NASCAR finds its go-to tech pit crew

Tim Clark’s work naturally comes with a heavy dose of speed. Clark is NASCAR’s EVP and chief brand officer, and he’s gearing up for the governing body’s weekend of series championships at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

But that stock car-racing pace has also landed on his desk as he manages people and tech in a world hitting a checkered-flag sprint due to the growing impacts of AI. As a leader and decision-maker, Clark mentions the goal is to try to forecast in the right direction. That’s exceedingly harder now.

“I’m trying to manage that with the head count, the professional fees, the personnel fees, trying to find talent,” Clark said. “I mean, we would have developer positions open for a year that we couldn’t figure out how to staff.”

Clark’s experience made me understand NASCAR’s recent announcement with tech consultancy Next League and how painful the staffing experience can be at rapid pace. The two announced a new phase of their work last month, which I’ll admit surprised me. NASCAR and Next League just announced their extension last year. Now there’s another?!?

It crystallized through chats with both Clark and Next League CEO Dave Nugent: sometimes the innovation is good, old-fashioned human power, which Next League has offered as a consultant, but increasingly, as a resource that can augment emerging needs.

Clark and Nugent have worked together for nearly 12 years, which stretches back through Nugent’s days at digital agency Omnigon. Clark called Nugent and crew “the 24-hour emergency plumbers” back then. In this latest version of their work together, Next League has built and maintained the NASCAR app while also building out automations of formerly arduous quality assurance testing on race days, where the various data feeds and broadcast components come in massive proportions.

Nugent said that Next League has only seen this augmentation support opportunity grow throughout the industry, because regardless of sport, the constant churn of tech lately keeps moving the target for team and league operators. It’s allowed Next League to shoulder equal parts of the blocking and tackling along with the innovation. That effort will scale more across the NASCAR ecosystem, with this recent expansion of work including support of NASCAR racing teams and the International Motor Sports Association going forward.

“It’s their business at the end of the day. Our job is just to help them fulfill whatever those KPIs and outcomes are,” Nugent said. “We have a broad enough purview of the entire ecosystem that it gives us a little bit of an advantage.”

Source: Sports Business Journal