Prime Video's AI-Powered 'Burn Bar' Revolutionizes NASCAR Broadcasts

How Prime Video's 'Burn Bar' is changing the way we watch NASCAR

NASCAR fans have grown accustomed to seeing speed, throttle and braking on broadcasts for years. There has been one measurement, though, that has eluded networks and viewers for years. Until now. Viewers of the Prime Video races have been able to see fuel usage with the introduction of the Burn Bar. Race teams have measured burn rates and fuel levels down to the last ounce for years, but the methodology has been kept secret due to competitive reasons. Prime Video, though, developed an AI tool using car data available to broadcasters and teams that can measure miles per gallon. The Burn Bar made a brief appearance during Prime's first broadcast of the Coca-Cola 600 on May 25. It has been used more frequently the past two weeks and will again be deployed on Sunday during the race in Mexico City. NASCAR on Prime analyst Steve Letarte, a former crew chief for Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., contributed to the development of the Burn Bar and sees it as the first step in taking race analysis to a new level. "It's the first true tool that is taking information off the car, making calculations and then displaying to the fan a calculation or measurement that is being used in the garage. And it does affect the team," he said. "There's not a sensor on the car giving us miles per gallon. It's a mathematical calculation of other cars performances." The AI model analyzes thousands of performance data per second, including a range of in-car telemetry signals, RPMs, throttle and optical tracking of each car's position. The model then evaluates each driver's fuel consumption and efficiency throughout the race. Letarte worked with Prime Video "Thursday Night Football Prime Vision" analyst Sam Schwartzstein during the process. They came up with four methodologies that were tested during the first part of the season, which was broadcast by Fox. Schwartzstein and Letarte would then get the data from teams after races to see how close they were until they picked one what worked the best. The Burn Bar received its toughest test during last week's race at Michigan as the final 48 laps were run without a caution flag. Most teams made their final pit stops with 50 laps to go, meaning teams were going to be down to the end of their fuel runs at the checkered flag. "We projected William Byron to run out, which he did, and then we were on the razor's edge for Denny Hamlin. And then watching the truck push him back into victory lane at the end, knowing he was as close as we thought he was. What a cool way to see this feature come to life and elevate NASCAR broadcasts," Schwartzstein said. Alex Strand, Prime Video's senior coordinating producer for live sports, also sees the Burn Bar as the first tool of many that Amazon and Prime Video can develop for its coverage. Prime Video is in the first year of a seven-year agreement to carry five races per season. "It's really cool to live in a world where it shows us that anything is possible. We're starting with something that we're really excited about, but it's setting us down a path that will open up new doors for us," he said. "I think that's what we're really excited about is to say, 'OK, we've had success in year one on a feature that's resonated with fans right out of the gate.' It raises the table for our offseason." After Sunday's race in Mexico City, Prime Video's coverage for this season wraps up with the race at Pocono on June 22.

Prime wanted a fresh twist for its first NASCAR broadcasts. Enter the 'Burn Bar'

As the laps wound down in this month's NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway, the big question was which drivers had enough fuel to make it to the finish line. In the past, fans at home would have been flying blind. Viewers might understand drivers were trying to save fuel, but there was no way to tell if they were actually conserving enough gas -- and to what degree. Enter a new innovation used on Prime Video's NASCAR broadcasts: The "Burn Bar," an AI tool that measures fuel usage across every car in the field. At Michigan, fans were looped in and could see how drivers like Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson were preserving their remaining gas to make it to the finish line. Prime not only showed how much they were using, but provided an estimated miles per gallon on its graphic in the process. "I look at fuel as the score," said Steve Letarte, the former crew chief turned TV analyst who helped brainstorm the Burn Bar concept with Prime. "How much fuel someone has or how much they're using can determine the outcome, and this allows us to display it for the fan." NASCAR teams use data to calculate fuel mileage, but every manufacturer currently has a slightly different recipe to calculate fuel usage, Letarte said. It involves an equation that takes into account throttle position (how far the pedal is pushed down), engine performance, RPM and gear rate. Prime's calculation is a "light version" of that, Letarte said, because TV doesn't need to be as exact as the teams. What matters is showing the viewer what's happening to "alert the fans of the story of the race," Letarte said. And Prime's tool has another twist: It can see every car in the field at once, whereas most teams are most concerned with tracking their own cars. The origins of the Burn Bar trace back 18 months to a day at JR Motorsports, when the future Prime Video booth was watching a NASCAR race together and talking about race coverage in general. Alex Strand, Prime's senior coordinating producer, said the conversation turned to topics like what was missing from NASCAR broadcasts and what fans would want that they aren't currently getting. Tracking fuel usage came up at the time, and then again when Prime started asking the teams what they thought was missing. "That's when we said, 'All right, Steve, let's talk fuel,'" Strand said. "And then we got in the lab, and this is where we ended up." The tool works similarly to other forms of AI. Prime gives it the starting parameters, and then it uses machine learning in Stage 1 to take stock of what is happening throughout the field -- every lap and every input for each driver to create a measurement. By the start of Stage 2, Prime is comfortable enough that the Burn Bar is ready for display with a more accurate measurement than if it had just been displayed from the green flag. The tool's roots are in the innovation Prime made for its "Thursday Night Football" coverage, when the broadcaster came up with "Defensive Alerts" -- the groundbreaking form of AI that predicts blitzes before the ball is snapped. On TNF, the AI tool circles a potential player who is likely to rush the quarterback based on a proprietary model. "We asked ourselves a question about, 'What if we could predict a blitz?'" Strand said. "And then these scientists who are on our team in Tel Aviv said, 'We can do that.' We're like, 'Really?' "Then the real macro message was, 'You can kind of do anything. It's just a matter of what are the data inputs.'" It took approximately a year to develop the Burn Bar tool, and Letarte said the reaction from teams in the garage has been "shocked." After all, he said, it's not like there are thousands of people in the world who work on something this specific. "The fact we could take something that's pretty complicated in a real specialized field and present it to these scientists and they're like, 'Oh yeah, here's your answer' -- I think that opens the garage's eyes," Letarte said. "Like, 'Wow, they solved that problem relatively quickly.'" Even now, the Burn Bar could be just a start. With TNF, Defensive Alerts served as a jumping-off point for further viewer enhancements (such as "Defensive Vulnerability" and "Coverage ID"). Prime already has a new AI tool that analyzes all radio communications from all teams for the entire race and surfaces interesting radio chatter based on certain categories (car performance, emotion, etc.). Producers in Los Angeles then use the tool to edit Prime's version of Fox Sports' "Radioactive" feature -- a recap of interesting team communications -- that airs during the postrace show. Letarte, an analyst for three of NASCAR's four Cup Series network partners this season, said as much as he values the announcing element of broadcasts, "all sports should be really entertaining on mute." In other words, he said, TV should tell the story to someone who is watching a game or a race with no volume, which makes tools like the Burn Bar and its fuel usage display all the more valuable. "It's not just, 'What can we measure, but how are we going to show it?'" Letarte said. "If you walk in a bar, by the end of your first beer, you should have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the event. That has to tell its own story." Said Strand: "We want (fans) to know more, and we think they can. What we've seen with things like this and stuff on our NFL (coverage) is they have an appetite for it, and we think we've got the ability to present it in a simple way. So it's been pretty neat."

How Prime Video's 'Burn Bar' is changing the way we watch NASCAR

NASCAR fans have grown accustomed to seeing speed, throttle and braking on broadcasts for years NASCAR fans have grown accustomed to seeing speed, throttle and braking on broadcasts for years. There has been one measurement, though, that has eluded networks and viewers for years. Until now. Viewers of the Prime Video races have been able to see fuel usage with the introduction of the Burn Bar. Race teams have measured burn rates and fuel levels down to the last ounce for years, but the methodology has been kept secret due to competitive reasons. Prime Video, though, developed an AI tool using car data available to broadcasters and teams that can measure miles per gallon. The Burn Bar made a brief appearance during Prime's first broadcast of the Coca-Cola 600 on May 25. It has been used more frequently the past two weeks and will again be deployed on Sunday during the race in Mexico City. NASCAR on Prime analyst Steve Letarte, a former crew chief for Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., contributed to the development of the Burn Bar and sees it as the first step in taking race analysis to a new level. "It's the first true tool that is taking information off the car, making calculations and then displaying to the fan a calculation or measurement that is being used in the garage. And it does affect the team," he said. "There's not a sensor on the car giving us miles per gallon. It's a mathematical calculation of other cars performances." The AI model analyzes thousands of performance data per second, including a range of in-car telemetry signals, RPMs, throttle and optical tracking of each car's position. The model then evaluates each driver's fuel consumption and efficiency throughout the race. Letarte worked with Prime Video "Thursday Night Football Prime Vision" analyst Sam Schwartzstein during the process. They came up with four methodologies that were tested during the first part of the season, which was broadcast by Fox. Schwartzstein and Letarte would then get the data from teams after races to see how close they were until they picked one what worked the best. The Burn Bar received its toughest test during last week's race at Michigan as the final 48 laps were run without a caution flag. Most teams made their final pit stops with 50 laps to go, meaning teams were going to be down to the end of their fuel runs at the checkered flag. "We projected William Byron to run out, which he did, and then we were on the razor's edge for Denny Hamlin. And then watching the truck push him back into victory lane at the end, knowing he was as close as we thought he was. What a cool way to see this feature come to life and elevate NASCAR broadcasts," Schwartzstein said. Alex Strand, Prime Video's senior coordinating producer for live sports, also sees the Burn Bar as the first tool of many that Amazon and Prime Video can develop for its coverage. Prime Video is in the first year of a seven-year agreement to carry five races per season. "It's really cool to live in a world where it shows us that anything is possible. We're starting with something that we're really excited about, but it's setting us down a path that will open up new doors for us," he said. "I think that's what we're really excited about is to say, 'OK, we've had success in year one on a feature that's resonated with fans right out of the gate.' It raises the table for our offseason." After Sunday's race in Mexico City, Prime Video's coverage for this season wraps up with the race at Pocono on June 22.