Nascar’s New TV Home Will Be Its Old One

In 1999, NBC and Fox celebrated deals worth $2.4 billion that let them split Nascar coverage from 2001 to 2006.

While Fox’s reign has continued unabated, NBC’s ended after those six years when ESPN swooped in.

On Tuesday, NBC announced that it will replace ESPN on the Nascar schedule for 10 years starting in 2015.

The deal will include televising 20 Nascar Sprint Cup races — three of which will come out of TNT’s six-race summer schedule — and 19 Nationwide Series events each season. NBC is paying $420 million to $450 million a year, said an executive who was briefed on the deal.

The network is in a different position than it was when it last carried Nascar. Back then, its cable partner was TNT. Now, NBC owns the NBC Sports Network, which will carry 13 of the 20 Sprint Cup races and 15 of the 19 Nationwide races. The all-sports channel is a critical element in NBC’s Olympic, English Premier League soccer, National Hockey League and Triple Crown horse-racing deals.

Nascar is also in a different position. A dozen or so years ago, stock car racing appeared destined for a long cycle of growth, the reason that NBC and Fox, which carried races on the FX cable network, made their deals.

David Hill, who was then running Fox Sports, said Nascar was “a model for how a sport should be run and promoted.”

But in recent years, the recession hurt track attendance and spending. Fans went to fewer races. The Car of Tomorrow, introduced in 2007, turned off fans and was replaced this year by the well-received Gen-6 car. Television viewership sagged; between 2010 and 2012, ESPN’s Sprint Cup viewership fell to 4.4 million from 4.8 million per race. Dale Earnhardt Jr., the most popular driver, was no longer a regular in victory lane. And Nascar learned that it had to build a younger, more diverse fan base.

“This is a bet on growth,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, who was running Turner Sports when TNT first linked up with NBC. “This is a bet that there is more audience out there.” Referring to Brian France, Nascar’s chief executive, Lazarus added, “If you look at the changes Brian has been making in the cars and in the form of racing, we think there is a lot of upside.”

NBC’s deal also includes TV Everywhere rights and the ability to carry races on the Telemundo Spanish-language network.

France said NBC’s array of broadcast, cable and digital properties made its offer compelling — evidently more so than ESPN, with its many platforms, offered before its exclusive negotiating period ended last week. He said he was not worried that ESPN would significantly reduce its coverage of Nascar when it was no longer televising the races.

“The reality is that they have to cover the big events that people watch every weekend,” France said.

John Skipper, the president of ESPN, said in a statement: “We will continue to serve Nascar fans through ‘SportsCenter’ and our other news platforms as we continue to enhance our industry-leading collection of quality assets.”

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