Prime's Joy is the key to NASCAR success

NASCAR on (Amazon) Prime Sports was a smash hit 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 Wednesday during a media call previewing the streaming platform’s second season, which starts 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's not the right word, 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” was 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.

It’s our job to entertain the fans said Strand. The vast majority of these fans will never make it to a race this season or ever so we want to get them to the track. We want to celebrate the race celebrate the drivers.

Each one has a favourite driver. Each of them has a song they love. They both have a favorite team. There’s a reason they’re watching that day and the big reason they’re watching us is to watch that.

“So the worst thing we can do is to 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’s a big success.”

One thing I’ve 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’s a huge success for us. This is all about, in my opinion, bringing joy in people’s homes.”

And there was a lot of joy in their authenticity last season. “Joy begins with Earnhardt, and how much the 15-time most popular driver truly loves all things NASCAR,” Letarte says.

“He’s infectious with his love,” Letarte said. “Not many sports have the most popular human as the most passionate 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 praised Strand for how much he has embraced a sport he hadn’t spent much time in before last season. Strand saw fast what fans most wanted from their broadcast and used his talent to give it to them.

Fans loved the authenticity the rawness and sometimes the lack of polish. For instance pre and post-race host Corey Lajoie came in last summer thinking he was supposed to be a stereotypical analyst but quickly learned the fans wanted him to just be himself talking racing with his friend.

Essentially, what if the Stacking Pennies podcast collided with the Dale Jr Download and Inside the Race after every checkered flag. That would be easy as pie for Lajoie.

“I felt like I had to be the best talker,” 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 racing with my buddy on a podcast.

“Earnhardt was very important in reading the room of the fanbase,” Strand said.

“Fans want to sit back and enjoy the sport and celebrate what they’re seeing,” said Strand. I think these are things we knew intuitively, 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 basic direction, but it’s real.

“What we’ve learned is that the fans want to just enjoy the racing and we want to enjoy it with them. That's why we've assembled this group. “We have a group that really enjoys the race track and we want fans to feel as though they are right there with us every weekend,” said team owner and driver Todd Gilliland.

That includes their post-race show, which is widely considered 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,” said Strand when asked what he wanted to do more of this year. “We learned fans stay around. We had close to a million viewers for our post-race coverage, which is holding close to half the race audience, and that’s huge.

“That’s a signal for us. Like we really need to keep investing into this and we’re doing that across all 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.”