NASCAR President Steve Phelps says TV negotiations 'exceeded our expectations'

Ahead of the NASCAR Championship races this weekend, Steve Phelps opened up about the ongoing TV negotiations for 2025 and beyond. Nothing is set in stone except the Xfinity Series to The CW. As for the Cup Series, things are not as clear.

NASCAR President Steve Phelps had a pretty good report on the negotiations. There is a plan to have a six-race summer schedule on a third-party channel or streaming service. Stock car racing is a pretty valuable product on the TV market, folks.

Phelps told the media that as far as the negotiations go, things have gone beyond what anyone expected going in.

“Our media rights, the amount of interest in attaining our media rights for ’25 and beyond exceeded our expectations,” Phelps said. “It is our expectation that, not only having a great result with the CW with our Xfinity Series and what’s going to be an incredible 33-race schedule on broadcast television, we believe that we’re going to have a very strong result with media partners that will look at a combination of broadcast, cable and streaming to some degree.

“What that looks like, I don’t know. Are we getting towards the end of this process? We are. Did I think we would have a result earlier? I did. But we haven’t. It’s an incredibly competitive marketplace. With that said, I want to assure all our race fans, anyone who is listening, certainly the media corps here, we have had tremendous interest in our sport from a media rights standpoint.”

It’s very interesting as Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch echoed similar sentiments this week.

NASCAR TV deal close to being finalized

Steve Phelps isn’t the only one confident a deal is going to get done. After The CW came in and brought the Xfinity Series to standard TV, it felt like anything was possible. Nothing wild should happen, though. As far as the Cup Series is concerned, Fox and NBC are locked in on renewing.

Murdoch talked about the NASCAR negotiations this week.

“We’re currently in, I think, the final stages of a very constructive negotiation for our NASCAR renewal, we’d look forward to continuing that, that partnership with NASCAR, Murdoch said to Awful Announcing. “It’s been a great partnership for many years, and, and obviously, you know, NASCAR exceeds our expectations into from, from a ROI [return on investment] point of view.”

So, what is the path forward for NASCAR? It sounds like a more modern TV schedule. Cable, TV, streaming – it’s likely all going to happen. It should also be a massive amount of money for this new agreement.