NASCAR appeals to millennials a lot more than you might think

The aging of the NASCAR fanbase is definitely an issue, but the reality is more complicated than the narrative around the situation.

It’s a common perception that one of the problems facing NASCAR as it moves into the third decade of the 21st century is that its fans are aging with few young ones to replace them. Television statistics back this assertion up, as research done within the past few years found that NASCAR TV viewers had an average age of 58 in 2016, older than all sports except golf, horse racing and men’s tennis. On top of that, while the TV audiences for all sports are getting older, none did so faster than NASCAR from 2006 to 2016, with the age of the average viewer leaping nearly a decade in that time.

Still, television isn’t everything when it comes to the popularity of sports in the current era. There are streaming numbers to consider, which have been increasing yearly for stock car racing even though they are still tiny compared to the number of people watching races on TV. Then there’s social media, an area in which every sports league desires success.

Despite its old school air, NASCAR has embraced social media right from the start, and there are signs that its efforts are paying off where it matters most: in attracting young potential fans, particularly millennials. A recent article in Forbes, citing research by Nielsen Scarborough, offers some surprising insight in this area.

"The numbers bear this out: NASCAR is second only to the NFL in reaching millennials, reaching five times as many millennials as MLS per event. Approximately half of the social media audiences of NASCAR-owned accounts are millennials, according to Nielsen Scarborough."

That’s important because while top NASCAR drivers compare favorably in terms of social media reach to athletes in other sports — consider Chase Elliott’s 800,000 Twitter followers to, say, Bryce Harper’s 963,000 — NASCAR itself lags far behind what people consider the Big Four North American sports: the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. Quantity matters in this case, but it’s probably even more important for the people stock car racing is engaging on social media to be the next generation of fans.

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Time will tell if those younger social media followers will become the kind of fans that go to races and buy merchandise to support their favorite drivers, and one expects that some NASCAR execs are being paid good money to figure out how to make sure they do. In the meantime, though, it’s comforting to think that the narrative around the graying of racing fans isn’t as straightforward as many would believe, and that there’s still hope for stock car racing to reach the people who will carry it into the future.