Kelli Stavast on What Women in Motorsports Broadcasting Still Face

When Kelli Stavast walked into her first off-road racing assignment in the early 2000s, there was almost no one in the paddock she could look at and recognize as a version of where she might end up. The pit reporters were men. The booth voices were men. The crew chiefs she was learning to interview were men. The corporate side of the broadcast had a few women in producer chairs, but the on-air talent was a club, and the club had a dress code she didn’t match.

A little over twenty years later, the picture has changed. It hasn’t changed evenly, and it hasn’t changed everywhere, and the people who have spent careers inside it tend to be careful when they describe the trajectory. The shape of the change is real. The pace of it is slower than the highlight reels suggest.

Where the Numbers Sit

The cleanest data point comes from the Associated Press Sports Editors’ periodic gender and racial report cards on sports media, run through the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. The most recent national snapshot found that the share of women working as sports reporters had risen from 11.5 percent in 2018 to 14.4 percent in 2021. Roughly 22.2 percent of sports journalists overall identified as female at the time of the study, against a population of professional athletes in the United States that was 37.6 percent women. Those figures cover the full sports media beat, as ESPN summarized in its coverage of the report. They don’t isolate motorsports.

When you do isolate motorsports, the numbers get smaller. There’s never been a full count of women working as on-air talent in NASCAR, IndyCar, IMSA, and Formula 1 broadcasts in the United States, but a list of the women who have held lead pit-reporter, booth analyst, or play-by-play roles across the major U.S. motorsports series in the last twenty years would fit on a single page. Most readers could probably name fewer than ten of them.

The Names That Built the Beat

The women who carried motorsports broadcasting through the 2000s and 2010s are a small group, and they tend to know each other. Krista Voda was promoted to NASCAR on Fox as a pit reporter for the Cup Series in 2007, replacing Jeanne Zelasko, and worked the beat for years. Wendy Venturini built her career on SPEED Channel and stayed close to the sport long after the network folded. Jamie Little spent two decades in the paddock as a pit reporter for the Indianapolis 500 and the NASCAR Cup Series before Fox moved her into the booth as a play-by-play announcer for the NASCAR Truck Series, the first woman to call lap-by-lap action for a national motorsports series in the United States, as Sports Illustrated documented in a career retrospective on her path. Shannon Spake also moved through Fox’s NASCAR coverage and into broader hosting roles.

Kelli Stavast joined the small group in 2014, when NBC Sports announced her addition to its pit-reporter team alongside Marty Snider for the network’s return to NASCAR coverage. The press release from the time noted that her résumé already included off-road racing for NBC and SPEED, the Baja 1000, the Red Bull Air Race, the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series, and the Whelen Modified Tour, as NBC Sports listed in its hire announcement. She covered NBC’s NASCAR Cup, Xfinity, and IndyCar coverage from 2015 through 2021. Of the network’s original NASCAR pit-reporter group, she was the one with no NASCAR background coming in.

Reporters who arrived after Stavast inherited a paddock that knew, by then, what to do when a woman walked in with credentials. That hadn’t always been the case. The women who came up in the 1990s and early 2000s were assembling the protocol in real time. The reporters who came up after them inherited a working version of it.

The Booth Is the Last Door

The pit-road beat opened first. The booth has been slower. Throughout most of the modern era of American motorsports television, the lap-by-lap and color analyst chairs were occupied exclusively by men, almost always former drivers or crew chiefs. Jamie Little’s appointment to play-by-play on the Truck Series in 2021 was the first time a woman had held that role for any nationally televised U.S. motorsports series. Going into the 2025 season, the lead booth voices for the NASCAR Cup Series remained men. The same is true of IndyCar’s main race calls. The shift has happened at the analyst tier, where women are starting to appear with more regularity. It hasn’t happened at lap-by-lap.

Formula 1’s broadcast presence has moved more visibly. Sky Sports F1, the dominant English-language broadcaster of the championship, added Naomi Schiff and Bernie Collins as analysts during the 2022 and 2023 seasons. Sky added Jamie Chadwick, the three-time W Series champion, to its 2025 lineup of analysts working alongside Jenson Button, Nico Rosberg, Jacques Villeneuve, Martin Brundle, Karun Chandhok, and Anthony Davidson, as F1i reported when the season’s broadcast roster was announced. Three women in a panel of nine analysts is the most the booth has ever had at one time on the most-watched English-language F1 broadcast, even if it falls well short of parity.

Why the Pipeline Question Is Harder Than It Looks

A standard explanation for slow representation in the booth is that broadcasters draw their analyst hires from former drivers and crew chiefs, and the population of former drivers and crew chiefs is overwhelmingly male. That’s true. There’s some truth in the pipeline argument. There’s also a circularity problem. The reason there are few former female drivers in NASCAR and IndyCar is in part that the sport spent decades not building any structural pathway for women to reach those series in the first place.

That’s the circularity. You can’t draw analysts from a former-driver pool that the sport never built.

The W Series, founded in 2019 as a women-only single-seater championship, was an attempt to address that. It ran on Formula 1 weekends, drew Sky Sports as a broadcast partner, and gave a generation of female drivers, including Chadwick, a competitive platform that did not exist before. Sky Sports announced the broadcast deal in 2022, positioning the championship as a route around the financial barriers that had historically kept women out of the upper tiers of the sport. The W Series collapsed financially later that year. F1 Academy, run directly by Formula 1, took its place as the primary women’s feeder series and is currently in operation.

The relevance of those series to broadcasting is indirect but real. A pipeline of female drivers eventually becomes a pipeline of former drivers. A pipeline of former drivers eventually becomes a pipeline of analysts. The path is decades long. The networks that hire booth talent in 2026 are working with a driver pool that was shaped by access decisions made in the 1990s and 2000s.

What the Job Has Always Required

The women who built the beat tend to describe the work the same way the best male reporters do. The job is preparation. It’s paddock relationships. It’s reading a driver’s mood five minutes before the green flag and asking the question that produces something a viewer can’t find on the timing-and-scoring page. Stavast has talked about her own race-day prep starting days before the actual race, working through the paddock for the texture the broadcast actually rests on. The driver who was up all night with a newborn. The crew chief who threw out the setup overnight. The number on the stat sheet is the floor. The human detail is the work.

What women in the role have had to do on top of that, throughout the period covered here, is establish credibility with each new audience member. Stavast has described being one of a very small handful of women in the sport when she started and figuring out the protocol largely by herself. Little has talked publicly about the same thing in her own way. Voda, Venturini, Spake, the same. The reporters who held the role before there were many of them holding it built the baseline that newer reporters now inherit. That’s the lineage.

What Is Still True

Three things sit on the same line, depending on where you look. Representation in motorsports broadcasting has improved markedly since the early 2000s, when the women on camera could be counted on one hand. Representation has improved unevenly, with most of the gains concentrated at the pit-road tier and the analyst tier rather than at lap-by-lap. And the pipeline that feeds the analyst tier is shaped by access decisions made decades earlier in the driver development pyramid, which means the pace of further change in the booth is gated by structural realities outside the broadcast division.

The women who have spent careers in the role tend to talk about it without performance. The next reporter who walks into the paddock with a microphone will inherit a working set of protocols, an established lineage of women who did the job before her, and a sport that’s still not used to seeing her there. All three things will be true at the same time. The work, when she does it, will be the same work it has always been.

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