The Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 has confirmed its place as one of Australia’s most popular sporting events with a huge television audience tuning into Sunday’s race.

According to OzTam’s official ratings, the Seven Network’s coverage of Sunday’s race attracted an average audience of 1.22 million viewers across Australia’s five major capitals – making the V8 Supercars race the fifth most-watched program of the day, behind only Seven News, Seven Sunday Night, Underbelly (Nine Network) and Nine News.

The five-capitals average viewers figure, a television industry standard measurement, sees the weekend’s race as the highest rating Bathurst since 2008 and represents a healthy 16.2% increase over last year.

A national average viewers figure of 1.86 million is also the strongest since 2008.

Total total number of viewers for the three days of coverage in the five capitals increased by 2.90% over 2010 to 3.55 million, while the figure for the final 15 minutes of the race increased by 20.77% to 1.63 million.

Sunday’s coverage was broken up into six slots for ratings purposes, with The Race (fifth), Final Countdown (10th), The Podium (12th), Pre-race Entertainment (19th), The Wrap-Up (22nd), Morning (28th) all making it into the day’s top 30 most watched programs.

Seven’s weekend coverage utilised 169 cameras (including 120 on-boards, of which none were in the winning car), and saw a High Definition simulcast of the race on its digital-only channel 7mate.

The telecast was beamed into 117 countries, including to the USA via Speed, which sent its own crew (including NASCAR broadcasters Darrell Waltrip and Mike Joy) to Bathurst in order to explain the race to local viewers.

Several members of the Speed team will stay on in Australia for the Armor All Gold Coast 600 on October 21-23.

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