THE carpet bombing of IndyCar Series ads during the US TV coverage of the Super Bowl prompts this edition of Strange But True.
IndyCar has penned a new rights deal beginning this year with US sports giant Fox Sports, which used its broadcast of the NFL’s grand final to pump up the new IndyCar season and its first time airing the Indianapolis 500.
The vast audience tuning into the game makes its commercial slots annually the most valuable in US television, and Fox used several of them to air IndyCar promos.
This is @AlexPalou. Welcome to the fastest racing on earth. @IndyCar | #INDYCARonFOX pic.twitter.com/CgN8m4MqU2
— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) February 9, 2025
For Australians, though, the shift from NBC to Fox doesn’t mean all that much beyond the commentary team as Stan Sports retains the rights to show IndyCar here in 2025.
It’s the latest chapter in the Nine Network’s history with the sport, dating back to the 1980s and 1990s when it broadcast the Indianapolis 500 live around Australia.
The ‘500 has always had an unusual relationship with television coverage.
While races of IndyCar and its forerunners had been shown live on TV as early as the 1960s, the Indy 500 was first shown live on American television only in 1986.
In contrast, NASCAR began broadcasting its marquee race, the Daytona 500, live in 1979, while Australia had live coverage of the Bathurst 500/1000 as early as its first running at Mount Panorama in 1963.
Nine was supposed to show that 1986 race live, but heavy rain on Memorial Day postponed the race by a week.
While American audiences watched live as Bobby Rahal made a late-race pass to secure an emotional victory for dying team owner Jim Trueman, Australian audiences made do with a tape-delayed airing of the race a couple of nights later.
But, had everything gone to plan, that still wouldn’t have been the first time the Indianapolis 500 was shown live on Australian TV.
That had happened decades earlier.
In 1968, Australians could watch the Indianapolis 500 beamed live-via-satellite on ABC TV around the country … well, except for Western Australia.
If you had tuned in between the hours of 1am and 5am AEST on Friday, May 31, you also would have been watching a moment in history: the first live broadcast in Australia of an overseas sporting event.
Live sport via satellite
The use of satellites to beam television signals around the world was in its infancy in the 1960s; heck, satellites were in their infancy in the 1960s.
The first commercial satellites to service our region were the Intelsat II fleet, four in units total that were launched into the Earth’s orbit between 1966 and 1967.
The first one, nicknamed Blue Bird, facilitated the first satellite TV broadcast between Australia and another country in November 1966, when the ABC and BBC reunited British immigrants living in Carnarvon with their family in England.
But a problem with Blue Bird’s thrusters meant it wasn’t able to lock into a synchronous orbit as planned, meaning it only had small windows of time in which to transmit signals.
Later Intelsat II satellites allowed Australia to receive and send TV signals around the world at length; the global ‘Our World’ show in June 1967 went for two hours and comprised segments beamed live from 14 different countries with an estimated global audience of 400-700 million people.
Satellite use soon expanded to footage of live news and sport.
The ABC took edited highlights of America’s Cup races in September 1967 and beamed live coverage of the Davis Cup final in Brisbane to a Spanish TV network in December.
However, the 1968 running of the ‘500 appears to have been the first overseas sporting event broadcast live-via-satellite in Australia.
Once again it was courtesy of the ABC, which bought the Australasian screening rights for the live broadcast of the race.
But with even the United States not having a live TV broadcast of the race, what were they showing?
Indianapolis via Moree
America’s ABC, the American Broadcasting Corporation, held the rights to show the Indy 500 on American television for decades, but regularly tape-delayed the race to show at a later date.
Such was the case in 1968, when the US TV audience waited until the afternoon of June 15 to see highlights of a race that took place on May 30.
However, there was a way to watch the race live in America, even if you weren’t trackside at ‘the Brickyard’.
From 1964 to 1970, the Music Corporation of America (MCA) beamed the race live via a closed-circuit television feed to theatres and arenas around the country.
It was no hokey setup, either; MCA’s coverage of the 1968 race featured 15 cameras, two of which were wireless units that could roam the pits, plus two-time winner Rodger Ward and journalist Chris Economaki among the on-air talent.
In 1966, the race was beamed via Intelsat’s original Early Bird satellite to England where some 3,000 homes, on a pay-per-view basis, sat through a long red-flag period from a lap-1 crash to watch Graham Hill win the ‘500. There was also free-to-air coverage in parts of continental Europe.
A year later, the feed was taken by Japan as well as Europe, but rain postponed the bulk of the 1967 race by a day, causing those countries to miss out on coverage due to a scheduling conflict on the satellite.
Luckily for the Australian ABC, there were no such issues with the 1968 race, which started on-time and ran interruption-free for its 200 laps.
The MCA feed travelled to Australia via the fourth Intelsat II unit, Pacific-2, and was received by the month-old Moree Earth Station dish in northern New South Wales, with the ABC then transmitting the signal around Australia.
Its four-hour length and its focus on a single event, allied to it being live, makes it an important broadcast in the history of sport on Australian television.
The pioneering broadcast, though, proved to be a one-off.
While the exact reason has been lost in time, the expense of the rights fee plus the satellite time led to it being called out in Federal Parliament amid a discussion over lifting the annual TV licence fee paid by viewers across the country.
“Surely the Government will not pretend that the spending of some $50,000 on enabling the Indianapolis 500 to be shown by way of satellite some time between midnight and dawn on a day in June last was well warranted, when hundreds of Australians who have any amount of talent cannot get a go because there is insufficient production of Australian programmes,” Senator Doug McClelland said.
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