Live From the Indy 500: FOX Sports Revs Up the Audio for Its First Time Covering the Iconic Race A team of NASCAR veterans will be on hand to manage the sound By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Friday, May 23, 2025 - 7:00 am
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No matter how much experience you have, there's always a first time for everything. That's what A1 Kevin McCloskey and crew will be doing this weekend in Indianapolis, when FOX Sports picks up the baton for the Indianapolis 500 for the first time.
I've done NASCAR for 25 years, but this is the first time for the Indy 500, says McCloskey, who also mixed the Daytona 500 in February on FOX. We have some of the crew from past years, and we have our FOX audio crew that came in. It's a good mix and a good crew.
Previously, NBC had broadcast the Indianapolis 500 from 2019 to 24, following ABC's 54-year tenure televising the iconic race from 1965 to 2018.
A1 Kevin McCloskey: From the Pagoda to Pit Road to the Snake Pit area, [the goal is] to communicate the fan experience and show what goes on at Indy.
This year's audio staff includes Shawn Peacock as the audio guarantee, managing comms; Rob Sweeney as submixer; Pat Sellers, mixing the live driver-radio submix, aided by Tim Spero, handling the near-live edits of those transmissions; and A2s Steve Onuska, Eric Anderson and Jeff Feltz. Most are aboard the IMS Productions HD-5 truck, with McCloskey manning its 96-input Calrec Apollo console. A1 Jamie McCombs will be mixing the pre/post-race shows from Game Creek Encore.
Another A1 handling the international feed will take stems and groups from McCloskey's and Sweeney's consoles, weaving in other, foreign-language announce talent but also taking the FOX announcer RF group as needed for pit interviews and other one-on-ones.
Audio From the Track, From the Cars, From the Talent They will have a lot of sound to manage, all of it in 5.1 surround. McCloskey estimates that 78 microphones, all networked over Calrec Hydra, will be deployed around the track to capture the key SFX of the race, such as the speed shots and turns, where SPL can reach close to 130 dB. The complement is a combination of various Sennheiser mono shotguns, Shure VP88 stereo condensers, and Audio-Technica BP4029 stereo shotguns.
The crew will also be managing sound from 17 in-car camera/microphone kits - the most ever for an Indy 500 race, McCloskey says. The kits, provided by RF vendor BSI, contain two cameras and a pair of microphones. They will be rear-mounted and spread out wider than in the past, he notes, to enhance the stereo effect; picking up the mechanically coupled in-car vibrations, for example, will provide the ambience for the driver/crew-chief radio-team comms over Kenwood TM2550A transceivers.
It's all about the imaging, McCloskey says. You want that definition on the left side and the right side [discretely], because the car's getting into an accident one side or rubbing on the wall [on the other]. The corners here are the most prevalent for accidents, but anything can happen - a blown tire on a straightway - anywhere, anytime.
Sweeney will be deploying what has become a signature trick for motorsports mixers: an Ernie Ball guitar volume pedal that lets him swell the general ambience and roar of the track when the cars are between turns, where most of the microphones are positioned.
It's like having an extra hand on the mix, quips McCloskey.
In addition, six reporters will be onsite (four in the pits, two for color-call talent), providing analysis on teams and pit activities. Because SPL levels can reach more than 120 dB in these areas, they wear enclosed headsets for acoustic protection. This year, they'll be using Sennheiser e835 hand mics - which feature high-output gain, minimal handling noise, and a tight cardioid pattern for off-axis noise rejection - into BSI RF transmitters.
An Emphasis on Entertainment McCombs, another NASCAR veteran and Indy 500 first-timer (he has done shows from the Brickyard before), will have his hands full with an increasingly entertainment-oriented pre/post-race event.
FOX is bringing out a lot of their talent; we're also going to have lots of guests: owners, etc., he predicts. We have four sets and 28 mics - not including backups of different types of wireless microphones - to pretty much cover the whole track or wherever we need to do interviews. From the Pagoda to Pit Road to the Snake Pit area, [the goal is] to communicate the fan experience and show what goes on at Indy.
Crowd Sound Is Part of the Experience As loud as the cars get, the crowd competes with them for attention. Audio-Technica AT4050s - a studio-grade mic with high-SPL capability and a transparent and airy upper-midrange - will be deployed to buttress the usual array of crowd mics. They're great for pulling the crowd forward in a loud environment like auto racing, McCloskey explains. We've used them for that on NASCAR races, because NASCAR is so much louder: there are more cars, and they stay in packs. Indy-car racing is not as loud, but it's still a bit harder to grab the crowd out of the [noise] of the cars.
McCombs will also have to manage mixing the live sound into the broadcast audio, including the sound from music concerts scheduled for the events.
We have full PA systems for the crowd and the viewers to hear what's going on with the show, so they can be a part of the excitement, he says. Each one of our desks individually will feed a PA system at each site so those fans locally can hear what's going on and enjoy it. We want the full fan experience. We want to capture that in each set and wherever we are, so we can hear the cheering. I know they're having a concert in the Snake Pit area, so it looks like it's going to be a pretty
