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Rolling into this weekend’s Indianapolis 500, both the NTT IndyCar series and Fox are moving at top speed toward their goals for the collaboration.
In June 2024, IndyCar announced that it was shifting partners from NBCUniversal to Fox and putting all 17 of its races, plus two days of qualifying rounds for the Gainbridge-sponsored Indy 500, on live network broadcasts. The circuit saw immediate dividends during its opening race in St. Petersburg, when Fox drew an audience of 1.42 million—a viewership level IndyCar hadn’t hit since the 2011 Indianapolis 500 and 45% higher than last year’s opener on NBC, according to Sports Media Watch.
As Fox announced during its upfront earlier this month, IndyCar viewership is up 25% on Fox from the same time last year. That didn’t happen in a vacuum, as Fox began marketing IndyCar in fall and early winter during its college football and National Football League broadcasts, using its other Fox Sports properties to boost awareness of IndyCar.
“We were able to use that platform to start advertising and talking about IndyCar and the drivers to a wide audience, and that was an important part of the liftoff of the new season and the new relationship with Indy continued that through the playoffs and the Super Bowl,” said Robert Gottlieb, president of marketing at Fox Sports. “We’ve used our NASCAR broadcast, beginning with the Daytona 500, which has large amounts of motorsports fans, and we’re able to talk to them a lot about IndyCar, and so that all led to a pretty virtuous circle that delivered us to our opener at St Petersburg.”
Gottlieb considers the Indianapolis 500 broadcast an inflection point for Fox’s IndyCar coverage, with much of it building to this stage. During the Super Bowl, Fox’s IndyCar ads focused on 26-year-old Mexican driver Pato O’Ward, who dabbles in Formula 1 with McLaren and came in second at last year’s Indy 500 after a raucous final lap. The campaign also featured reigning champion Josef Newgarden, who’s going for his third-consecutive victory after winning the previous two races in Indianapolis on the last lap.
A throwaway line in Newgarden’s ad about how he “loves the smell of unleaded gasoline” amid images of him in a stylized fragrance ad for the fake cologne “Ethanol” led to online clamor for a tie-in souvenir. Eventually, a giant bottle of it appeared with Newgarden near the track at St. Petersburg and at other races. Fox marketer Shelby Romero then proposed a collaboration with an actual cologne retailer, which led to a pre-Indy 500 appearance by Newgarden with the fragrance at Macy’s Herald Square on May 21.
“If it’s a national competition, if it’s Team USA playing in soccer or hockey or any event, the personalities and the individuals probably don’t come into play quite as much as the uniform,” Gottlieb said. “But outside of those sports, the need to have personalities and to have individuals that people care about and want to see perform is really important—whether that’s NASCAR, IndyCar, MLB, college football, or beyond—knowing the players and feeling like you care about their performance is always an integral part of bringing people into the sport and into viewing it on on our networks.”
Forming a race team
While Fox has been taking its Big Spill milk bottle and race car installation to local Fox affiliates across the U.S. to gather interest for Indianapolis 500 coverage, it’s also had IndyCar figures, including Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood and Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Graham Rahal, along to explain the race’s intricacies and history—including why winners drink milk (1936 winner Louis Meyer just liked buttermilk).
The faces and stories behind the wheel at this year’s Indianapolis 500 have been invaluable to Fox and IndyCar’s marketing efforts. Gottlieb noted that, since 2021, O’Ward has finished second at the Indy 500 twice and within the Top 5 three times. In his last interview in Indianapolis, visibly and audibly emotional after coming so close to victory, he closed by thanking the crowd for its cheers, saying they “made Indianapolis a home for me.”
That was basically his audition for Fox’s campaign.
“Pato was an easy one for us as we stepped into this because he’s so charismatic. He’s very young. He’s an amazing driver, and he’s gotten so close to the brass ring at Indy a couple of times now,” Gottlieb said. “[He] showed a vulnerability and an emotion that you don’t often see in today’s athletes, and when you see how raw he was and how much this means to him, and what this quest means to him, that’s incredibly compelling to see an athlete who is in that space.”
Newgarden, meanwhile, represents another part of the equation—a “pretty unique character,” a multi-time winner, “who’s been an eager participant in the stuff that we’ve been doing at Fox to try to make any car grow and become more accessible to more fans,” Gottlieb noted.
However, in becoming one of the faces of the circuit and seeking his third crown at Indianapolis, he now walks a line between hero and heel.
“He is like the perfect leading man for a race car circuit: He’s young; he’s handsome; he’s ambitious; and he’s an absolute killer on the track. Joseph was a bit of a gift for us,” Gottlieb said. “If this is a guy you can’t be interested in, then you’ve got no pulse at all, and he’s kind of polarizing in the best way: A lot of fans absolutely love and adore him and his dominance at the 500 is something that they revel in, and then there are a lot of fans who think he’s too perfect and can’t wait to see him get his comeuppance.”
Welcome to the fastest racing on earth. March 2 on @FOXTV.@IndyCar | @josefnewgarden | #INDYCARonFOX pic.twitter.com/yWFIOlDVa3
— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) January 12, 2025
The next lap
At Fox’s upfront, Newgarden shared the stage with an IndyCar luminary who more often prefers a place in the shadows: Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing owner David Letterman. The late-night retiree tested his comedic muscles at the expense of the 500’s multifaceted Borg-Warner Trophy, praised Newgarden while wishing Rahal would edge him in this weekend’s event, and went into Indy’s 109th running by testing everyone’s memory of Ray Harroun.
While Letterman hasn’t been a focus of Fox IndyCar marketing or sought its spotlight, his willingness to lend some time to the partnership and help draw ad buyers to races—especially the Indianapolis 500—bodes well for IndyCar on Fox as it accelerates forward.
“Having David Letterman at the upfront was special, unique, and we were thrilled, but that being said, he’s famously reluctant to use his celebrity in pursuit of anything other than living his own private life at this point,” Gottlieb said. “The benefit for us of having David Letterman on stage [at the upfront] was it illustrates, in a very strong way, for people who are unfamiliar with IndyCar that there is a strong cross-section of culture and sport that exists around IndyCar.”
