TV RATINGS: THE BEND BEST SINCE RACING RETURN
A CLASSIC weekend of racing at the Repco Super Sprint has seen Fox Sports pull their biggest ratings since racing returned in June this year.
WORDS: Richard Craill IMAGE: Frank Hodak / The Bend Motorsport Park
BOTH Saturday’s Wild Race 25 and Sunday’s slightly more tame affairs set new benchmarks for Fox Sports 506, at least since the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship returned to the track at Sydney Motorsport Park in late June.
The 134,000 who watched arguably the best race of the season on Saturday afternoon was the best Saturday audience on Fox since the Adelaide 500.
147,000 watched Race 26 at midday on Sunday – at that point the largest Fox Sports Audience for a Supercars race since the season-opener.
That, however, was trumped again by the final race of the day as 154,000 tuning in to see Scott McLaughlin dominate Race 27 of the championship.
It’s the largest Fox Sports audience of the year outside of the Adelaide 500 and more than 20,000 larger than the equivalent race at The Bend last year.
The cumulative audience across all three races was 435,000, comfortably the biggest round of the year for Fox Sports since June.
Supercars numbers are gradually easing upwards as the year charges towards the Bathurst 1000 finale – it will be interesting to see if it continues next weekend when the series returns to The Bend – on a different layout.
Supercars programming filled nine of the top-20 slots on Subscription TV on Sunday, with an impressive 99,000 watching the Support races between Sunday’s two Supercars sprints and 106,000 watching the pre-race for The Bend finale’.
MOTO GP
MOTOGP’s return to Misano delivered another cracker, though the TV ratings didn’t quite match the on-track excitement this time around.
A total audience of 178,000 watched the race on 10Bold and Fox Sports, the lowest of the year to date.
The 10Bold Audience of 112,000 may have been compromised by key games of Footy being played on primary free-to-air channels at the time, though the Fox Sports Audience of 66,000 was the second-largest of the season to date.
Ratings Watch Archive – Click Here
SOURCES: TV Tonight, Mediaweek, TV Black Box.
(NOTE: Numbers are overnight metro (5 capital city) and Foxtel ratings supplied by ratings agency OzTam to media outlets. They do not include any additional reporting, including time shifted content, regional ratings or broader reach, unless released and freely available. They also do not include streaming numbers on Kayo or SuperView, etc).
Richard Craill (administrator)
Working full time in the motorsport industry since 2004, Richard has established himself within the group of Australia’s core motorsport broadcasters, covering the support card at the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix for Channel 10, the Bathurst 12 Hour for Channel 7 and Porsche Carrera Cup & Touring Car Masters for FOX Sports’ Supercars coverage. Pretends to be a PR guy / Journalist and sometimes photographer to make ends meet when not yelling at a television in a padded room.
