NASCAR: Fox changing broadcast booth in 2024?

Various individuals joined the Fox broadcast booth alongside Mike Joy and Clint Bowyer during the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season.

The NASCAR Cup Series race at Sonoma Raceway back in June wrapped up Fox’s portion of the 2023 broadcast schedule. NBC took over for the remainder of the season, with NBC and USA Network each broadcasting 10 of the season’s final 20 races.

Given an impending announcer addition for 2024, it also wrapped up a broadcast approach that Fox had taken since the start of the 2022 season.

After Jeff Gordon’s departure following their 2021 portion of the broadcast schedule to focus on his new role as Vice Chairman of Hendrick Motorsports, Fox opted not to hire a third full-time analyst to join Mike Joy and Clint Bowyer in the booth.

Instead, Fox decided to bring in guest analysts for each NASCAR Cup Series race.

In most cases, one other individual — such as Tony Stewart, Jamie McMurray, Danica Patrick, just to name a few — joined Joy and Bowyer as the third announcer in the booth, and in rare cases, several others joined the booth to call a race.

While Fox haven’t ruled out having “occasional special guests” join the booth next year, that approach to filling the third spot with a rotating cast is set to be shelved after two years.

Kevin Harvick is set to join the Fox broadcast booth on a full-time basis after retiring from Cup Series competition at the end of the 2023 season, his 23rd in the series and 10th with Stewart-Haas Racing.

When Fox confirmed that they would be taking the same broadcast booth approach in 2023 as they took in 2022, it was kind of like an early hint that Harvick, who had long been linked to an announcing career, would be retiring from driving.

It had long been rumored that Fox wanted to keep the third spot open for the 2014 champion, rather than hiring somebody else full-time, and doing what they did in 2022 again in 2023 left the door open for that possibility in 2024.

The trio of Joy, Bowyer, and Harvick is set to be the third unique full-time trio in the Fox booth since 2019, when Joy called races alongside Gordon and Darrell Waltrip.

Waltrip retired after Fox’s 2019 portion of the broadcast schedule, and he was not immediately replaced. Joy and Gordon simply made up a two-man booth in 2020 before Bowyer, a former Stewart-Haas Racing and Richard Childress Racing teammate of Harvick, retired from Cup Series competition after 2020 and joined the booth in 2021.

Fox’s first race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season is set to be the Busch Light Clash preseason exhibition race at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Sunday, February 4. The first points race of the season is set to be the 66th annual Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on Sunday, February 18.