The Town Square That Racing Never Replaced
FOX brings back SPEED
When SPEED TV died on August 17, 2013, the motorsports world lost something it still hasn’t been able to name correctly.
Everyone called it a channel. What it actually was: infrastructure.
The original SPEED, born as Speedvision in 1995 and sharpened over 18 years into a 24-hour obsession machine, functioned as the shared operating system for American motorsports fandom. NASCAR fans, F1 obsessives, IMSA diehards, motorcycle people, gearheads, and engineers. All in the same room. All speaking the same language. You didn’t have to love all of it. You just had to sit next to someone who did.
When FOX flipped it to FS1, they thought they were upgrading the hardware. They actually burned down the town square.
Two men who represent, deliberately and by design, the continental divide in motorsports fandom.
Harvick is stock car royalty. Oval purist. Daytona 500 winner. The kind of guy who grew up inside the sport and speaks fluent garage.
Buxton came up through F1. Spent years inside the paddock, camped with fans in a caravan when Formula One Magazine folded, answered questions around literal campfires. It’s a formative experience he still credits as the core philosophy of everything he’s done since. “Our job is to open those gates for everybody,” he told us on the Business of Speed Podcast. “Take them in with us. Say, come and look at this.”
That, in two sentences, is the show’s entire thesis.
This Forbes headline gets one thing right: “motorsports fans still want a shared living room.” It just undersells the ambition here.
A living room is passive. You watch. You consume. You leave.
What SPEED TV was at its peak was closer to what Buxton described to us as a “safe space,” a place where a NASCAR fan could accidentally learn why Suzuka is the most technically demanding circuit on earth, and an F1 purist could come to understand that oval racing is, as Buxton put it bluntly, not “put your foot flat to the floor, turn left, easy peasy.”
“It’s not,” he added. “It’s so complex.”
That’s where SPEED with Harvick and Buxton intends to live: a translation service for a sport that has, for a decade, segmented its own audience.
James Hinchcliffe, three-time IndyCar race winner and now an F1 presenter, told us that despite the cultural perception of rivalry between series, the mutual respect between elite drivers across disciplines is almost universally high.
“Guys like Lando grew up racing with Colton Herta, Conor Daly was over in Europe, Josef Newgarden was over in Europe,” he said. “A lot of these guys follow the sport. A lot of them openly admit, ‘I’m not going to do ovals.’” That kind of cross-pollination, professional and human and genuine, almost never makes it to air. This show is supposed to change that.
The context couldn’t be tighter, and the data backs it up.
Formula 1’s U.S. average viewership has nearly doubled since ESPN picked up the rights in 2018, climbing from 554,000 viewers per race to 1.1 million across the 2023 and 2024 seasons. The 2024 Miami Grand Prix set an all-time record for F1 in America: 3.1 million viewers. The 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey found that the United States now accounts for the largest share of respondents among individual countries. The sport is no longer a niche European import. It’s a growth asset with a younger, wealthier demographic largely created by Drive to Survive.
NASCAR’s story runs the other direction, at least on paper. The Cup Series saw viewership drop 14 percent in 2025, averaging 2.476 million per race, down from 2.892 million in 2024. Commissioner Steve Phelps said the decline was expected, a byproduct of moving races off network TV and onto cable and streaming. He may be right about the cause. But the trend predates the media deal restructuring, and the sport knows it. NASCAR is in what Harvick himself described as a “throwback era,” actively trying to reconnect with the identity it held when SPEED was at its peak.
IndyCar sits in a different kind of tension. The Indianapolis 500 still draws around 5 million viewers annually, making it one of the most-watched motorsport events in America. Beyond that race, the series is fighting for cultural relevance against two properties that have captured the mainstream conversation in ways it hasn’t.
Three series. Three distinct fan tribes. All are experiencing either a renaissance or an identity crisis at the same time. All distributed across NBC, ESPN, FOX, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, and half a dozen other streaming services.
This is the media landscape FOX is trying to unify. In a podcast.
Not everyone mourned SPEED when it went dark. In fact, one of the sharpest observers in motorsports argued that its death was actually good for the sport.
Writing for Road and Track in July 2015, Marshall Pruett argued that the fragmentation that followed SPEED’s collapse had produced something healthier than what came before. NBC Sports Network had gone deep into open-wheel racing. FS1 was carrying sports cars. CBS Sports Network was airing the BTCC, DTM, and V8 Supercars with almost no delay. “Motorsports has settled into a happy rhythm on three cable outlets,” he wrote. Leigh Diffey, who had made the move from SPEED to NBC, told him the sport was “in a really good place today on cable.”
It was a reasonable read of 2015. The problem is that the story didn’t stop there.
NBC Sports Network shut down entirely in 2021. CBS Sports Network’s motorsports programming quietly shrank. The “happy rhythm” that Pruett described kept fragmenting, from cable to streaming, from streaming to exclusive streaming, until the average fan trying to follow multiple series needed subscriptions to Apple TV, ESPN+, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, and FS1 just to stay current. What looked like healthy diversification a decade ago turned out, in time, to be a slow dispersal with no gravitational center.
When we had Pruett on Business of Speed, he talked about the paddock brotherhood. About the people. About what keeps bringing him back. The institutional architecture he praised in 2015 has since been rebuilt, dismantled, and rebuilt again. What hasn’t been replaced is the thing that had nothing to do with architecture: the shared room.
Eric Shanks, the big boss at FOX Sports and an Indiana native who used to sneak into the Speedway as a teenager, has put serious institutional weight behind this. When FOX acquired IndyCar broadcast rights, the network used eight-figure Super Bowl advertising inventory to promote the series rather than selling those slots to outside buyers. Buxton confirmed as much when he appeared on Business of Speed. “It’s not just bluster,” he said. “There’s a very deep emotional connection here that means it will be a success.”
That kind of commitment matters because FOX Sports now holds the primary broadcast relationship with three of America’s biggest motorsports properties: the NASCAR Cup Series, the IndyCar Series, and NHRA drag racing. SPEED is the connective tissue that could hold that portfolio together editorially, giving fans of each series a reason to look sideways at the others.
Here’s the honest question: can a twice-weekly show actually fill the hole a 24-hour channel left?
Probably not entirely. And the hosts know it.
Harvick kept it clinical on the success question: “Ultimately, the ratings are what make it successful.” But he pivoted fast to the less measurable version. Whether drivers want to come on. Whether the show feels fair. Whether it represents a series well enough that a NASCAR star or an IndyCar champion sees it as a platform worth their time rather than a media obligation to survive.
That’s actually the smarter success metric. In motorsports, access follows trust. If Harvick and Buxton build the kind of show where the conversation goes somewhere real, the talent pipeline fills itself.
Buxton set the bar even further out. “If in ten years’ time, this is still relevant, that will be a success,” he said. He wants a show so embedded with fans that the production team gets snowed under with messages every week. A show that creates the conversation rather than just reporting on it.
That’s what’s genuinely hard to rebuild in a fragmented, algorithmic, subscribe-to-everything media environment. The ambient quality of a channel, the sense that the sport is always on and always available, doesn’t port cleanly to a twice-weekly pod.
But here’s what does port: authority. Depth. The willingness to go somewhere the post-race press conference never goes.
Mario Andretti told us that what drove his entire career was curiosity about what the sport had to offer across disciplines, that the greatest satisfaction came from going outside his specialty and winning there anyway. That’s the same hunger SPEED TV tapped into: the sense that there was always more to learn about this world, always another series worth understanding.
That’s the content strategy Harvick and Buxton are pitching. They just haven’t said it that plainly.
Whether that’s enough depends on a question the ratings can’t answer: do motorsports fans still want to be curious together, or have they retreated so fully into their respective series ecosystems that shared space feels threatening rather than enriching?
SPEED was once a cathedral. It wants to become a town square again.
The difference matters. Cathedrals ask you to believe. Town squares ask you to show up and argue. The best ones make you want to come back tomorrow to continue the fight.
If SPEED with Harvick and Buxton can do that, if it can make a NASCAR lifer care what happened at Suzuka, and make a Drive to Survive convert understand why the Daytona 500 winner cried in victory lane, then it won’t just be a show.
It’ll be infrastructure again.
And that’s worth building.
They definitely picked the right two people for this.