What Kelli Stavast Looks for in a Pit Reporter That Most People Never Think About

The conventional wisdom about who makes a good pit reporter tends to focus on motorsports knowledge. Know the series, know the drivers, know your way around a garage, and the rest follows. Kelli Stavast spent the better part of two decades doing the job for NBC Sports and she has a different view. The knowledge matters, she’ll tell you. It’s just not what separates the people who are good at it from those who aren’t. Stavast came into motorsports knowing nothing about the sport. She had been a broadcast journalism student in Orange, California, intending to cover football and basketball, when a professor sent her to interview for a sideline reporter role to make the university look good. She took the job, spent the first few years of her career trying to find a way out, and eventually built one of the longest careers as a pit reporter in American motorsports. The absence of deep background knowledge was never, by her account, the limiting factor. “I’m not trying to be an expert,” she said. “You’ve got to know how to ask the questions to get the information you need to do a good job.” That distinction, between being an expert and knowing how to extract information from one, sits at the center of how she thinks about the position. A pit reporter is not the analyst in the booth running stats and providing color commentary from deep familiarity with the sport’s history. A pit reporter is on the ground, in the heat, working a moving target. The skill required is identifying the right person, walking up cold, and asking the question that produces something the viewer could not find anywhere else. Stavast described this when NBC occasionally asked her to help mentor younger broadcasters. She gave them the same thing every time. Nobody will believe you’re suddenly an expert. The drivers won’t believe it, the crew chiefs won’t believe it, and the audience certainly won’t. They will respond to a reporter who knows exactly what they need and asks for it directly. The goal is to surface expertise in someone else. A specific kind of preparation is required for that, and it’s where the work actually lives. Race day for a pit reporter at a national NASCAR broadcast starts days earlier. By the time Stavast arrived at a track, she had already worked through the publicly available information, statistics, track history, and how specific drivers had performed there in previous seasons. From there, she moved on to what could only be gathered by showing up and asking. Crew chiefs were being talked to before qualifying. Drivers were still being approached during commercial breaks, minutes before they climbed into the car. Notes were still being built in real time while the broadcast was already running. The stuff worth knowing never appears on a stat sheet. Whether a driver was up all night with a sick kid. Whether wholesale setup changes had been made between practice and race day, so the driver would climb into a car that felt completely different from what he’d run the day before. How someone actually feels about a particular track on a particular morning. None of it is findable. It has to be asked, and the window for asking it is narrow. The physical demands of the pit road add a layer that people watching from home never register. On race day, a director, a producer, and a pit producer are all talking in the reporter’s ear simultaneously. Scanners carry live audio from drivers’ radios across the entire field, a constant stream of voices. Broadcast partners are calling the race from the booth, also in the ear. Multiple streams of information are being processed at once while the reporter stays camera-ready and waits for the cue to deliver something clean, confident, and useful in real time. “You have a hundred different voices going on in your head,” Stavast said. Managing that environment is not something motor racing knowledge teaches. It comes from having been repeatedly thrown into uncomfortable situations over many years, in many different contexts, until the stress of not knowing becomes something you can function within rather than something that shuts you down. Stavast built that tolerance by covering off-road racing, the Baja 1000, the Red Bull Air Race, the American Le Mans Series, events at the lower rungs of motorsports where production was smaller, the stakes were lower, and the room for error was a little wider. The Olympics accelerated it. NBC sent her to cover freestyle skiing in PyeongChang without knowing the sport. She figured it out. Diving in Rio. The Westminster Dog Show. “They said, well, you have dogs,” she recalled. “I’m like, that doesn’t mean I know anything about dog shows.” What she knew was how to walk into a situation she knew nothing about, find the person who did, and ask the question that mattered. That’s what she looks for. Subject matter knowledge can be acquired. The capacity to function under pressure while holding multiple information streams and still asking the right question takes longer to build, and most people underestimate how long.