Meet the man who’s keeping NASCAR and live sports on your TV through the pandemic

Coronavirus is hitting sports hard, but through the many event postponements, whispers of rescheduled dates and fan prayers, the virtual world is kicking into overdrive to fill the gap in live entertainment. iRacing is at the epicenter.

The sim racing game, which launched its first eSports series — the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series — in partnership with NASCAR in 2009, was well-positioned to fill the gaps in sports entertainment. Drivers across all levels of NASCAR have access to simulator rigs and the iRacing infrastructure was already in place to quickly launch a virtual series featuring the sport’s stars.

Since NASCAR announced it was postponing its season March 13, iRacing has launched at least nine new series and is broadcasting live events in partnership with Fox and NBC. Events for each new series, which include motorsports partners such as NASCAR, IndyCar, SCCA, FR Americas, Supercars and World of Outlaws, are now broadcast on major cable networks almost every day of the week.

“Three and a half weeks ago I was an executive producer of a software company and now here I am,” iRacing EVP and executive producer Steve Myers said. “I’m an executive producer of a software company and a broadcasting company.”

Myers took a break from his calls with network heads and autosport leaders, which he said keeps him working for 12 hours a day, to speak with The Charlotte Observer about potentially over-saturating our screens with races, limiting lineups and the future of iRacing post-pandemic.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Alex Andrejev: I want to start by asking about these recent viewership numbers for the Pro Invitational. It’s been in the 1.2 to 1.3 million viewer range. What do you make of those numbers? Is that what you expected?

Steve Myers: I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if I’ve had an expectation. This all happened so fast that it’s really been hard to pay attention to anything other than the next day and executing what we need to get done for the next TV show. Between the eSports races that are on our digital platforms and new shows, we’re so busy coming up with a plan and learning what we did from the previous week, it’s been hard to actually appreciate and study what’s been happening. I’m surprised by the fact that everything so dramatically went from where we were to where we are, but I’m not really surprised that people have tuned in and watched it. NASCAR fans particularly are so loyal to the sport and care about their stars so much that I’m not surprised they took a chance on watching this and seem to enjoy it. I think with everything that’s going on, being able to have two hours to sit back and watch something that’s live and kind of forget about the pandemic, from that aspect, I’m not surprised the number is so good because there really is so little going on the world to make people happy right now.

AA: What’s iRacing’s philosophy when it comes to adding these new series? How did all these events come about?

SM: The NASCAR one was obviously the first one. That came about because I think Fox really wanted to do something. They were looking at the big picture going, ‘This could be a significant amount of time that we’re away and this is our kind of window of television. We’ve got a big investment here and we should try to do something.’ So I think that was a natural (progression), especially since we already had a really great relationship with NASCAR and we’d seen growth in our eSports series in the last two years. It went so quickly because all the relationships were there, the drivers were there, the relationship with NASCAR was there. The Fox piece was the new piece. We had given them some content for their studio shows last year, so we developed a small relationship, but I think the fact that they can now have this window on Sundays where they’re desperate to have some content, I think that was an easy decision (for Fox). I think once people saw what NASCAR did, everyone was like, ‘Whoa, that was pretty cool.’ And then in fairness, we’ve had a relationship with NBC through last year, so in a lot of ways, the work that we did with NBC set us up in a position to be able to do what we did with Fox this year.

AA: How do you navigate all these different relationships with the networks and sanctioning bodies? Are you worried about over-saturating the schedule?

SM: We’ve looked at this as an opportunity to be a good partner to NBC and NBCSN, to Fox, to NASCAR, to IndyCar, World of Outlaws, USAC, IMSA, all of these companies we have relationships with. And they’re all in the same boat to some degree. They’re desperate to keep content coming and their fans engaged. Because we have those relationships and because we have a platform that can easily do this kind of broadcast because we’ve built it into our platform, it wasn’t hard to get all these things off the ground. What has proved to be difficult is just making sure we don’t oversaturate the market and have too many things, so we really try to limit the number of things we do. We could be doing probably four times as many things as we are doing now. We just wanted to focus on these things and get them in a good spot before we look and say, ‘Is there an appetite for more of this or is this good enough?’

AA: Is iRacing planning to announce any more series soon?

SM: Not at this exact moment. I think we’ve kind of put a pause on adding new stuff. I think we’re working on just kind of perfecting the things that we have now. The Wednesday night slot that we have with FS1 is going to be something that’s going to be a little bit more dynamic. I think we’re going to have the ability to do some different things, outside-of-the-box ideas, with that night. I think, ultimately, we want to listen to what the public wants and we’ll look at the numbers and see what is successful and what is not, and make adjustments as we go.

AA: With all of the different parties involved, who sets the lineup (for the Pro Invitational)?

SM: It’s a combination of all three (iRacing, NASCAR and Fox) and it’s a week-to-week thing.

AA: So how does iRacing respond to the fact that some Cup drivers are upset they’re not included in the lineup?

SM: I guess the hard thing for people to understand is that this wasn’t created with the idea that this was going to be a way for teams to generate revenue from it. I understand that teams are hurting with loss of revenue and sponsorship and TV money. But I don’t think it’s fair to put a blanket statement that, ‘Because we’re a Cup team, we should be guaranteed into these races.’ This thing didn’t exist three-and-a-half weeks ago. We’re not going to be able to solve everyone’s problem in a virtual series in a 90-minute time slot on Sundays. I think it’s irresponsible and probably unfair to try to shoehorn everyone’s problems into something iRacing has to solve. That’s not why we’re doing this. We did this because we found an opportunity to be able to do something fun for the fans that allows them to take a break from the reality of what a pandemic is and how it’s impacting their lives. It’s going to be a week-to-week thing and everyone has their own objectives with it — NASCAR is trying to take care of its teams and Fox is interested in putting on good shows so they want the stars of the race. At some, point we have to make a decision of what is going to make for an entertaining race and that’s not going to include every Cup driver. I think as we saw this past weekend with the Bristol race, there’s limitations on what we can ask guys to do in such short windows of time. There were 12 caution flags in 150 laps. And that’s just a perfect example of we’re going to have to have smaller fields and there’s a certain level of deferring to the stars because that’s who fans want to watch.

AA: Will the lineups change going forward in terms of who’s let in?

SM: This is a week-by-week evaluation of what works and what doesn’t. It’s hard to look past what the next race is. We’re working on Richmond now and Richmond is another track that we’re probably not going to have more than 35 cars. That’s going to limit the field and limit the participants. But the next race after that is Talladega. Talladega can handle more cars, so we’re going to probably expand the number of cars that will be in that event. I don’t think there’s an easy way to kind of tie a bow around the topic and say it’s going to fit for every track because it’s just not.

AA: When will Richmond run? Will there be a race on Easter?

SM: There’s not going to be a race on Easter, so we’ll take this Sunday and Saturday night off. The next race is looking like Richmond for the following Sunday.

AA: How much carryover has there been from the broadcasts to interest in the existing eNASCAR series? Has there been growing engagement there?

SM: Oh absolutely. I think our numbers were already up on the eNASCAR Coca-Cola series this year, but just past Tuesday was the largest audience we ever had for that. The Coke series, I think we had over 400,000 views on that, so that’s just a huge number for that series. And I think absolutely this is helping elevate the profile of that series.

AA: Do you have viewership numbers from Monday’s Short Track Challenge yet?

SM: No, we probably won’t get any of that until I’d imagine next week since it’s running four days this week. That part, I’ll be honest, is the newest part to understand for me — how to get TV numbers and what they mean. It’s actually been quite interesting to learn all that stuff.

AA: I can imagine it’s been quite a shift.

SM: Yeah … Three-and-a-half weeks ago I was an executive producer of a software company and now here I am. I’m an executive producer of a software company and a broadcasting company. I’m literally on the phone from nine o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night just trying to figure out all of these things like what do we want to change this week? What are the limitations? What worked last week or didn’t? Doing that with two different networks is pretty much my full-time job now.

AA: Do you think these partnerships will continue once the NASCAR season resumes? Can we expect to see more iRacing on television after this, and have those long-term discussions with the networks already started?

SM: They haven’t. I think with the uncertainty of how long this is going to be, I think nobody really wants to talk about the future. I think everyone’s just kind of saying, ‘Let’s make this work for now and we hope we can get back to racing in the real world.’ But every day that goes by, it looks bleaker and bleaker to me that (real racing) is going to be something that happens before the summertime. So from our perspective, we just want to be good partners to them now and hopefully prove ourselves, and find a formula with this so it’s something we could do in the future. I think there certainly seems to be an appetite for it. Over a million people have tuned in over the last two weeks, so I mean, they came back. But who knows. Who knows where it’ll go from here when this is all over.