Tonight the Discovery Channel will air the season finale of the highly popular and quite controversial reality program Street Outlaws, bookending the series’ second season. For the uninitiated, the show features the heavy hitters of the Oklahoma City street racing scene and their menacing machines as they battle one another for supremacy on their top ten list.

Following the series’ first season, which premiered in June and ran through early July, we shared with you a brief look at the ratings pulled in by the then-new show, comparing it with the NHRA’s television numbers in a story that proved to be rather popular with the curious viewers out there. With that in mind, we’d be remiss if we didn’t follow that story up with a look at how the second season stacks up to the first.

You may recall from a recent Wolf’s Word column mention of the NHRA’s growing television woes, pointing out that their viewership numbers declined for the third straight year, with an average of fewer than 400,000 homes (and a 0.3 rating) tuning in for the Mello Yello series race-day telecasts on ESPN and ESPN2, and less than 300,000 for the Saturday qualifying shows.

Street Outlaws, however, has seen its numbers grow during its second season.

In it’s premiere season, the gearhead reality program was one of the top primetime cable shows on Monday nights, pulling in an average of about 1.5 million viewers and a 0.6 rating amongst the coveted 18-49 demographic. The second season, which premiered on December 2nd, climbed over 2.2 million viewers on December 31st (and garnered a combined 3.4 million on that night between the 9 p.m and 10 p.m. time slots), and averaging, in our non-calculated estimates, 1.7 to 1.8 million viewers on average and a 0.8 rating. Viewership has ranged from a low of 1.23 million to the high of 2.2 million, which consistently places it among the nights’ top cable programs and competitive with many other popular primetime cable shows.

Certainly, it could be argued that some of this increase comes down to timing, with more viewers hunkered down in front of their televisions in the quiet winter months than during the busy months of June and July, but it bears repeating that, in many ways, this great disparity between Street Outlaws’ numbers and that of the NHRA (well over four times the viewers) is a reflection of where the average ‘car guy” and “car gal” is going for their automotive-themed entertainment. 

It’s true that reality programming like Street Outlaws features manufactured drama that’s been fine-tuned in a production department before ever reaching the airwaves — a luxury that same-day and live telecasts of a motorsports event don’t have. Nor is a same-day weekend event and a weeknight primetime program an apple to apples comparison. But those facts aside, the ratings prove once again that real cars and personalities they can relate to are what today’s viewers are interested in seeing, and that suit-wearing race series officials, race promoters, and marketing types ought to be taking notice.