NASCAR made a giant leap into the future ahead of the 2024 season by inaugurating its own production facility. Located in Concord, North Carolina, this broadcast and content nerve center has fundamentally changed how NASCAR produces and distributes live races. And one of the key advancements it has facilitated is in the area of remote officiating.
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NASCAR Executive Vice President & Chief Racing Development Officer John Probst said during a recent conversation with Epartrade that NASCAR is planning to make the concept more public in the future after its success over the past year. He revealed that a section of the $53.5 million building has been specifically allocated for this purpose and that a crew is there at all times, remotely controlling races.
The amount of data that teams send to the race control building during an event is tremendously high. It is next to impossible for officials to run through all that information on a real-time basis and make the right call. This is where the new building and its technological features appear to be helping a lot.
Probst detailed, “When you look at a lot of the tools that we deploy today around our race, there’s the obvious. I mentioned the audio, the visual part of it, but then the data is coming. Scott Miller and his crew at the remote race control will be sort of our miners, if you will.”
“They’re in there, you know, digging away, looking for data. If we do get feedback for the teams to look at something, they’re able to do that in a semi-real-time sense, but not, you know, to the second. So, they give us that couple minute buffer of somebody going back and looking at the things that the team offered us.”
The promotion is actively looking forward to building on this incredible capability in 2026 on a weekly basis. Remote production is at the core of this facility. Sending complete broadcast crews and transporting massive equipment to the racetrack every week is an unproductive task with all the technology that’s available in the world.
Now, NASCAR can handle every race right from its backyard in Concord. Camera feeds, audio, telemetry, and every other bit of information are sent to the hub, where officials work in control rooms. Interestingly, this setup is powered by a 100-gigabit wide area network that links the facility with the production data center in Dallas and with the race tracks across the United States.
