Stock car racing organization NASCAR has revealed that the 2026 edition of its secondary championship, the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, hit its highest viewership in five years on The CW network.
The CW, the series’ exclusive broadcaster, claims that the 33 races throughout the season averaged 1.04 million total viewers, marking the second consecutive campaign of viewership increase, and the best season of viewership on the network.
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This was also the most-watched edition of the series, previously known as the Xfinity Series, since 2021, when the rights were split by media giants Fox and Comcast (owner of NBC).
Of the 33 races, 22 averaged over 1 million viewers throughout the duration of the race, the largest such number of races since the 2017 campaign.
The recent November 7 Championship race at Homestead–Miami Speedway drew 1.18 million total viewers, with a viewership peak of 1.6 million, making it the best-performing championship race since 2019, with viewership increasing 16% year-on-year on the 2025 finale.
This is a boon for the CW, which picked up the rights ahead of the 2024 campaign, and has seen strong viewership growth since.
After its acquisition by Nextar in 2022, The CW struggled before switching its focus drastically, and in 2023, sports became a core tenet of its rights strategy.
Across 2023, the network acquired the rights to a number of properties including LIV Golf, ACC college football and basketball, wrestling promotion WWE’s NXT program, American football talk show Inside the NFL, and of course NASCAR’s secondary series.
As of April 2026, The CW claimed that sports accounts for 40% of its programming.
This rights sweep has helped to galvanize The CW, growing audiences (sports viewership contributed to 13% audience growth), reducing programming costs, and, crucially, increasing profitability.
Strong NASCAR viewership on The CW is also a bonus for O’Reilly Auto Parts, a longstanding partner of the organization, which took over naming rights for the secondary series from Xfinity ahead of the 2026 campaign.
The series has been known as the NASCAR Xfinity Series since 2014 under a long-term agreement, but strong viewership in the first year of the new title deal will certainly help to shift viewer perception of the series and create a closer association to O’Reilly Auto Parts.
The 2027 edition of the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series will begin on February 20, and run through the November 13 finale.
