I'm going to bet their total viewership is way down this year because of all the chopped up segment showings. I'm not seeing near as much commentary around the net as in years past (both a good and bad thing imho). FOX owned Speed for a number of years before the "change", but maybe converting to yet another stick and ball channel was their long term objective even then. We are, relatively speaking, a small market segment, but with NBC doing the same with what used to be called The Outdoor Channel (in my market anyway) it would seem there's more supply than what I would imagine the demand is (but I'm not a big stick and ball guy, so who knows).
It looks like Velocity Channel might pick up some of the slack as they start building new domestically produced shows and trim back on the foreign produced stuff.