When Kelli Stavast looked around broadcast motorsports for someone to model herself after, she didn’t find anyone.
Not because women hadn’t worked in the sport before. A handful had. But Stavast wasn’t trying to build a career in motorsports, so there wasn’t anyone she was looking to emulate.
Ask her to put a number on how many women were doing what she was doing, and she’ll tell you she couldn’t have. “A handful,” she says. “Maybe fewer than that.”
Nobody in the Rearview
One thing Stavast is clear about: she wasn’t walking into motorsports thinking about the gender piece. She was thinking about whether she could do the job.
Her entry into racing coverage came by off-road racing–a sport she knew nothing of, athletes she was unfamiliar with. But when the job was offered to her, she said yes. And soon thereafter she traveled to Tijuana to cover the Baja 1000.
That was the calculation. Say “yes” when the opportunity arises. Nothing more complicated.
That approach held. She prepared, she showed up, she got the broadcast right. If you know the story better than anyone else in the paddock, it doesn’t matter much who they expected to walk through the gate.
The work was the answer to most questions she had about belonging. She treated being in an unfamiliar room the same way she treated covering an unfamiliar sport: get ahead of it through preparation, and keep your focus on the story in front of you, not on yourself.
But there were moments. Crew chiefs she had to earn twice over. Rooms where she was clearly not who they’d expected.
Some of that friction belongs to any reporter proving themselves in a new environment. Some of it was specific to being a woman in a space that had not organized itself around that possibility.
Accepting the Room You’re In
Something shifted in Stavast around that time. She stopped waiting for the environment to feel normal and decided to accept it. “I realized I just had to embrace it,” she says.
No dramatic turning point. A quiet recalibration where she went from wishing the room was different to being fine with the room.
Things got easier after that.
The sport has changed since she started. More women are working in broadcasting now, more are in engineering, more are present at a track in ways that weren’t true when she came up. That counts.
But Stavast would still say motorsports is underrepresented when it comes to women. There is a gap between where the sport is and what parity would actually look like. She says this as someone who loves it.
What has not changed is the preparation requirement. That is the same for everyone. Knowing the job cold going in is useful. It was for her.
What She’d Tell Her Now
If a young woman came to Stavast today and said she wanted to do what she did, Stavast would tell her to start at a local track.
Not a network. Not a major series. A local track on a Saturday night. Call races nobody else is covering.
Get the reps. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Say yes to everything you’re offered, even when it doesn’t obviously connect to where you want to end up.
The yes is the whole engine. Stavast knows that because she drove to Tijuana on a professor’s referral and it eventually led to a NASCAR pit lane and three Olympic Games.
There is one more thing she would want that young woman to know: she is already ahead of where Stavast was. When Stavast started, she had not decided she specifically wanted to cover motorsports. She was a sports broadcaster who said yes to an assignment and followed it wherever it went.
Someone starting out now who already knows she wants to cover racing, who has watched it and studied it and loves it, is miles ahead of the version of Stavast who showed up to the Baja 1000 with a notebook and no roadmap.
That matters more than she probably realizes.