THE BEND Motorsport Park’s OTR SuperSprint was the least-watched Repco Supercars Championship event of the year to date, thanks to softer Sunday audiences than usual.

After 119,000 people watched Race 9 on Saturday, 111,000 watched Race 10 and 108,000 Race 11 on Sunday afternoon on 506.

Those numbers are a mild surprise: It’s the first time since TRT began tracking individual race numbers that the later race on Sunday has produced a smaller audience than the earlier one – later timeslots generally offering larger audiences.

Sunday was a soft day for sports TV ratings with only one thing – an NRL match between the Dragons & Bulldogs – drawing more than 200,000. A busy Sunday of Mother’s day engagements for families is a likely contributor.

While the Supercars numbers were down on other rounds this year, relative to other sports shown on the same day they remain competitive; the Hawks v West Coast and Brisbane v Fremantle AFL games both drawing smaller audiences on Fox Sports than either Supercars race.

Eight of the top-20 shows on Foxtel on Sunday were Supercars-related programming, with 101,000 watching the Race 11 celebrations as Cameron Waters finally broke through for a race win.

60,000 watched Race 10 qualifying and the most-watched support race coverage.

2020 v 2021

AVERAGE AUDIENCES (After 4 Rounds)

2020:
Channel 10 Metro: 187,000 (average across 5 races)
Channel 10 regional: 145,000 (average across 5 races)
Fox Sports: 133,000 (average across 11 races)

2021:
Channel 7 Metro: 288,000 (average across 2 races)
Channel 7 Regional: 242,000 (average across 2 races)
Fox Sports: 135,000 (average across 11 races)

As always, tracking down numbers from Kayo Sports streaming is virtually impossible, however it’s worth noting that the streaming service has just cracked more than 1,000,000 subscribers

This is up from the approximately 460,000 they reported for the same point in 2020, which represents a substantial jump and means there’s a significant audience watching digitally each weekend, which would explain in part the drop in the Foxtel ratings.

Kayo recently confirmed that they have attracted audiences of 150,000 to Formula 1 races that start at midnight.

Spanish Grand Prix

107,000 watched the Spanish Grand Prix on Fox Sports on Sunday night, by far the biggest F1 audience of the year to date.

It’s the biggest Spanish GP audience since 2018 and went within 1,000 viewers of beating the Supercars race that started some seven hours earlier.

F1 audiences have been all over the shop this year to date thanks to the early-AM start time of Bahrain and the extremely late Portuguese Grand Prix last week.

The two races that have started at a reasonable time in Australia have both drawn more than 100,000 people.

70,000 watched Spain qualifying on Saturday night.

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).