Likes, dislikes from Fox's IndyCar debut and what to watch at The Thermal Club
THERMAL, Calif. — Fox Sports’ debut IndyCar broadcast was more than eight months in the making, featuring a refreshed booth and pit reporter lineup, new graphics, cartoon driver caricatures and a generally fresh look for a series that’s long been searching for a significant boost in the increasingly crowded, competitive American motorsports ecosystem.
But if I’m honest, I’m more focused on how it returns to the airwaves for Race No. 2 at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Season openers, never mind debuts, are pressure-packed. Even though you’d love for everything — and everyone — to be perfect, rust-free and seamless, it’s never the case. Drivers and teams feel it, and so do those on either side of the camera.
As Fox personnel have hinted, IndyCar’s new media rights partner has plans to roll out new tricks, features and technology throughout this season. Even if the Fox broadcast of the St. Pete street race was completely flawless, there’d be reason to think this weekend’s second edition from The Thermal Club, the private racing paradise crossed with a country club in the Southern California desert, would look, feel and sound a bit different.
On a first, admittedly semi-distracted watch in the St. Pete media center, it was clear Fox personnel would have some homework during this three-week break between their first IndyCar race weekend and their second. But with fresh eyes and a closer look, I went back and watched that St. Pete broadcast again with the sole purpose of putting a closer eye not on Alex Palou’s season-opening win, but the highs and lows of the broadcast of him doing so.
Here's what stood out, both the highs and the lows:
Fox IndyCar booth features strong initial chemistry
Let’s start positive, because there is plenty to be pleased with.
I admittedly missed the pre-race show live while out on the grid, and the replay on YouTube is missing most of it, but what was clear all weekend long, from the simple practice broadcasts to the new-feel Sunday morning warmup show is this booth’s chemistry just works. That’s not meant to be a knock on the NBC booth of old that included Leigh Diffey; they’re just both different and great in their own ways.
Whether purposeful or not, Will Buxton, James Hinchcliffe and Townsend Bell were almost more in-sync than the latter two seemed to be at times during their NBC days. Perhaps I didn’t catch it, but I don’t remember Hinchcliffe and Bell trading barbs in a friendly disagreement that, in the right moment, would bring a nice amount of spice and tension during the NBC days, but in others would sometimes feel tiresome and overdone. There were moments, too, when it almost felt like an act and disagreement simply for disagreement’s sake.
I wondered if there would be some moments of stepping on each others’ toes as they figured out each others’ rhythms and how their own puzzle pieces fit together, and those moments never seemed to come.
At the same time…
Fox IndyCar booth felt too comfortable and relaxed at times
Buxton’s role, first and foremost, is to give play-by-play action, and fresh off watching this weekend’s season-opening Formula 1 race broadcast, I felt like this first Fox IndyCar broadcast lacked a lot of action. Now, we know in hindsight that trading the lead of the race lacked much drama up until the final pit sequence and the closing 15 laps or so, but one thing Sky Sports does so well with its F1 coverage is taking the viewer at home to wherever the on-track battles are, whether they’re for first place or 10th.
Yes, admittedly that’s oftentimes out of necessity, with how frequently the battle for the race win comes from the results qualifying and who comes out with the lead through Lap 1, Turn 1, but even during what was admittedly a rather boring race on track, as I’ve watched more F1 races, I’ve grown to expect the broadcast crew to be able to find where the battles are taking place and showing them, even if they’re not among the leaders.
And so between the restart after the race’s lone caution, and the final pitstop with under 30 laps to go, I felt like the booth and those in their ear got too deep into explanatory tangents, rules and regulations explanations and storytelling and watched 50 laps or so go by as they — and therefore the viewers — almost just waited to see what strategy would win out.
There’s a time and a place for storytelling around drivers and teams and moments where you can work in reminders on how the tire rules work, but if I’m a prospective new fan, you’re going to convince me to tune into Race 2 far better by showing me action wherever you can find it rather than making sure I understand exactly why those who started on the softer alternate tires got a major momentum swing with the Lap 1 three-car crash.
IndyCar on Fox taking page out of the NFL's playbook
Quite possibly the feature of Fox’s debut IndyCar broadcast that I loved most? The page they took from NFL broadcasts by running through the field and getting each driver to say their name and where they’re from. On a broadcast where most of them were only represented by shots of their cars, their names on a leaderboard, their radio communication or them sitting in the cockpit with a helmet on, it humanized the sport’s most valuable assets: its stars — whom both Fox and IndyCar are committed to boosting the platforms of.
If you’re a brand-new fan and only know of a couple drivers, or know their faces or the fire suits but not their names, this was a fabulous way to give those watching at home a little taste of who they might choose to root for. My only suggestion — because for most of the cars on track, the fire suit they wore in that January content day featuring a certain primary sponsor isn’t the only one they’ll be wearing this year — overlay somewhere on the screen a tiny graphic of their car that weekend, too, so folks know what car to look out for during the race.
Fox's glitchy IndyCar graphics were distracting
Otherwise, Fox’s graphics were a bit hit-and-miss. As those who watched practice and qualifying earlier that weekend no doubt noticed, the network was having major glitches with its timing and scoring system — an issue so large and widespread it couldn’t be fixed during the weekend. At times, names where flashing up and jumping all across the leaderboard, and it happened enough times — and in certain moments, with enough frequency — that it was distracting and not just something a regular fan would catch.
I believe, too, the larger issues led to some features being turned off or not working, meaning because of those gremlins, we not only saw a somewhat glitchy broadcast from a graphics perspective, but we didn’t see all the tools Fox has in its toolbox. My biggest hope is these couple off weeks were enough time to diagnose the issue and troubleshoot it to the nth degree to ensure the wires, cables and radio frequencies delivering all sorts of data back-and-forth between the cars and the Fox trucks will operate without issue come Friday’s lone practice.
Keep the IndyCar drone shots coming, Fox
The other secret MVP from Fox’s IndyCar debut? The drone shots.
They were varied, but not overdone. The showed the liveliness and glitz of the row of yachts, but also managed to race around to different vantage points of the track and give an unparalleled perspective of these cars’ speeds and some of the sweeping corners and tight tunnels of an IndyCar street course. They gave you a sense of just how Palou’s lead was drying up late in the race, as well as how large of a lead Scott McLaughlin had built early on.
With the wide-open desert expanses at The Thermal Club and the second-longest natural-terrain road course on the calendar, I’ll be intently watching how Fox works them into Sunday’s race broadcast and if they can get down a little lower, possibly, to show us angles of on-track battles we’ve never seen.
How much IndyCar rules talk will we get for Race No. 2?
It deserves another mention: I applaud the clear effort Fox — from the truck to the pit reporters to the broadcast booth — went to ensure any new viewers it was picking up understood what was likely to be a race-deciding factor in the different tire compounds and the ways in which strategy around their use could make or break and driver’s day.
The broadcast did a great job explaining that up to after the Lap 1 crash and going through why some cars were stopping and others weren’t and what compounds those drivers had started on and were moving to.
I’ll be interested, though, to see over the next race or two how and whether they deviate from the mindset that IndyCar-specific items like that need to be thoroughly explained and touched on again and again and if they’ll move into the mode of assuming fans new and old understand the rules enough for mentions of the rules in-passing or not.
As someone who’s paid to know the rules for a living, I’ll admit the approach was a bit over-bearing for me, but I understand the need. My hope for this weekend is it feels a bit more natural and not nearly as forced and like I’m sitting through a class lecture at times.
Will Fox's heads up display get a refresh or rethink?
I’m also deeply intrigued to see if Fox’s heads up statistical display while the broadcast is showing a driver’s onboard camera is altered to keep from blocking the view of the inside of the aero screen, where years ago teams began placing sponsor stickers once it became clear that could be a new, lucrative place to give teams’ most important sponsors some broadcast airtime (for a cost, of course).
Thursday evening, the 'IndyCar on Fox' X account posted a couple tweaks to its graphics package, which included a minor reshuffle of the information on the heads up display, but still appeared to block the view of the inside of the aeroscreen.
No leak this time! Check out these updated @IndyCar on FOX graphics that you’ll see starting this weekend at The Thermal Club.
— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) March 20, 2025
*New Headshots
*Redesigned HUD
*Larger more informative Pointers pic.twitter.com/AyrZysutF1
With Fox’s new statistical display that showed a wide-range of easily digestible data — from a driver’s speed, their gearing and their brake and throttle mapping to what corner they’re approaching and where they sit in the running order — came the unintended consequence of those cars’ sponsor stickers being outright blocked whenever the graphic was on screen. Its use varied over the weekend, to the point it felt during the race that the broadcast would show the camera view for several seconds without it, and even when it did pop up, Fox had a box in the lower-righthand corner of the screen with the team’s primary sponsor featured.
It was an unfortunate feature teams knew of coming into the weekend but something I heard about from several teams mid-weekend once they truly saw what it would look like in real-time and after they received some blowback from irked sponsors.
In a vacuum, the graphic display is a great addition to the broadcast, but in a series where teams pay several hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket for the ability to have that camera on their car for a full season, they can’t be losing out on some of the value they were able to recoup by having them. (That there still isn’t a way for each car to have one, and that teams have to pay for it at all is, frankly, a whole separate story.)
As quickly as they surfaced, the IndyCar cartoons need to disappear
I feared it would be a complaint — though one widespread from drivers, fans and media alike — that would fall on deaf ears, it appears one of the worst features of the Fox IndyCar broadcast may have been scrapped altogether.
In the social media post referenced above, Fox's IndyCar account showed graphics using actual headshot photos of drivers with high-energy backgrounds, rather than any sort of cartoon-ized version of them. Does that mean we won't see any driver cartoons at all on this weekend's broadcasts? I'm not entirely sure, but one can hope.
The athlete cartoons have been a mainstay feature across the bulk of Fox Sports’ live broadcasts, and it was a constant feature during the St. Pete race for those who sit in the top 5 on the leaderboard, but they've long been panned in the NASCAR world, and from my vantage point, they come across as a hokey feature that does little to boost drivers’ brands. At their best and most accurate, they’re a fairly decent representation of a driver’s profile — something an actual photograph would accomplish even better. And at their worst, a couple have slipped close to theme park sketch caricatures that do nothing but ask to be made fun of.
Hopefully they were a one-and-done feature. We'll find out soon this weekend.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Fox IndyCar broadcast needs improvements to graphics, commentary
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