Live from the Indy 500: Mike Davies of Fox Sports on a Historic Production Effort at the Brickyard By Ken Kerschbaumer Friday, May 23, 2025 - 12:02 pm
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Fox Sports is all in on the 109th Indy 500 which will be broadcast on Sunday and will feature a ton of new production enhancements designed to make race fans and even those unfamiliar with Indy Car more engaged and informed. It's been a tremendous effort that has involved hundreds of people, months of preparation, and now final rehearsals ahead of the big day. Mike Davies, Fox Sports, EVP, Technical and Field Operations, sat down with SVG Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer to discuss the effort.
What does it means to Fox Sports to tackle the Indy 500 for the first time?
We're giving the Indy 500 the Super Bowl treatment, and by that, I mean we've brought to bear all of the people and the tools that can make this event stand out as one of the big national tent pole events like the Super Bowl. And if anything, the Indy 500 on Sunday will have a production profile that is really unmatched in racing.
This production set-up is different from the way you guys do NASCAR racing in that IMS Productions is involved with their trucks and crew. How has that relationship developed this year?
It's great working with IMSP (Indy Motorsports Productions) as partners because there's a lot of differences in terms of production compared to NASCAR. And IMS, and the amazing team of Kevin Sublette, Jason King, and Ken Ferguson committed to revitalize their HD5 unit by transitioning to and IP router in a short amount of time and then they also have real insight and institutional knowledge into how everything works here. And that goes for the rest of their people as well as they've been to all of these tracks and understand them.
Mike Davies and the Fox Sports team are all in on the 109th Indy 500 this weekend.
So, we have the power of two entities, IMSP and Fox Sports and we're both passionate about motorsports. And we'll both say, wouldn't it be cool if we did this or that? And 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 they have such a deep understanding of covering the race mean your team can focus on other things?
In some ways, yes and we do have two trucks here. We have IMS HD5 which is the truck at the center of race coverage and then we brough in Encore to do the studio shows and also some other things like graphics. And then there are the NEP BSI trucks that includes one truck that follows the Indy Car tour and then the truck that was used on the PGA Championship as wireless needs are huge here.
So, 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. And some of the races coming up, in Detroit, Toronto, Laguna, and Nashville are really 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 rights holders, 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 towards motor sports, 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 from what we did at the Super Bowl and then we're planting talent positions all around the racetrack. And in some ways, I think that [Fox Sports President] Eric Shanks gets to put his stamp on the Indy racing the way that David did on NASCAR leveraging the traditional and evolving it with amazing production partners like IMS Productions [who have been producing Indy Car Racing for decades]. They have an army of people here that have a lot of institutional knowledge for this event.
Game Creek Video's Encore is on hand for the studio programming which will surround the Indy 500 on Fox this Sunday.
But at the same time, we're bringing a lot of people who've never done an Indy 500. And I think that that new kind of perspective has lent to some new ideas, certainly with respect to the talent. And in terms of the race coverage, we're taking the drones and using them the way that we've used them in NASCAR, the Super Bowl and in baseball. And then 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 then things like the Heads Up Display which we shamelessly have taken from Formula One'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. And they're important because some of the drivers are famous but they 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 that 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.
And graphics plays such a big role in motorsports in order to allow the audience to keep track of everybody, where they are, track position, a lot of different thi
