The Pit Reporter Who Built a Career on Not Knowing Everything
Forget everything you think you know about pit reporters. Kelli Stavast, who spent nearly 20 years in the trenches for NBC Sports, says the real secret has nothing to do with motorsports knowledge. It is about knowing how to ask the right question at the right time, even when you know nothing at all.
Stavast walked into motorsports as a blank slate. She was a broadcast journalism student in Orange, California, dreaming of football and basketball. A professor sent her to interview for a sideline reporter role, just to make the university look good. She took the job. She spent the first few years trying to escape. Instead, she built one of the longest careers as a pit reporter in American motorsports. The lack of deep knowledge? Never the problem.
“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.”
The Difference Between an Expert and a Reporter
That line is the whole game. A pit reporter is not the analyst in the booth running stats and dropping history lessons. A pit reporter is on the ground, in the heat, working a moving target. The real skill is identifying the right person, walking up cold, and asking the question that produces something the viewer cannot find anywhere else.
When NBC asked Stavast to mentor younger broadcasters, she gave them the same advice every time. Nobody will believe you are suddenly an expert. The drivers won’t believe it. The crew chiefs won’t believe it. The audience certainly won’t. What they will respond to is a reporter who knows exactly what they need and asks for it directly. The goal is to surface expertise in someone else.
Race Day Starts Days Before the Race
The work lives in the preparation. By the time Stavast arrived at a track, she had already worked through the publicly available information: statistics, track history, how specific drivers had performed there in previous seasons. Then came the stuff that only shows up when you ask. Crew chiefs were talked to before qualifying. Drivers were approached during commercial breaks, minutes before they climbed into the car. Notes were 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 had 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 Chaos Behind the Camera
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.
How to Build the Tolerance for Pressure
Managing that environment is not something motor racing knowledge teaches. It comes from being 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 is 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.