When a NASCAR race goes smoothly on television, it looks effortless. The pit reporters appear at the right moments, deliver their information crisply, and hand the broadcast back to the booth without a seam showing. What viewers don’t see is everything happening behind that composure.
Kelli Stavast spent a decade working pit road for NBC Sports, covering the NASCAR Cup Series, the Xfinity Series, IndyCar and IMSA across hundreds of races. The job looked, from the outside, like showing up at a racetrack on Sundays and talking to drivers. The reality was something considerably more complicated.
Prep for a race weekend started days out. By the time Stavast arrived at the track on race day, she had already worked through the publicly available layer of historical stats, track records, and driver tendencies and was on to the information nobody else had. She walked into the garage. She talked to drivers and crew chiefs and asked questions no search engine could answer. How was Chase Elliott actually feeling that morning? Had the team made wholesale changes to the car setup overnight, so the driver would climb in not knowing what to expect? Was someone dealing with something personal?
“It’s my job to find out the stuff that the viewers can’t,” Stavast said. “They can find out very easily how many top-10 finishes they have at a track. What they can’t find out is that the driver was up all night with their newborn.”
That process didn’t stop when the broadcast began. It didn’t stop when the green flag dropped. Drivers were still being approached during commercial breaks, minutes before they got in the car. Notes were still being compiled while the broadcast was running.
Once the race was live, the environment on the pit road bore little resemblance to what appeared on screen. A director, a producer, and a pit producer were all talking in her ear simultaneously. Scanners ran constantly alongside live audio from drivers’ radios across the field, a wall of voices. Broadcast partners called the race from the booth, also in her ear. At any given moment, multiple streams of information were being processed while she remained camera-ready, expected to deliver clean and confident reporting on cue.
“You have a hundred different voices going on in your head,” she said.
The moments Stavast describes as her proudest from those years tended to go unnoticed by anyone watching. A segment that looked routine, while, just out of frame, something had gone badly wrong. The equipment had failed. Communication had broken down. The broadcast couldn’t be heard, or the monitor couldn’t be seen, and all of it got absorbed and pushed through without the viewer catching anything. Afterward, the only people who knew were Stavast, her assistant, and the producer.
“You just kind of look at each other and smile,” she said. “That should have been really ugly, but no one knew.”
The gap between what a broadcast looks like and what it takes to produce it is something most sports journalists who work in live television understand but rarely discuss publicly. Broadcast journalism training emphasizes storytelling, preparation, and on-camera presence. Less attention goes to the cognitive load of managing multiple live information streams while keeping the surface calm, or to the skill of recovering without anyone noticing when a segment starts to come apart.
The show goes on. The viewer’s experience is the only one that matters in the moment, and whatever is happening behind the camera stays there.
For Stavast, that principle runs through how she thinks about the craft. A pit reporter’s job is to get the right information on the air at the right moment and then get out of the way. Visibility is beside the point.
