Fox Sports gets three remaining NASCAR Cup races starting in 2015

NASCAR on Thursday amended its television-rights pact with Fox Sports so that Fox Sports will show the first 16 Sprint Cup Series races of the season starting in 2015.

Fox Sports already was set to carry the first 13 Cup races, as it does now, under an eight-year extension announced last October that was to last through 2022.

Then last month, NASCAR announced another deal with NBC Sports -- a 10-year pact from 2015 through 2024 -- for NBC Sports to carry the final 20 races of the 36-race Cup schedule. That had left three Cup races whose TV rights were still pending.

Fox Sports picked up those three races in its amended deal with NASCAR, and Fox Sports’ contract also was extended two years, through 2024, to align with the NBC Sports agreement.

The new deal also calls for Fox Sports to carry the first 14 races in NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series and all of the races in NASCAR’s Camping World Truck Series. NBC Sports will televise the remaining 19 Nationwide races.

NASCAR said nine of the Cup races carried by Fox Sports would be on network TV and seven would be carried by Fox Sports 1, its new all-sports cable network.

Fox Sports said it would launch Fox Sports 1 on Aug. 17 with a live showing of the NASCAR truck race at Michigan International Speedway.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed. But the NBC Sports deal was valued at $4.4 billion, according to people with knowledge of the pact. And SportsBusiness Daily reported Thursday that the amended Fox deal is worth $3.8 billion, which would put the combined value of the two deals at $8.2 billion.

NASCAR’s Cup races currently are divided among Fox Sports, Turner Sports (TNT) and ESPN, and its Nationwide schedule is carried by ESPN.

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