NASCAR on television in the 2000s
Open-knowledge reference entry
Until 2001, race tracks struck individual agreements with networks to broadcast races, but NASCAR wanted to capitalize on the growing popularity of the sport and announced in 1999 that television contracts would now be centralized; that is, instead of making agreements with individual tracks, networks would now negotiate directly with NASCAR for the rights to air a package of races.
Contract overview
2001–2006: Fox, NBC, Turner Sports
On December 15, 1999, Fox Sports, FX, NBC and Turner Sports agreed to pay $2.4 billion for a new six-year television package, covering the Winston/Nextel Cup Series and Busch Series schedules.
Fox and FX would be responsible for covering the first half of the season. All Busch Series races during that part of the season would also be on Fox/FX. NBC and Turner would partner to cover the second half of the season, which beginning in 2004 would include the Chase for the Cup. Originally, Turner's broadcast outlet for its NASCAR coverage was to be TBS as it had been for every other race Turner had broadcast before. However, Turner Broadcasting opted to rebrand its sister network TNT as a drama-heavy network and decided to move the NASCAR coverage there in March 2001 as they felt it fit the new branding better.
As part of the new contract, the Daytona events were split evenly between the networks. Fox would air the Daytona 500 in every odd numbered year during the contract, with NBC covering the then-Pepsi 400 those years. NBC would then, in turn, air the Daytona 500 in every even-numbered year with Fox receiving the Pepsi 400.
The network in charge of Daytona 500 coverage would also have the rights to air the events during Speedweeks, which consisted of the Budweiser Shootout, Daytona 500 pole qualifying, the two qualifying races held after pole qualifying, and the season opening Busch race.
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This entry incorporates text from “NASCAR on television in the 2000s” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.