Paul Tracy’s smaller NBC role part of network’s “new philosophy”
Paul Tracy, longtime color analyst for NBC Sports’ IndyCar coverage, will have a scaled back role during the 2021 season, he and NBC confirmed Monday night. According to Tracy, he’s currently scheduled to work six IndyCar race weekends in the booth in 2021, rather than his full-time role of the prior two seasons. Those races Tracy will help call include this weekend’s season-opener at Barber, the doubleheader at Texas, the Indianapolis 500, Nashville, Laguna Seca and Long Beach.
It’s part of what he called “a new philosophy” the sports broadcast network is “experimenting” with in 2021: “Less is more.” In the past, a typical NBC IndyCar broadcast would feature a three-man booth (Tracy, play-by-play announcer Leigh Diffey and fellow analyst Townsend Bell) and as many as five pit reporters. Instead, Tracy said, most races in 2021 will feature two of each.
“It was a big disappointment,” Tracy told IndyStar on Monday evening. “I really enjoy going to the races. I enjoy the people I work with. I think Townsend and Leigh and myself, we have fantastic chemistry that I think the fans enjoy, but I don’t make the decisions at NBC. This is what they want to try, to have less voices overall. It’s their show.
“And no, it’s not only me. There’s other people. It won’t be hard to find out once the second race gets going.”
NBC sent IndyStar a statement Monday night about Tracy’s new role and declined to confirm specifics, beyond his 500 return, and did not mention other changes within the on-air team.
“Due to a variety of factors, Paul will not be in the booth for every race this season,” read a statement from an NBC Sports spokesperson. “But his assignments will include many of IndyCar’s most high-profile races, including the Indy 500. We will announce our commentator assignments on a week-to-week basis, as they can fluctuate, but IndyCar fans can continue to expect our best-in-class coverage throughout the year.”
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It was also not immediately clear whether NBC will lean on two regulars, or whether those roles will rotate among the group. Last week, in a release to race media, NBC Sports said that “throughout most of the 2021 season,” it’s commentary team would include Diffey, Bell and Tracy, along with pit reporters Marty Snider, Kelli Stavast, Dave Burns, Kevin Lee and Dillon Welch.
Tracy said the most frustrating part in all this was that he’d signed a new contract in November with the understanding he’d be involved in his typical full-season role, as he has been since NBC became the sole broadcast partner of the series starting with the 2019 season.
Last summer, he was one of the first drivers announced to be competing in Tony Stewart and Ray Evernham’s new six-race stock car series debuting this summer on CBS Sports, the Superstar Racing Experience. At the time, even without a firm schedule, it had been billed as running on six consecutive Saturday nights from mid-June to mid-July on short tracks throughout the East Coast and Midwest. When IndyCar came out with its 2021 schedule in early October, followed by the SRX schedule in early January, there were four overlapping weekends
SRX’s schedule would directly overlap Race 1 of the Detroit Grand Prix (June 12) along with races late in the evening before four other IndyCar events: Detroit Grand Prix Race 2 (June 13), Road America (June 20), Mid-Ohio (July 4) and Toronto (July 11). To combat those potential conflicts, Tracy said Stewart and Evernham had offered to help get him to his Sunday broadcast assignments.
“They said, ‘Hey, we’ll get you wherever you need to go and fly you out Saturday night,” Tracy said. Some of the trips, like July 3-4, only would have involved a car ride between Indianapolis and the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. One, July 10-11 between Slinger Speedway in Wisconsin and the IndyCar race in Toronto, could have proved challenging due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“I’d made arrangements so I wouldn’t miss an IndyCar race,” he said. “There were a lot of hurdles to jump over, and now really for no reason.”
Some speculated that Tracy’s involvement with SRX, namely joining a series that would almost certainly take away from his broadcast focus and either force absences or tight travel weekends, was the reason behind his reduced broadcast role. Tracy didn’t believe that to be the case, given that was made public in July — four months before he signed a contract that he thought would have him calling all 17 races. NBC Sports would not elaborate as to whether these conflicts had anything to do with the move.
An additional frustration on Tracy’s end was the lack of communication on the switch. He said he was only told a couple weeks ago about his changed role, after he’d turned down several racing opportunities for 2021 that would have conflicted with the 15 IndyCar race weekends he’d penciled into his calendar. He’d also recently bought his own LPM3 sportscar that he’d hoped to find a way to race. Now, given the last-minute circumstances, it appears many of his spring and summer weekends will be spent on the lake on his boat. But according to his contract, he has to be ready and available on his weekends he isn’t already scheduled to be in the booth, in case NBC Sports executives decide to switch gears or if he’d needed to fill in for either Diffey or Bell
“You plan your year around IndyCar. I could have had other irons in the fire,” he said. “I had some people interested in driving with me this year, and I had to turn it away because it all conflicted. Now, things are pretty wide-open, and there’s nothing around. It’s a little frustrating to find that out this late in the game.”
Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.
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