(Editor's note: Michael Davies will be the featured speaker during tomorrow's TVTech Talk webinar on sports production. He will discuss Fox Sports' preparations for Indy 500 and 2026 FIFA World Cup coverage. Register here to attend.)

SPEEDWAY, Ind.—The crash involving drivers Alexander Rossi, Pat O’Ward and Romain Grosjean during Indianapolis 500 Qualifying Monday once again demonstrated to race fans what in-car cameras bring to coverage as driver view shots from inside O’Ward and Rossi’s cars gave viewers the closest experience they’ll ever have to a smashup at more than 200 mph.

Those shots, however, are only one of multiple different in-car angles viewers can expect May 24 during Fox Sports’ coverage of the 110^th running of the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

New for this year’s race coverage from the cars are what the broadcaster has dubbed “Top Gun” cameras, miniature RF cameras pointed at drivers in the cockpit, and what it is calling a Buckeye Camera mounted on the rear quarter panel of Indy cars.

“Inspiration for our ‘Top Gun’ camera comes from some of the films about racing,” said Michael Davies, Fox Sports executive vice president of technical and field operations. “F1: The Movie was a fantastic inspiration to see what we could do, and our director [Mitch Riggin] thought of how to get this amazing shot of the driver’s head looking straight on.”

The addition of the rear quarter panel camera brings another angle to engage the audience with new views of racing and pit action, he added.

“There’s just a lot of inspiration that goes into figuring out how to not only get the cameras that show you the X’s and O’s and the strategy, but also the emotion of it—the kind of thing you might see in a cinematic production,” said Davies.

These two new camera angles join the Racing Force micro-cameras embedded in drivers’ helmets at eyeline for Driver’s Eye shots, which Fox Sports used during its inaugural Indy 500 coverage last year and which captured yesterday’s qualifying round crash in such detail, as well as on-board forward and rear hoop angles and sidepod and suspension views.

To augment the Driver’s Eye shots, Fox Sports will key on its heads-up display (HUD) telemetry, including throttle, brake gear, speed and other key data.

(Editor’s note: Live coverage of the Indy 500 begins at 10 a.m. EDT on Fox. The green flag drops at 12:30 p.m. EDT. Coverage is also available via Fox One and the Fox Sports App.)

By The Numbers

Production of the Indianapolis 500 is a massive undertaking—not only in terms of the technology used to cover the race from the 1,000 acres Speedway property, but also the number of people in attendance. About 350,000 people are expected, including 235,000 in the stands, 100,000 in the infield and about 12,000 workers.

To capture the race, Fox Sports will deploy cameras at about 70 positions around the Speedway to supply more than 100 camera fees. Ten cameras will run at up to 240 fps 4x HFR to deliver what the broadcaster is calling “cinema-grade” slow motion. Fourteen RF handheld cameras and six pit-box cameras from NEP Broadcast Sports International (BSI) will provide roaming shots. The broadcaster will also provide some 30 ISO replay channels from five EVS systems.

Fox Sports is producing the race in 1080p HDR with a crew of about 200 production personnel, some of whom have worked on the IndyCar tour for decades. It will distribute its show in 4K UHD.

Drones and Digital Cinema

Fox Sports is adding a third drone to its airborne complement of cameras for this year’s race. Beverly Hills Aerials, which the broadcaster has turned to for major tent pole events, including NASCAR and IndyCar races, is providing the drone camera platforms and piloting them.

“The thing about Indy is it’s just vast,” said Davies. “To get around very quickly on the track, there’s no real substitute for utilizing drones. Motorsports is one of those sports that lends itself to using drones for actual coverage of the sport, not just beauty shots.”

The three drones and a Helivision helicopter will provide first-person view (FPV) shots, aerial coverage of pre-race events and shots of “some of the more histrionics” of the day at the Brickyard, he said.

The use of drones has evolved over time. While Fox Sports will not fly drones of the track during races, drones have become safer with the addition of features like parachutes and other safety equipment that not only ensure safety but make it legally allowed to fly over people, he noted.

“Certainly, from where we were a few years ago, the drone space and the flexibility in how they are used have opened up, and IndyCar has been a fantastic partner in understanding the importance of drones in the coverage and the overall presentation of the of the product,” Davies added.

For its Indy 500 remote studio show, Fox Sports is deploying more than 10 ARRI digital cinema cameras specially outfitted by The Helm to eliminate operational complexity and enable the broadcaster to integrate them into its live production pipeline, he said.

“We've been convinced these cameras have some interesting properties that can help us in terms of light tolerance and the ability to dial up and down a shallow depth of field, depending not just on the look we want but also because there may be things we don’t want viewers to see,” said Davies.

On-Site Production

As with its coverage of last year’s race, Fox Sports again is partnering with Indy Motor Sports (IMS) Productions, which has rolled its HD-5 IP-based mobile production unit to the speedway. The broadcaster is augmenting HD-5’s capabilities with Game Creek’s Ovation mobile unit, which also serves as Fox Sports’ flagship truck for NASCAR coverage.

NEP BSI, which provides end-to-end, turnkey RF and microwave services for race coverage, has brought a truck to the track as well, as has CE+T, which is providing Fox Sports with power. The broadcaster will use about 2 MWs of power, including primary and backup, across the production compound and its remote sets.

Infinite Structures has also built temporary remote offices and broadcast facilities for the production crew. In all, Fox Sports is deploying 12 mobile units for race coverage.

These units make this year’s Indy 500 a rather “old-school” remote production setup, “but it’ll probably be the last one,” said Davies.

“One of the things we saw when we came in to do our first year of IndyCar was that besides Indy itself [the Indianapolis Motor Speedway], there was virtually no other tracks that had the fiber need to even consider doing distributed production,” he said.

Over the past year, Fox Sports has worked with Lumen Technologies to outfit IndyCar tracks with the fiber optic infrastructure needed to support distributed production. “Indy has always been the outlier in that respect because they always had it [fiber] there,” said Davies.

Even though there are some 20 miles of fiber optic cable is in place around the speedway, “we wanted to sort of crawl, walk and run on this, and didn’t sink too many resources into distributed production methods,” he said, adding that next year will be different.

Remember The Future

Distributed production isn’t the only thing Fox Sports is teeing up for next year’s Indy 500 race coverage. Managing RF cameras more efficiently is also planned. “We’re testing a lot to see what we can bring back, maybe not in terms of the number of cameras, but rather in a more intelligent way,” said Davies. “Even if you were able to bring back five cameras from a car—whether it’s an IndyCar or NASCAR—I’m not sure what you’d be able to do with all of that.”

How those remote camera signals are managed is only one part of the next generation of the connected car, however. Radio and location technology are others, he noted.

Currently, Fox Sports relies on SportsMEDIA Technology for GPS location data and is looking at how it is evolving. “Whether it’s NASCAR or IndyCar, we only have two channels of audio coming back from the cars. We need more.”

All of these sources rely on RF connectivity, and Fox Sports is working with Verizon on using a private 5G network to augment that.

“We’ve been working with Verizon to help understand what their technology can do,” said Davies. “You know, the interesting part is that if you’re going to test something and it has to work at the biggest events, then it’s absolutely essential to bring a testing environment into the Indy 500, because if it doesn’t work there or at the Daytona 500 or Talladega, then it doesn’t work.”

INDIANAPOLIS—When Fox Sports Executive Vice President of Technical and Field Operations Michael Davies reviews his organization’s inaugural Indianapolis 500 production from May 25, he does so with a mix of satisfaction, anticipation about what to do differently in 2026 and a degree of humility.

“The whole experience was humbling,” he said. “You know, when you go into something and you really don’t know what you’re getting into, you have to figure out a lot of it as you go along. “You only get a finite amount of those [first-time major broadcasts] in your career, and that was one of them.”

[Also Read: Fox Sports Preps for ‘Mini Super Bowl’ of Motorsports in Indianapolis]

This year’s 109th Indianapolis 500 was the first time Fox Sports produced the race under a deal announced June 2024 awarding exclusive media rights for the 2025 NTT IndyCar Series races to the broadcaster. Fox Sports took over video production of the race from NBC Sports, which had held rights to the iconic motorsports event since 2019, following a 54-year run on ABC.

Working with Indy Motor Sports Productions on the production of the race contributed to the broadcaster’s first-time win at Indy. “We linked arms with Indy Motor Sports Productions and they were fantastic. I can say from this experience that it was that cooperation that made this Indy 500 a success,” Davies said.

Three In-Car Enhancements
To Davies, three enhancements—one each involving video, audio and augmented reality (AR) graphics—in cars stood out as production innovations that made watching the race more engaging for fans.

“The inside-out view from the driver’s eye cameras really shows just how fast these cars were going,” Davies said. “As fast as they go in NASCAR, the 240 miles per hour they go at Indy is flat-out ridiculous.”

The cameras embedded into the helmets of six drivers at this year’s race were a success overall; however, a couple of them experienced “some small technical issues,” he noted, adding, “I think we’ll get better at using them.”

Fox Sports’ use of a head-up display (HUD) to present real-time telemetry for the cars “in a way that hadn’t been seen at Indy” added a new element for Indy 500 race fans, Davies said. “We kind of borrowed that idea from Formula One, but it worked great for Indy, too.”

To enhance the audio from the cars, the broadcaster placed microphones on each side of the Indy cars to “make it sound even better,” he says.

Drones and Ghost Car
Fox Sports strategically deployed two drones to enhance its two-hour prerace show and coverage of the race. Beverly Hills Aerials, which partnered with the broadcaster, piloted a modified DJI Inspire drone outfitted with a paintable broadcast camera and an FPV racing drone, which Fox Sports uses widely in its NASCAR coverage.

“When you’re talking about drone coverage, you add this in-between layer,” he said. “You’ve got ground coverage cameras, hard cameras and on-board cameras, the RF cameras. Then there’s the aerial, which is vital, because it shows strategy. Drones deliver an intermediate type of shot that shows racing caution, laps and pit stops in a totally different way.”

The broadcaster also used the drones during its prerace show with different sets. “We were able to fly around to the different talent locations to show the Indy Motor Speedway and the kind of vast edifice it is and set the tone for the race,” Davies recalls.

Overall, drones have contributed significantly to the broadcaster’s coverage of Indy. “The use of drones in IndyCar—not only at the Indy 500 but on the Road Course—is one of the single biggest things that I think Fox is doing for the sport,” Davies said.

Like drones, which Fox Sports began using in NASCAR a decade ago, the broadcaster brought its virtual Ghost Car to the Indy 500 to add another dimension to its coverage of the qualifiers. “I think adding in the competitive aspect of showing a car as it was racing and placing something that doesn’t exist [the Ghost Car] and making it exist through the art of virtual technology was a fantastic addition,” he said.

“Zac Fields [Fox Sports senior vice president of graphic technology and integration] is the master of doing this stuff,” Davies says. “I think virtual graphics on Indy motorsports is kind of the next frontier of enhancement.”

Nip and Tuck for 2026
Shortly after the race, Davies and his team began the process of doing postmortems on coverage while the event was still fresh in their minds. “There are always ‘nips and tucks,’ but we were really happy with the coverage,” he said.

Davies has already begun to think about what those “nips and tucks” entail for next year’s coverage. Top of mind is the addition of a third drone, more driver’s eye cameras and additional data-driven features to convey more about what is going on with the cars as they circle the speedway, such as the temperature of tires.

“We’re going to get better at getting at things like tire temperatures, which are really important for oval track races,” he said.

Leveraging artificial intelligence to record, organize and catalog conversations between racers and their teams is in development and may be ready for the 2026 edition of the race. The broadcaster is also at work on an AI-driven application that makes driver audio clearer, so it sounds less like a radio transmission and more like a digital microphone, Davies said.

Another effort that may change how the broadcaster covers the race is the deployment of a private 5G network. “We’re looking at this with our two major motorsports partners to figure out how we can use a private network to enhance what we do—not just for broadcast, but for everything, including cameras, communications, telemetry and bidirectional,” he said.

“You know, you always find a million things that you’d want to do better—a million things that you could have enhanced,” Davies said. “But at the end of the day, if you walk away from the Indy 500 looking to build on what you’ve done instead of change what you’ve done, then you know you’ve had a success.”

WIXOM, Mich.—Bluewater Technologies has announced that it recently completed work at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where it upgraded the Pagoda Scoring Ribbon and replaced its aging light bulb system with vibrant, energy-efficient LED technology.

"Our goal was to honor the legacy of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway while introducing modern technology to enhance the fan experience," said Scott Schoenberger, managing partner at Bluewater Technologies. "We're proud to have played a role in transforming this iconic venue into a state-of-the-art racing destination."

The improvements were the latest in a series of modernization efforts that Bluewater has worked on at the IMS over the years.

Working closely with venue partners, Bluewater has helped implement a variety of upgrades that improve the fan experience while honoring the track’s iconic status, including:

• Retrofitting the 92-foot-tall scoring pylon in partnership with K-WAV, upgrading it with stackable LED cabinets designed for modern functionality and visual clarity.
• Installing a 22-foot-by-12-foot LED board at the start/finish line and a 42-foot-by-24-foot board viewable from multiple grandstands.
• Adding 27 LED boards along the paddock seating area, eliminating visibility blind spots across the venue.
• Building a 100-foot-wide, 18-foot-tall LED media wall at the base of the Pagoda, delivering dynamic race content and analytics in Pagoda Plaza.

These enhancements ensure that every seat offers an immersive viewing experience, Bluewater said, bringing fans closer to the action.

The upgrades will be visible during the Indianapolis 500, which will begin at 12:45 p.m. ET Sunday (May 25).

For more information about Bluewater Technologies and its innovative solutions, please visit www.bluewatertech.com.

INDIANAPOLIS—Drivers Robert Shwartzman, Louis Foster and Nolan Siegel won’t be the only Indianapolis 500 rookies when they get the green flag May 25 to start this year’s race from the Brickyard. Fox Sports, too, is making its inaugural run at the race—only from the production point of view.

“You know, you don't get too many opportunities in your career to be a part of something like this where the rights have been with one broadcaster for so long, and then you get to drop in and put your mark on it,” Fox Sports Executive Vice President of Technical and Field Operations Michael Davies said.

(Coverage of the 2025 Indianapolis 500 begins on Fox stations at 10 a.m. ET with the pre-race show. Race coverage begins at 12:45 p.m. Coverage is also available on Fox Deportes and can be streamed via the Fox Sports App and at FoxDeportes.com.)

This year’s 109th Indianapolis 500 is the first time Fox Sports will produce and televise the race under a deal announced last June awarding exclusive media rights for the 2025 NTT IndyCar Series races to the broadcaster.

‘Mini-Super Bowl’
While Fox Sports is new to the Indy 500, it has a long history of covering premier motorsports events like the Daytona 500 and other massive sports properties, such as the Super Bowl. Fox takes over this year for NBC Sports, which had held rights to the iconic motorsports event since 2019, following a 54-year run on ABC.

“Indy kind of seems like a mini Super Bowl to me, but it's different, though, because, we've got a production partner here,” Daviies said. “That’s Indy Motor Sports [IMS] Productions, and Kevin Sublette [president of IMS Productions] and those guys.”

Like other IndyCar races this season, Fox Sports will produce race coverage from IMS Productions’ mobile production units. For the Indy 500, it will rely on five recently-rebuilt IMS trucks—collectively known as HD5—and Game Creek Video’s Encore, a complement of three 53-foot expando production trailers, Davies said.

Broadcast Sports Inc. (BSI) has also arrived in Indianapolis with the same RF truck CBS Sports used this month at the PGA Championship in Charlotte, N.C., he said.

The broadcaster will produce the race entirely on-site, foregoing the use of off-site resources for replay and graphics as it has done for other events. “Sometimes, when you’re dealing with this kind of show, especially as a one-off, we’ll just bring everybody on-site,” said Davies.

“Maybe next year we’ll get cute with it, but for now, we are good old-fashioned, dyed in-the-wool on-site here.”

Fox Sports will draw on the experience of IMS Productions covering the race while adding a few of its own special touches.

Special Touches
There are a few noteworthy broadcast and production firsts for this year’s Indy 500. Fox Sports and IMS Productions will produce the race in 1080p HDR and distribute upconverted 4K—a first for the race—to capture “all of the race’s color and pageantry,” said Davies, adding that the HDR color space is “something that’s a vast improvement.”

Fox Sports is deploying six “driver’s eye cameras” at the Indy 500 this year—a first for the race. While these types of cameras have been used in Formula 1 and Formula E racing, their addition to the production of the Indy 500 will bring a first-time driver’s perspective to fans of the race, said Davies.

“The driver’s eye camera is turning a lot of heads,” he said. “We did it for NASCAR, but it’s a lot better in the open cockpit models because there’s not as much gak in front of the cameras. We think it is very compelling at Indy because it gives you an inside-out look at exactly what the driver is seeing.”

The cameras, believed to be the smallest currently in use in sports production, will be part of the helmets worn by drivers Josef Newgarden, Scott Dixon, Alex Palou, Will Power, Marcus Ericsson and Felix Rosenqvist.

Beyond simply capturing the track, this camera will give fans a view of the car’s wheel, controls and the hands of the six drivers as well as the “sheer vibration” of the car as it powers around the track, Davies said.

The broadcaster is bringing many of the production elements commonly used in its NASCAR and other motorsports coverage to Indianapolis. A decade ago, it pioneered its use of drones in motorsports with NASCAR.

For the Memorial Day Weekend race, it is again partnering with Beverly Hills Aerials, which will deploy two airborne platforms at the Indy 500, said Davies.

Beverly Hills Aerials has modified a DJI Inspire drone, outfitted with a broadcast camera that Fox can paint remotely to match its other cameras. The drone specialist has received a waiver to fly over people at the race in a safe manner, said Davies.

The company also will deploy an FPV racing drone, which Fox uses widely in its NASCAR coverage and can achieve speeds between 80 and 90 miles per hour to “show how fast these cars are going,” he said.

Fox Sports senior vice president of graphic technology and integration Zac Fields and his team will add augmented reality graphic elements and a head-up display (HUD) depicting a virtual dashboard in some cars. The Fox Sports Ghost Car, a familiar NASCAR visual, made its Indy debut last weekend during qualifying sessions, he said.

“What Fox brings is some of this new technology that we’ve invested in like the SMT [SportsMEDIA Technology] vectors that allow us to do things like positioning boxes like we use in NASCAR, to do the Ghost Car and pointers and HUD display.

“There's a fair amount of graphical firepower here, and Zac's been hard at work to make sure we can get all the data that is supplied by IMS Productions and manifest graphics for our audience,” Davies said.

Maiden Voyage
While Fox Sports will deploy many of the tools and technical innovations that have elevated motorsports coverage, most notably for NASCAR, Davies and his team are approaching production of the Indianapolis 500 with a deep respect for the historical context of the race.

“We try to be humble in terms of coming to a place like this that’s been racing for over 100 years,” he said. “We're all newbies here, and we're taking the experience we have from doing NASCAR and other motorsports, but combining it with just the way that Fox does big events,” he said.

“You know, we are relying on the experience of our partners at Indy Motor Sports Productions,“ Davies added. “Those guys are awesome and really are the engine of race coverage.”

INDIANAPOLIS—Ericsson, in partnership with Intel and Verizon, took to the track during the Indianapolis 500 to test some 5G network and virtual reality technology.

Screenshot by Corinne Reichert/ZDNet

Technologies such as beam forming and beam tracking, which use antenna arrays to steer a beam to where a user is with less radio interference, were utilized to attain speeds of 6Gbps across Verizon’s 5G trial network. Ericsson also installed a camera on the roof of the race car and fitted the driver with a 5G-enabled VR headset showing a 4K video stream of the track from the camera.

Ericsson and Verizon reported that during the trials they attained downlink speeds of 6.4Gbps in a vehicle travelling at 60 miles per hour.

For more information, read the full story of ZDNet.

INDIANAPOLIS—Drivers will be asked for the 100th time to start their engines this Memorial Day weekend for one of auto racing’s premier events, the Indianapolis 500. First televised in 1949, the live broadcast of the Indy 500 was not an annual event until 1986 by ABC, which has been broadcast the race since the 1960s. Over that time it has strived to bring the intensity and experience of the 500 to fans.

Rich Feinberg had his first experience working the Indy 500 back in 1986 as a production runner. He also worked for ESPN for 23 years, with the Indy 500 being one of his big annual productions, as the sports network handles the production for ABC. He recently took the position of vice president and executive producer with Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions. He has seen the growth of the production first hand.

“Technology evolution was synonymous with the evolution of the production of the race,” said Feinberg. “As technology has evolved since the ‘80s, so has the ability for media partners to cover racing and put the viewer not only at the event but quite often in the driver’s seat and in the cockpit, and that makes a difference in their viewing experience.”

COVERING ALL ANGLES

Those evolutions have manifested themselves in high-definition cameras; more dynamic camera angles, including in-car cameras; 3D graphics; high-motion cameras; and driver audio playback. This year’s production will continue to expand the scope of ABC/ESPN’s coverage, adding more cameras than ever and offering a live-stream of the full broadcast for the first time.

In a nice bit of symmetry, the production will utilize 100 cameras for the 100th edition of the Indy 500. The cameras, which range from in-car compact cameras to a remote camera on a military base, will offer a variety of viewpoints for fans watching at home. The 100 cameras are the most the production has ever used, but as Kate Jackson, ESPN’s coordinating producer, puts it: “It’s really about trying to find ways to cover more of such a large space and how to enhance the storytelling at home.”

That will include a full live-stream of the race through the WatchESPN app. Over the last three years, viewers have had access to a second-screen experience with WatchESPN with footage from the in-car cameras, giving them the ability to track their favorite driver, the leader, or one weaving through the pack. “It’s a really nice supplement to have,” said Jackson.

TECH CHALLENGES

One of the few limitations that the production has is that only 12 of the 33 cars have in-car cameras that can be accessed. A number of factors go into which cars do have them, including sales and sponsorships, but the main reason for the limited number is the amount of RF bandwidth available. “The Indianapolis market is actually limited in the amount of spectrum we can use and get temporary frequencies for,” explained Dennis Cleary, operations producer for the race. But if you’re worried about possible advantages for the other 21 cars not using in-car cameras, the Indy Car league requires that dummy weights/dummy cameras are installed to equal out any weight or aerodynamic issues that may occur.

Clearly also revealed that 4K may be coming to the Indy 500 soon, just not this year. The ABC/ESPN production is still based in 720p and the production requires cameras that can effectively capture at a frame rate of 600 fps. “With the high rate of speed that these cars are travelling, we wanted to make sure that we capture it without any issues,” Clearly said on why they decided to forgo attempting a 4K broadcast. “Maybe next year, maybe the year after as the technology progresses and the cameras progress, but for this year, we definitely had a long conversation about it but we chose not to go that route.”

All of these production elements are meant to serve the viewing audience at home by bringing them as close to the action as possible. That is one element of the production that has not changed over the years. “It was always taken not only with great pride but with individual responsibility to ensure that the broadcast was leading motor sports coverage in terms of storytelling, in terms of event documentation and in terms of use of new and advance technology to show this spectacular event,” Feinberg said.

The 100th Indianapolis 500 will air Sunday, May 29 at 12:00 p.m. on ABC.