NASCAR on (Amazon) Prime Sports earned widespread critical acclaim last season and crew chief analyst Steve Letarte says their success came from a very simple set of instructions from executive producer Alex Strand.
“Alex won't pat himself on the back but I think the Prime group gave us a really clear direction on what was expected,” Letarte said on Wednesday during a media call previewing the streaming platform’s second season, which begins on Sunday with the Coca-Cola 600.
“I know it sounds silly, but it was like, ‘hey, this is what we expect.’ It was very basic, and maybe that isn’t the right term, but very traditional. And I think that guidance when you go to the booth or pre-race, those expectations for coverage made our jobs easy and a lot of fun.”
Fun is the operative word when it came time for Strand to detail those expectations for Letarte, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and play-by-play lead Adam Alexander while calling races from the broadcast booth.
“Our job is to entertain fans,” Strand said. “The large majority of these fans will never make it to a race this season, or maybe ever, so we want to bring them to the track. We want to celebrate the race and celebrate the drivers.
“They each have a favorite driver. They each have a favorite track. They each have a favorite team. They are watching that day for a reason and the big reason they are watching us is to enjoy that.
“So, the worst thing we can do is not enjoy it ourselves. And so, one thing we talk about a lot is sharing that joy with the fans that are watching along. If we can do that, that is a big success.
“One thing I have said a lot is that if we lose any viewers from the Coca-Cola 600 to Nashville because they decided, ‘you know what, that was fun, and I am going to buy a ticket and experience that in person,’ that is a huge success for us. To me, this is all about bringing joy into people’s homes.”
And there was a lot of joy associated with their authenticity last season. Letarte says that joy begins with Earnhardt and how much the 15-time most popular driver genuinely loves all aspects of NASCAR.
“He is infectious with his love,” Letarte said. “Rarely there is a sport where the most popular human is the biggest fan of the sport, and we have that, and I don’t take that for granted. He makes me a much better announcer because of his enthusiasm and his drive to be so good at it.”
The talent also credited Strand for how much he has positively embraced a sport that he had not spent any time within prior to last season. Strand very quickly understood what fans most wanted out of their broadcast and leaned on his talent to deliver it.
Fans encouraged the authenticity, the rawness and sometimes, even a lack of polish. For example, pre- and post-race host Corey Lajoie went into last summer thinking he was supposed to be a stereotypical analyst, but quickly realized that fans wanted him to simply be himself talking racing with his friend.
Basically, it’s what if the Stacking Pennies podcast intersected with the Dale Jr Download and Inside the Race after every checkered flag. Lajoie could easily do that.
“I thought I had to be the most well-spoken,” Lajoie said. “I thought I had to know every single note to a T and I don’t know what I expected when it came to TV because I just sat here and talked about racing with my buddy on a podcast.”
Strand said Earnhardt was very instrumental in reading the room of the fanbase.
“We learned that fans want to sit back and enjoy the sport and celebrate what they’re seeing,” Strand said. “I think these are things we intuitively knew because Dale has said it for years.
“We put that into (the broadcasts) last year and the reaction was immediately ‘this is the right direction, please keep going,’ and Dale said, ‘let’s run it back.’ It’s a very simple direction, but it’s real.
“What we learned is that fans just want to enjoy the racing and we want to enjoy it with them. That’s why we’ve brought this group together. We have a group that really has a great time at the race track and we want fans to feel like they are right there with us each and every weekend.”
And that includes their post post-race show, widely believed to be the modern gold standard of what fans want after the checkered flag, aided by the bandwidth Prime has on not having to immediately get off the air like traditional TV partners.
“Post-race, post-race, post-race, post-race,” Strand said when asked what he wanted to do more of this year. “We learned that fans stick around. We averaged nearly a million viewers for our post-race coverage, which is holding nearly half the race audience, and that’s huge.
“That is a signal to us. Like, we really have to continue investing into this, and we’re doing that across all of our sports as well. … It’s a huge part of who we are and it’s part of what we are as a streamer and something that’s really important that we are going to continue to lean into.”
