Duel tops cable time slot with nearly 2M households

In its second year of live and exclusive coverage of the Gatorade Duel at Daytona, SPEED delivered a 12 percent ratings increase over 2007, with race coverage scoring a final Nielsen Household Rating of 2.10 (1,512,000 households) compared to last season's 1.87 (1,307,000 households), making it the second-most watched program in SPEED history.

According to Nielsen Media Research, SPEED was ranked No. 1 among the 69 basic cable networks in Households and Total Viewers during the live Valentine's Day broadcast of the Gatorade Duel at Daytona.

"SPEED recognizes The Gatorade Duel at Daytona as an integral piece of the fabric that makes up Daytona Speedweeks," said SPEED president Hunter Nickell. "And as a network, we never took it for granted that The Duel was a major part of a huge SPEED presence at a very historic weekend of NASCAR competition. Simply having the Duel on SPEED is great ... the fact that we delivered significant ratings growth is absolutely awesome."

This year's Duel coverage peaked at 2.65 (1,910,000 households), topping last year's peak of 2.48 (1,728,000 households).

The SPEED ratings growth continued a trend that began early in Speedweeks, with the pre-Bud Shootout edition of NASCAR RaceDay scoring a Nielsen Household Rating of 1.53 (1,101,000 households). On the first Saturday of Daytona coverage, five SPEED programs scored a Nielsen mark of "1" or better. NASCAR RaceDay was up 17 percent from a year ago, the ARCA RE/MAX Series race scored its best ratings in network history, up 16 percent (1.46 vs. 1.26), Sprint Cup Series practice was up 8 percent (1.11 vs. 1.03) and two episodes of NASCAR Live! were up 18 percent and 26 percent respectively.