NBC Sports reveals promising rating for NASCAR’s Iowa Corn 350 at Iowa Speedway

Many NASCAR drivers didn’t love Sunday’s race at Iowa Speedway, but viewers tuned in for the event. NBC Sports revealed on Tuesday that the broadcast of the Iowa Corn 350 was television’s most-watched sporting event of the weekend, averaging 2.2 million viewers.

“USA Network’s coverage of the NASCAR Iowa Corn 350 was TV’s most-watched sporting event of the weekend,” NBC Sports posted on X. “Sunday’s race on USA averaged 2.2 million viewers, 2nd highest for last 10 Cup Series races.”

That’s certainly a positive development for NASCAR and NBC Sports. Even if the action didn’t live up to expectations, it’s a solid sign that their audience is tuning in to see what’s going on in the world of motorsports.

After the dust settled on the race that was, Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic tried to make sense of it all. They were left feeling very lukewarm about Sunday’s event, like many fans of the Cup Series.

“I thought it was, again, very Dover-esque. I mean, it’s sort of like – I think anybody that’s watched these races … But we all know by now that clean air and track position mean a ton. And you could see there that even though William Byron is in extreme fuel savings mode, extreme, they’re screaming at him. ‘Back up even more, back up even more,’ right? In the end, he had to save 144 laps of fuel, and now he got a ton of cautions, that really helped,” Gluck said on The Teardown. “But Chase Briscoe still can’t get there to make the move on him. Which is, again, familiar story, we’ve seen this before. 

“Then Brad Keselowski is driving as hard as he can, he can’t get there. Now, had it played out a little bit longer, you know, Blaney made a lot of ground up. He got into the picture there. But he was suddenly in the, he was going to be in dirty air with the rest of them. So, how long would it have taken him to pass? It’s just very, very hard to pass with this car. The track only got half paved last year when they did it. So, you, you can’t run the full track, you know what I mean? So, I mean, this was just, just exactly what you would expect, I guess.”

All told, NASCAR did not have a great show at Iowa. At least, not in the Cup Series race on Sunday. We’ll see if they can provide some better racing at Watkins Glen this coming weekend, and how the ratings reflect their product.

— On3’s Jonathan Howard contributed to this article.