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

New York Times

19-06-2025

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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
'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.
Fuel strategy is of the utmost importance in Michigan ⛽@SteveLetarte goes in-depth on the AI-powered Burn Bar. #NASCARonPrime pic.twitter.com/bE7XohwoK3
— Sports on Prime (@SportsonPrime) June 8, 2025
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.''
Advertisement
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.'
(Top photo of a screenshot showing the Burn Bar from Prime's NASCAR coverage: Courtesy of Prime)