‘We’re giving the Indianapolis 500 the Super Bowl treatment’
By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director, Sports Video Group
Friday, May 23, 2025 – 12:02 pm
FOX Sports is all-in on the 109th Indy 500, which will be broadcast on Sunday with production enhancements designed to engage and inform race fans and even viewers unfamiliar with Indy Car. It has been a massive effort involving hundreds of people, months of preparation, and now final rehearsals ahead of the big day. Mike Davies, EVP, technical and field operations, FOX Sports, sat down with SVG to discuss the effort.
What does it mean to FOX Sports to tackle the Indy 500 for the first time?
We’re giving the Indy 500 the Super Bowl treatment. By that, I mean we’ve brought to bear all the people and tools that can make this event stand out as one of the big national tent-pole events like the Super Bowl. If anything, the Indy 500 on Sunday will have a production profile that is unmatched in racing.
This production setup is different from the way you guys do NASCAR racing in that IMS Productions is involved with its trucks and crew. How has that relationship developed this year?
It’s great working with IMSP [Indy Motorsports Productions] as partners because there are a lot of differences in terms of production compared to NASCAR. IMS and the amazing team of [President] Kevin Sublette, [Senior Director, Engineering] Jason King, and [Director, Broadcast Operations] Ken Ferguson committed to revitalize their HD-5 unit by transitioning to an IP router in a short amount of time. They also have real insight and institutional knowledge into how everything works here. And that goes for the rest of their people as well: they’ve been to all of these tracks and understand them.
So we have the power of two entities, IMSP and FOX Sports — both passionate about motorsports. We’ll both say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this or that?” They’ve been nothing but supportive, and the end result is presenting this race in a way that is going to look amazing.
Does the fact that the IMSP team has such a deep understanding of covering the race mean that your team can focus on other things?
In some ways, yes. We do have two trucks here. We have IMS HD-5, which is the truck at the center of race coverage, and brought in [Game Creek Video] Encore to do the studio shows and also some other things, like graphics. And then, because wireless needs are huge here, there are the NEP BSI trucks, which include one truck that follows the Indy Car tour and the truck used on the PGA Championship.
The challenge is integrating those units and create one big system, which gives this compound a Super Bowl sheen.
At the end of the day, FOX has put an enormous number of resources into Indy Car, and this is our best bet at capturing as many eyeballs as we can. Our studio show First Things First was here. FOX News is here, and also FOX Deportes. Some of the races coming up — in Detroit, Toronto, Laguna, and Nashville — are amazing races, so we want to use this race as the ultimate evangelizer for the Indy Car Series.
This race is rooted in tradition, and, in many respects, the previous rightsholders, from ABC Sports way back to NBC more recently, have given it classic race coverage. FOX Sports has a different aesthetic and a different approach to motorsports, like your NASCAR coverage. How do you see the FOX imprint being reflected on the coverage?
In a few ways. First, we’re bringing to bear all of our talent from across all of our sports and giving it that celebrity sheen of what FOX Sports is about.
And then, we’re leveraging all our remote-studio assets. We’ve got crew and equipment from Big Noon Kickoff for the Super Bowl, and we’re planting talent positions all around the racetrack. In some ways, I think, [FOX Sports President] Eric Shanks gets to put his stamp on Indy racing the way that FOX Sports Founding President David Hill did on NASCAR: leveraging the traditional and evolving it with amazing production partners like IMS Productions [who has been producing Indy Car racing for decades]. They have an army of people here who have a lot of institutional knowledge for this event.
At the same time, we’re bringing a lot of people who’ve never done an Indy 500. I think that new kind of perspective has led to some new ideas, certainly with respect to the talent. In terms of the race coverage, we’re using the drones the way we’ve used them in NASCAR, the Super Bowl, and baseball. And our graphics will be getting a big push as we have reimagined the on-air presentation with things like a Pylon insert [to show driver position] and the Heads Up Display [HUD], which we shamelessly have taken from Formula 1’s coverage because there is nobody who does auto racing better than F1.
What else are you doing graphically?
We brought back the pointers, which haven’t been a part of Indy for years. They’re important because some of the drivers are famous but aren’t household names. The use of pointers will let the audience know who is on the track and where, and that brings the audience closer to the coverage.
The other thing we did during qualifying that was really cool was the “Mario Cart” graphics, where we could layer in the ghost car from the on-track perspective.
Graphics plays a big role in motorsports to allow the audience to keep track of everybody, where they are, track position, a lot of different things. That’s where [FOX Sports SVP, Graphic Technology and Integration] Zac Fields and [EVP/Creative Director] Gary Hartley and those guys have really come through. [We use] these graphics to help our coverage pass the bar test: being able to follow the race while you’re watching it at a bar, where you might not hear the audio. We feel that the graphics that are up there permanently, like the dynamic Pylon, which is integral, and the different tools, like the HUD, are important to keeping the audience informed all the time.
You’ve also made a big commitment to cameras on and in the cars, with three cameras on each of the 16 cars.
Yes. Also, for the first time at an Indy 500, we will have the Driver’s Eye camera, something that we tried in NASCAR. Here it looks amazing because you don’t have the windshield in front of the driver, so you can see a lot more. We’ll have six of those cameras, and they’ll help us cover the race from the inside out and put those cameras front and center.
Another new camera will be the use of the Rovercam on Gasoline Alley. It’s a bit of an experiment in motorsports, but [camera innovators] Deena Sheldon and Jeff Zachary always have wonderful ideas about how to use their Rovercam, so we’re going to try it. And then Steadicam owner/operator Richie Leible is bringing in three Scorpio telescopic arms on carts, which will be handy. I have to thank [Penske Entertainment Innovative SVP/EP] Richie Feinberg and [Indianapolis Motor Speedway Director, Operations] Dan Skiver, who have been fantastic advocates for some of the new stuff that we’re going to see.
What about on the audio side?
We’ll have microphones on both the left and right sides of the cars, which has been paying off, especially in some of the wrecks in qualifying. But, with those, we think we can make this the best-sounding Indy 500 ever, especially because we have an All-Star audio team of four mixers. Kevin McCluskey, our NASCAR mixer, will be mixing the event. Jamie McCombs, our Super Bowl mixer, will mix the studio show. And we have Sean Peacock, our college-football mixer, in a support role and Mike Sweeney, who mixes Indy racing, handling submix.
One of the challenges is helping viewers at home grasp how fast these cars are going, which is upwards of 230 mph. The pointers will help them know who is where. but how do you convey the sense of speed?
Our director Mitch Riggin and producer Pam Miller have their work cut out for them, because portraying the speed on television versus being here and seeing it is challenging. Audio is obviously a big part of it, and there are the drones. I do think the Driver’s Eye is a great look because it gives you that sort of dramatic shaking of the helmet that shows a lot of forces are involved in driving this track.
And Mitch and Pam will be tracking simultaneous storylines because it’s not just about who is winning. There could be a driver in fifth who’s moving up or another having trouble. It’s almost like golf in that there are simultaneous stories happening and the challenge for production is to unpack some of those stories to make the race more interesting for the audience.
This is different from the Daytona 500, which kicks off the NASCAR season. Here, you have a few Indy Car races under your belt and could test things out. What elements were tested out during those earlier races?
It’s definitely a relief and an opportunity to not have our biggest race be the first race of the season. We looked at the season and discussed where we could insert things to have them ready for Indy. During the last few races, the HUD has come a long way, and, at the last race, we were able to have the HDR cameras up and running. But having the ability to plan and work out the kinks for all the tech was amazing.
Speaking of HUD, is SMT involved with pulling that data together?
Yes. They integrate the Indy Car data and supply the graphics for the HUD and the pointers. And we’ve put back the vectors, which are the piece of equipment that allows GPS tracking so that, while we use the time loops and the official data, we have much more iterative data through the vectors.