Washington D.C. race garners IndyCar’s best non-Indy 500 rating since 2008 merger

There was a lot of conversation and controversy surrounding IndyCar’s race on the streets of Washington, D.C., this past weekend.

There were a lot of people watching at home, too.

Fox Sports announced Tuesday that Sunday’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix drew an average of 3.28 million viewers, which would make it the most-watched IndyCar race other than the Indy 500 since the series formed following 2008’s unification.

FOX Sports’ extensive coverage of the inaugural Freedom 250 GP of Washington, D.C., delivers the most-watched non-Indianapolis 500 INDYCAR SERIES race since before the open-wheel merger in 2008 pic.twitter.com/Q7OUs3hkAr

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— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) August 25, 2026

That number is nearly four times larger than IndyCar’s Sunday non-Indy 500 races from last year (867,000 viewers) and a 364% gain from a comparable event around the same time last year (708,000 viewers on Fox).

As The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck noted, those numbers also gave IndyCar the extremely rare bragging rights of beating out NASCAR, with the Freedom 250 Grand Prix drawing more eyeballs than NASCAR’s Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway (1.79 million viewers, per NASCAR).

Per Fox Sports, their IndyCar race coverage is averaging 1.875,000 viewers through 15 races, up 32 percent from last year and 70 percent from 2024, making it the best start to an IndyCar season since 2008.

One of the final festivities as part of the Trump Administration’s 250th anniversary program featured a heavy presence by Donald Trump (which Fox noted). It also joins the UFC Freedom 250 event in June in having courted a lot of controversy but ultimately pulling in a sizable audience to make it worthwhile.

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