HOMESTEAD, Fla. (AP) — While acknowledging sagging television ratings for the Cup Series, NASCAR is trying to “create as many avenues as possible” to attract new fans.
NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell, speaking two days before the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, said the sanctioning body is turning to YouTube and social media influencers in hopes of growing the series beyond its southern roots and moving further into international markets.
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Crews prepare ahead of NASCAR Championship weekend, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
FILE - Brad Keselowski's Dodge stands in the garage during practice for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race at Watkins Glen International in Watkins Glen, N.Y., on Aug. 10, 2012. (AP Photo/David Duprey, File)
Kyle Larson speaks to journalists during media day for the NASCAR Championship, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
Palm trees rise behind a NASCAR sign as crews prepare ahead of NASCAR Championship weekend, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
“If you’re in New York or you’re in Seattle, and you don’t have a race, what is that entry point?,” O’Donnell said Friday. “It may be a YouTube clip that you see that you say, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool. What is this? I’m going to tune into that race. OK, I found it. I want to then go to a race.’
“So there’s a lot of avenues that we’ve got to focus on, all kinds of things that we can look at to grow. … We know we’re building off a strong foundation, but we’ve got to grow those.”
O’Donnell pointed to admission being up 5% across all races and attendance for kids 12 and up being up 12%. He also noted that NASCAR is coming off “record attendance” at European series events.
He blamed recent TV ratings on head-to-head matchups with college football and the NFL.
NBC viewership for last week’s Cup race at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia was down 15% from last year. The event averaged just under 2 million viewers, making it the least-watched, non-delayed Cup race on broadcast television. And NASCAR has seen an overall postseason decline in ratings.
“You’ve got to look at your social media engagement. You got to look at, ‘Are you growing on YouTube?’ Are sponsors coming into the sport? Are you top of mind as people are talking about it?" O'Donnell said. "All those things are up.
“Attendance? If I came in here and said, ‘Our attendance is matching our ratings in the tail end of the season,’ that would be something we would want to focus on. Our attendance is up. When we look at 2027, where we’re going, those numbers are up. So we’ve got to look at it all in totality. It’s all important.”
O’Donnell applauded the addition of Dodge as a fourth manufacturer and suggested a partnership with Tom Cruise and his “Days of Thunder” sequel could help.
“The goal at NASCAR is ultimately to create as many avenues as possible to bring fans into the sport,” he said. “That’ll hopefully lead to someone saying, ‘Hey, I want to get to a race.’ What do we hope that happens from there? They embrace a driver.
“True success is that race fan has embraced the driver and develops so much passion that they have absolute disdain for three or four other drivers out there on the track. That’s when we know we’re successful.”
The return to the Chase for the championship this season, which rewarded consistency and dumped elimination events during the 10-race playoff, resulted in Kyle Larson nearly clinching the title a week before the finale.
But O’Donnell suggested it was more of a fluke than a flaw to the setup.
“Kyle Larson has gone on an historic run and deserves to be talked about,” he said. “If we had that one-race deal, we would have had four drivers in here and it would have been different. …
“At least in my discussions with the garage area and the industry, people feel like directionally it has worked. But we want to talk to the fans as well and see what feedback we get.”
Larson has won three of the nine postseason races and finished in the top 10 in eight of them.
The Next Gen car in the Cup Series gets ripped regularly — by fans and drivers alike — for the racing product it produces. But O’Donnell doesn’t expect any wholesale changes to the car because it creates “a sustainable model for the industry.”
“A (new) car comes with all kinds of costs and all kinds of different things,” he said. “So I’m confident in our guys and the industry and the OEMs to tweak what we have where necessary but also be pretty confident in our drivers going out there and having the ability to go win races and put on some pretty darn good competition.”
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Crews prepare ahead of NASCAR Championship weekend, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
FILE - Brad Keselowski's Dodge stands in the garage during practice for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race at Watkins Glen International in Watkins Glen, N.Y., on Aug. 10, 2012. (AP Photo/David Duprey, File)
Kyle Larson speaks to journalists during media day for the NASCAR Championship, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
Palm trees rise behind a NASCAR sign as crews prepare ahead of NASCAR Championship weekend, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV is kicking off a three-nation tour of Latin America on Friday with a visit to Uruguay, the region’s least Catholic and most secular country, three weeks after undergoing lung cancer surgery that had put the entire trip into question.
Leo is due to arrive in Montevideo after a 13½-hour flight from Rome. He has a packed three-day itinerary in Uruguay including a visit to a neighborhood plagued by gang violence, a Mass in Paysandú, around 375 kilometers (230 miles) from the capital, and another Mass in the city of Florida, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Montevideo.
The atmosphere at the airport before Leo’s arrival was calm and unhurried, much like the rest of Uruguay’s capital. Gradually, however, people began gathering at Plaza Independencia, one of the country’s most prominent public spaces and the site of Leo's first public event.
“It’s definitely a major event, which is great, even though I’m not a believer myself. It’s wonderful to see so many people coming together,” said musician Diego Vázquez, 28. “I think it’s a lovely initiative that has also put Uruguay, to some extent, in the eyes of the world.”
The Uruguay leg is the first stop on what will be the longest and farthest trip of his pontificate, all being undertaken as the 71-year-old pope continues his recovery. The trip will also bring him to neighboring Argentina and finally back home to Peru, where Leo served as a missionary priest and bishop for two decades.
“His stamina is fantastic. The way that he's singing is incredible. And you can only sing if your lungs are really strong,” said María Montserrat Alvarado, the Vatican's new communications chief. She noted that Leo has passed the 14-day convalescence period required by doctors after his Oct. 13 surgery and is eager to get on the road.
“His doctors are very confident and he'll have plenty of medical care on board should something happen, but we don't see that in his prognosis or even in the way that he's acting,” she said.
In Uruguay, which hasn’t had a papal visit since 1988, Leo is expected to try to remind the 3.5 million people of their strong Catholic heritage stemming from the times of Spanish colonial rule. He's likely to propose the faith anew as an answer to today’s challenges and problems.
Upon arrival, Leo will meet with President Yamandú Orsi, leader of the center-left alliance that assumed power in March 2025, and then deliver his welcome address to government officials and diplomats. He finishes the long day with a vespers service at the city's cathedral.
Leo will find in Uruguay a country unlike any other in Latin America, which is home to around 40% of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. Uruguay is considered the most secular country in the region, where only a fraction of people who identify as Catholic actually go to Mass regularly.
Uruguay’s secularism has roots in the weakness of its colonial church. With no gold or silver to mine, Spain valued the land of cattle ranches mainly as a buffer against Portuguese Brazil and left it largely unsettled. Montevideo was founded only in the 1720s, roughly two centuries after Mexico City and Lima.
With few priests and no local bishop, the church never became the powerful institution it was elsewhere in the empire. “Uruguay was colonized late, and that made Catholicism weaker,” said Gerardo Caetano, a Uruguayan historian.
Montevideo awoke to its usual calm. Along the waterfront, joggers were out for their morning runs and residents walked their dogs along the very same promenade that the pope is set to visit just a few hours later.
“We still don’t understand why he chose Uruguay, given that it’s a secular country, but we hope he leaves something positive behind," said Mary Fernández while drinking mate, Uruguay's beloved beverage.
The origins of the separation between church and state can be traced back to the 19th century, particularly to the spread of liberal ideas promoted by European intellectuals, who viewed religion as a symptom of backwardness or a lack of rationality, said Luis Bahamondes, a professor at the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Chile.
“While Latin America also experienced a separation of church and state, the Catholic Church has nonetheless maintained strong ties with the various states in the region,” he said. “In this context, Uruguay stands out as a paradigmatic example of how secularism can be implemented.”
This process went so far as to include the renaming of certain holidays to reflect their secular character — such as “Family Day” and “Tourism Week” — signaling that the “inherent weight of Catholicism had no place within the State’s official framework,” Bahamondes added.
Since then, Uruguay has become the first country in the world to legalize marijuana for recreational use, the second country in Latin America to decriminalize abortion, and the third country in the Americas to legalize same-sex marriage.
More recently, it became the first country in the region to approve assisted dying legislation despite the strong opposition of the Catholic Church.
Uruguayan church officials have marveled at the apparent enthusiasm that the visit has provoked, with reports that tickets to Leo’s prayer vigil at Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium were snapped up after two days.
“It seems that the pope’s presence is shifting something here and is gradually breaking down this veil that has always sought to obscure and diminish the presence of the Catholic tradition that lies at the country’s foundation,” said Guzmán Carriquiry, the Uruguayan former head of the Vatican’s pontifical commission for Latin America.
Carriquiry said that he expects Leo will seek to revive the Catholic roots of Uruguay, especially when he travels to the city of Florida on Sunday to mark an important Catholic feast day.
The Nov. 8 feast commemorates the Virgin of the Thirty-three, a small wooden icon of the Virgin Mary that is intricately connected to Uruguay’s independence movement. According to tradition, 33 independence patriots acquired the Guaraní statue and had it with them when independence was declared from the Brazilian empire in Florida on Aug. 25, 1825.
“So the number 33 is an ecclesiastical symbol, a national symbol,” said Carriquiry. “And so the pope will speak there about the Catholic tradition that lies at the origin of Uruguay — that stems from Uruguay and gave rise to Uruguay — in order to revive and renew the Catholic tradition in the hearts of Uruguayans.”
Andrew Chesnut, chair of Catholic studies and an expert in the Latin American church at Virginia Commonwealth University, said that he wasn’t surprised that Leo’s visit had generated enthusiasm and that he will be welcomed warmly.
“But that’s not necessarily going to translate into folks in the pews,” he said. “If the overarching goal is trying to revitalize Catholicism in the most Catholic region on Earth, Uruguay is kind of a lost cause, and it has been for decades.”
Nayara Batschke contributed from Montevideo, Uruguay.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
This story has been corrected to show that the last name of the Vatican’s new communications chief is Alvarado, not Alvar.
People cheer as a statue of Pope Leo XIV is installed in 'El Niño' park in Callao, Peru, Friday, Nov. 6, 2026, ahead of his planned trip to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru from November 6 to17. (AP Photo/Guadalupe Pardo)
A vendor sells scarves featuring Pope Leo XIV's image ahead of his arrival in Montevideo, Uruguay, Friday, Nov. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
Pope Leo XIV departs from Rome's Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Fiumicino, near Rome, for Montevideo, Uruguay, at the start of his twelve-day apostolic journey to South America, Friday, Nov. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Pope Leo XIV departs from Rome's Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Fiumicino, near Rome, for Montevideo, Uruguay, at the start of his twelve-day apostolic journey to South America, Friday, Nov. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Pope Leo XIV appears at the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter's Square at the Vatican for the Angelus noon prayer on All Saints' Day, a feast celebrated across much of the Christian world, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV blesses a new born after his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square at The Vatican, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Pope Leo XIV celebrates a mass in memory of cardinals and bishops who died during the past year, in St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
A mototaxi pass drives past a banner of Pope Leo XIV at Pimentel beach in Chiclayo, Peru, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, ahead of his planned trip to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru from November 6 to 17. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)
