Fox Sports is using a 10-person production crew to bring iRacing to NASCAR fans
There is a word FOX Sports Executive Producer Brad Zager used to describe the weekend that followed the simultaneous stoppage of the sports world two weeks ago: “Chaos.”
“I’m trying to figure out where to start the story,” Zager said during a phone call Friday morning that he took at his kitchen counter, a spot he now calls his “office” since it’s where he conducts Zoom meetings and teleconferences that have consumed his schedule after the coronavirus pandemic forced many Americans, including Zager, to work from home.
“Really it starts with that weekend where all the events were being canceled,” Zager said. “We were basically spending our days just worrying about the crews we already had around the country at NASCAR events, at XFL events, at MLS events, at college basketball tournaments.”
Zager oversees all live events that air on FOX Sports and FS1, including Major League Baseball, NFL, college football and NASCAR. By Friday, March 13, NASCAR became the latest professional sport sanctioning body to postpone its season to prevent the spread of COVID-19, leaving FOX Sports and other cable networks to scramble for programming content to replace the live events originally scheduled to air that weekend.
“It was just a minute-by-minute of trying to make sure that everything was taken care of,” Zager said. “And most importantly, everybody got home, everybody’s safe, everybody’s healthy.”
News of other canceled events had barely slowed before Zager got a call from his boss, CEO of FOX Sports Eric Shanks, on Sunday evening, according to Zager.
“He’s like, ‘I’ve got an idea to do iRacing,’” Zager said. “I think everybody’s head was going so many different directions at the time that we started to think about it and I said, ‘Yeah.’”
Last Sunday, FS1 aired its first race of the eNASCAR Pro Invitational iRacing Series, an exhibition series organized by NASCAR in the wake of race postponements that features top Cup drivers competing on simulator rigs and virtual tracks that closely resemble the ones fans see in real life.
The live FOX broadcast drew just under a million viewers on FS1 (903,000 viewers), according to Nielsen. On Tuesday, FOX Sports announced it will broadcast the remainder of the virtual series until the official NASCAR season reconvenes some time after early May.
“I thought it was awesome,” Zager said. “I’ll be honest, we didn’t have any expectations. We were doing this hoping that NASCAR fans would appreciate it and sports viewers would show up, and we just felt really good afterwards about the number.”
That number is significantly lower than what Cup Series races typically average for FOX Sports - 4.6 million viewers tuned into NASCAR’s last official race at Phoenix Raceway, for example. But the iRace was still the most-watched sports telecast on cable television that day and, as of Tuesday, it was the most-watched telecast on FS1 since professional sports leagues began postponing events on March 12.
Logistics for the production came together in a matter of days, with graphics from iRacing’s headquarters in Boston being fed into FOX NASCAR’s Charlotte-based studio for the race (and Zager watching from a stream at his home in Los Angeles).
“It worked well that it wasn’t completely buttoned up,” said FOX NASCAR broadcaster and former driver Jeff Gordon. “I hope we still maintain a little bit of that aspect this weekend.”
According to Gordon, the whole thing was a learn-as-you-go type deal. Although he was familiar with the iRacing rigs and circuits prior to last Sunday, there was still a lot to learn before calling the iRace live.
“I literally watched Jeff Gordon, Mike Joy and Larry McReynolds sit in a production meeting with iRacing and FOX officials and in a matter of an hour, maybe two hours, write every note (and) ask every question they knew to ask,” said full-time Cup driver Clint Bowyer, who served as an in-race analyst for FOX’s broadcast while competing last weekend.
The production itself is operating under a tight schedule and a limited crew. FOX NASCAR has been using a skeleton production crew of 10 members to comply with CDC guidelines and avoid unnecessary contact. The production team is typically double that for a typical studio show and more than 10 times that for a live Cup Series race. But like Gordon, Zager feels the impromptu nature of the production is part of its appeal.
“There was almost a rawness to it that everybody connected to with the announcers figuring things out, the production figuring things out, and the buy-in of the NASCAR drivers,” Zager said.
That “buy-in” is part of what makes the broadcast work. Fans are able to see in-home streams of drivers like Denny Hamlin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. who are racing without shoes (Hamlin) or one-handed (Dale Jr.). It brings a sense of connectivity, but also something else.
“I think it’s going to bring in new fans,” Gordon said. “And they’re going to have a whole new respect for what these drivers do and are capable of doing, as well as the danger factor that exists in the real world that doesn’t exist in the virtual world when you can just hit a reset button.”
This story was originally published March 29, 2020 at 6:00 AM.