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Fox Should Give IndyCar a Major Boost
Have you seen those dazzling 30-second television commercials that began airing on Fox during the Super Bowl and have flooded the network and its cable sports affiliates since? They feature IndyCar drivers Pato O’Ward, Alex Palou, and Josef Newgarden, profiled at breakneck speed in the three separate spots.
The campaign is the work of Fox corporate creative staff and writers from the Los Angeles office of the Special Group, a global Australia-based ad agency. If you haven’t seen the spots, you can sample them here on the Special Group’s website.
We mention this because the IndyCar series season opens this weekend, with the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg airing Sunday on the Fox network. IndyCar, which features some of the world’s best racing, has been in a serious mainstream publicity slump since the only woman to win a race in the series, Danica Patrick, moved full-time to NASCAR in 2012. These new commercials seek to make personalities out of some of the top drivers, and so far, it’s working.
Fox has big plans for IndyCar in 2025. The network clearly believes it has uncovered a diamond in the rough, and it is spending a lot of money this year polishing its strategic gem. All 17 races will air on the Fox network—a far better TV deal than NASCAR has this season, where five of its races will run on subscription-only Amazon Prime Video, five more on cable’s TNT, and ten on cable’s USA.
Fox has assembled a solid announcing team, led by Will Buxton, 44, a British motorsports journalist and TV presenter with Formula 1 for the past 15 years. Buxton, who is leaving F1 for IndyCar, will be joined in the broadcast booth by James Hinchcliffe, 38, an IndyCar driver who retired from the series in 2021, and Townsend Bell, 49, a former IndyCar driver whose last race in the series was the 2016 Indianapolis 500. Bell and Hinchcliffe, who both raced sports cars after leaving open-wheel racing, worked together on NBC’s IndyCar broadcasts.
Fox made the trio available for Zoom interviews to preview the upcoming season in general, the St. Petersburg race in particular.
Buxton said he has spent the last month cramming on IndyCar. “I just want to get to St. Pete and start calling the action. There are so many fascinating story lines to cover for a hopefully burgeoning, growing audience, that we can introduce to what I believe is the greatest racing on earth.”
“I didn’t know what to expect coming into this Fox deal,” said Bell, who has been covering IndyCar for 13 years. “But it’s been unbelievable. I’m just so pumped—they have so many bells and whistles, drones, graphics—just fun, aggressive, edgy stuff that we’re bringing right out of the cage at St. Pete. It’s gonna be a blast.”
“We are encouraged to throw any and every idea” at the producers, Hinchcliffe said. “They aren’t afraid of trying anything. The number of things we’ve gotten approved that I never thought we would is shocking.”
As for those three commercials featuring drivers O’Ward, Palou, and Newgarden: “I talked to Pato O’Ward this morning about them,” Bell said, “and he told me it was like he’d just won the Indy 500, the amount of text messages he got. He said, ‘I’ve heard from girls I hadn’t talked to in 10 years who were watching the Super Bowl.’”
Same thing with Nashville-native Newgarden. “He said he gets recognized more walking down the streets of Nashville now than he did after winning his second Indy 500. That just shows you how much this is working,” Hinchcliffe said. “I sat in on 11 years of pre-season meetings with IndyCar management and ownership and got told every year, ‘Hey, the focus is to make the drivers stars,’ and every year, we came up pretty short.” Now, “the commercials are working, the approach is working.”
There are plenty of valid storylines for the Fox crew to mine this weekend, especially since this is the 20th anniversary of the IndyCar Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, held on a temporary street course in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. Cars first raced in downtown St. Pete in 1985, but it wasn’t until IndyCar took over as the sanctioning body in 2005 that the event found firm footing.
That first IndyCar race was also significant because the winner, Dan Wheldon, was a British driver who moved to St. Petersburg in 2005. Wheldon was married in 2008, and he and his wife Susie had two sons, Sebastian and Oliver.
Wheldon won the Indianapolis 500 and the IndyCar championship in 2005, won the Rolex 24 at Daytona in 2006, and won the Indy 500 again in 2011.
By then he had semi-retired at age 33, but decided to compete in the last event of the 2011 IndyCar season, which took place in October at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a fast oval track. As a publicity stunt, IndyCar tried to lure an internationally-known driver to compete in the race, offering a $5 million purse that would be split between the racer, if he won, and a fan. Unable to get a proper Formula 1 star to bite, IndyCar offered the prize to Wheldon, but he had to start in the back. On lap 12 there was a massive crash involving 15 of the 34 drivers. Wheldon’s car was launched into the catchfence, and his head struck a pole. He was killed.
This is a link to ABC’s coverage of the crash. Beware: It’s difficult to watch.
I had lunch with Wheldon not long before that Las Vegas race. Privately, he said he had enough money to live on—Indy 500 purses are enormous. I believe he went into that Las Vegas race to try to help the series. His death was crushing to a lot of people, including me.
On Sunday, Susie Wheldon and sons Sebastian and Oliver, who still live in St. Petersburg, will participate in the moments leading up to the start. Sebastian will drive one of the pace cars, and Susie will wave the green flag.
And it will likely be an emotional moment for announcers Hinchcliffe and Bell; they were among the drivers caught up in that crash in Las Vegas.
Fox goes live with the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg at noon on Sunday, with the green flag scheduled for about a half-hour later. Can the broadcast live up to the hype? We’ll find out soon enough.
If we could eliminate the chase from Channel to Channel each week would help. Also skip the pay channels. Every week I never know where to find a race anymore.
Hopefully as a fan Fox will give IndyCar the shot in the arm it needs and deserves. Enough to eventually add more races to the calendar to keep the momentum going etc. Perhaps having F-1 growing in popularity might bring some open wheel racing converts as well. These kind of spots should work. You certainly can’t say they weren’t well produced. However I do think they missed the boat in one way. Dixon as one of the truly great IndyCar drivers should also be featured. I can’t imagine anyone arguing he isn’t top of the heap among actives. And from a driver as personality promotional standpoint, his wife Emma is, as a conscious understatement, easy on the eyes to say the least.
As I mentioned in another post, Fox needs to have an inexpensive on-demand streaming option for these races. I don’t like sitting around my television on a sunny weekend day and I’ll probably miss half the races if the only broadcast is live. Certainly, I won’t be watching practices or qualifying sessions much at all.
V-97 – You can get the old school radio play by play on Sirius XM which is kind of cool on a ride. I’m assuming ( never ass-u-me ) Fox will do a later rebroadcast much like ESPN does with F-1 as well.