile friendly, because we know that's where people are operating these days, and it's also why we're putting a significant effort into our digital channels.

And most especially, getting more content across the 2025 NTT IndyCar Series onto YouTube. So for us, we want to make sure there are as many touch points as possible for a fan to interact with IndyCar while they're waiting for the next race to take place.

Part of Penske Entertainment's plan is to allow fans as many ways to interact with the IndyCar Series as possible. James Black/IMS Photo

And as it relates to working hand in hand with FOX Sports, you're going to see us embrace the "Fastest Racing on Earth" campaign in our own creative. So for example, we have a season anthem video that we're posting across our digital channels that uses some of the "Fastest Racing on Earth" creative, even though it was developed by the NTT IndyCar Series and our team here. And in addition to that, we think the FOX driver spots are really terrific, and they do a great job of creating heroes for people to engage with.

So we've adjusted our paid promotional campaign to incorporate some of those spots as we're promoting tune-in for St. Pete, in addition to some of the materials we prepared ourselves, and that's just smart resourcing, and again, utilizing the expertise of your media rights partner to together drive this forward.

MARSHALL PRUETT: Tell me more about "youthification" of the series to create newer fans, younger fans. Where does IndyCar go in that direction?

DAMRON: Reaching new audiences and bringing young fans into the fold is a huge priority for us. We think one of the primary ways to accomplish that is efficient and consistent digital content and mapping out the fan journey to have a heavy emphasis on social media content creation and mobile-led platforms. We're working really hard to bring new content creators and influencers into the fold across the 2025 season.

In some cases, they'll be creating experiential content for their own platforms and tagging us, and in other cases, they'll actually be lending their talents to the NTT IndyCar Series’ social media handles and creating content that we post ourselves. And so that's something we're really excited about, and we want their followers to engage with IndyCar, to see it as something that is exciting to learn about – what we believe is the most competitive and best racing series on the planet, and to then, therefore, tune in and engage with us across the spectrum of different ways we communicate as well.

So that's one piece of the puzzle, for sure. Something else we're super-focused on is being an incubator for star power for our drivers. We work with a couple of agencies to help ensure that our drivers have interesting events to go to and appear at. One place you'll see an IndyCar presence this year is the South by Southwest Festival in Austin (Texas), just to give you an example. But we want our drivers to be seen out there at events that resonate with the new audience. And we want to be good storytellers about what makes an NTT IndyCar Series driver a hero.

PRUETT: Tell me more about the digital side. More Instagram, more Tik-Tok, more everything … that's everybody's strategy, everybody knows do a lot of that. Where does IndyCar fall in using YouTube, and what you can do there with the new FOX relationship How much can you push into making live content or whatever it might be available there?

DAMRON: Yeah, across our digital channels, video has actually been our biggest growth metric. Over the last few years, we've put a lot of effort into upping our staff that is producing video content coming out of race weekends and even following IndyCar drivers as they're going about events and promotional tours and such, and the response has been really strong.

Instagram is where we've seen the largest increase in viewership and engagement as it relates to video, so we're going to continue to feed that medium a lot of video content,, but we think there's opportunity to grow our following and engagement on YouTube as well. In 2025, without giving everything away, you're going to see recaps of some of our racing action arrive more quickly on our YouTube channel, and you're going to see more original content debut on our YouTube channel as well.

IndyCar has seen significant gains in engagement on Instagram, particularly for video content. Joe Skibinski/IMS Photo

And the goal there, frankly, goes beyond just driving video views to up our subscriber level, and it’s to hopefully have YouTube be a platform that that feeds a lot of interest in the NTT Indy Car Series and helps us transition people from casual fans to individuals who are so interested they want to tune in every weekend, and then head straight to the YouTube page afterwards to engage more.

PRUETT: Some of the demographic data is really encouraging. Some of it, I will admit to having some pretty serious skepticism. A 42-percent decrease in fans over 45 in a single year has never been seen in the history of the sport, but I want to believe it’s true. Can you provide any insights there?

DAMRON: Well, we are getting younger and engaging more millennial and Gen Z fans. And I think one of the most interesting things that happened last year is we actually saw a double-digit growth in terms of viewers, 35 and under on our TV broadcasts, which was really exciting, because one of the challenges you sometimes have is it's easy enough to grow a digital audience, but converting them to actually watch your racing on a traditional media platform is sometimes harder, and we feel like we started to turn the corner on that last year, and think we can continue to do so with FOX Sports, for sure.

So that's something that we're really excited about, and is going to be an emphasis moving forward. Look, I think that racing appeals to young people. The stars of the NTT Indy Car Series appeal to young people. We've just got to keep meeting people where they are from a content perspective, and showing them why the NTT IndyCar Series, is a community to engage with, 24/7.

PRUETT: Last thing that comes to mind is, I’d heard there might be an initiative to do more paid social engagements. I don't know if that is boosting content on YouTube, Facebook and wherever else. Is that a significant factor in any of the plans for this year?

DAMRON: We've consistently had a digital spend to boost content over the last few seasons, and that is a strategy we're deploying this year that starts for us in the two-week countdown to St. Pete and runs across the season. What I will say is that as you go, you learn what's working and what's not, and can fine-tune the campaign to be even more targeted and drive even more of the engagement that you want.

So we're looking forward to assessing what worked and how we can get even better following the first couple races of the season, and in particular, leading into the month of May and the race for the championship. That program does cut across paid searches, YouTube and other social media platforms as well, so it envelopes where we believe people are right now.