It never makes air, and it’s rarely dramatic enough to build a broadcast segment around, since it’s not the question viewers hear Kelli Stavast ask on camera.
But before she gets to whatever she’s actually going to ask on the record, there’s one thing she needs an honest read on first: how does this person feel right now?
The Question Behind the Questions
Stavast has described her job in blunt, practical terms. A driver’s top-10 finishes at a given track can be found with a quick search.
What they can’t find is whether that driver was up all night with a newborn, whether they’re not feeling well, or whether they quietly reworked a setup that wasn’t working the day before. Getting at any of that starts with the same read: assessing how someone is doing before deciding what to ask them next.
That’s not the same as literally asking “how do you feel” on camera, which is often a lazy, throwaway line in sports broadcasting precisely because it invites a throwaway answer. Stavast’s version happens earlier and off camera, in the walk-up to an interview, in the tone of a driver’s one-word response to a crew member, in whether someone’s making eye contact or staring at the car. The question is internal. The answer shapes everything that follows.
Learning to Read People She Didn’t Know Yet
The skill wasn’t something Stavast had already arrived at NBC with. Early in her career, before search engines and social media made background research easy, she said there simply wasn’t a plethora of information available on the people she was covering.
No Instagram page had been built yet for most of the people she was covering, no quick way to find out how someone was doing that morning. She had to walk up to strangers, cold, and figure out in real time what she needed to ask them and how they were likely to respond.
That’s a different kind of pressure from the modern version of the job, but the underlying task hasn’t changed. She’s described the result as becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, a phrase she’s used to describe years of moving between racing series every season or two, having to reintroduce herself and rebuild that read from scratch each time she moved somewhere new. The reading of a stranger’s state, done quickly and with little to go on, was the actual training. Everything that came later, including reading a driver’s mood in the thirty seconds before a green flag, drew on reps built under conditions with far less information available than she has now.
Why the Read Matters More Than the Answer
There’s real substance behind treating a competitor’s emotional state as usable information rather than small talk. Researchers studying NBA pre-game interviews have found that the language players use beforehand carries a predictive signal about how they’ll perform, above and beyond what is captured by their statistical track record. The theory underneath that finding, drawn from sports psychology, holds that athletes each have an individual zone of optimal emotional intensity, and that deviating from it in either direction, too flat or too keyed up, shows up in the way they talk before it shows up on the scoreboard.
Stavast isn’t running a research study on pit road, but the instinct is the same one. A driver who seems distracted, short, or unusually calm is telling her something worth knowing before the green flag drops, whether or not that shows up in an answer she can use on air. Reading that state accurately is what lets her decide, in the few minutes she has, whether to ask about the setup change, the track history, or nothing at all beyond a quick word of encouragement.
What Google Can’t Answer
The specific, practical value of the question is that it produces information nobody else has access to. Stavast has said this plainly: her job is to find out what the viewers can’t.
Anyone can look up how many top-10 finishes a driver has at a track. Nobody outside the garage can know that the same driver didn’t sleep because of a newborn at home, or that yesterday’s changes to the car left them unsure what to expect once they’re back in it.
Getting to that kind of material requires more than showing up with a list of questions about lap times. It requires knowing, in the moment, whether the person in front of her can be talked to honestly about any of it, and adjusting the actual interview accordingly. The emotional read functions as reporting in its own right, not a warm-up act before the real work starts.
The Same Question, Asked Differently
The shape of the question doesn’t change much from one assignment to another, even though who’s answering it does. On pit road, she’s reading a driver in the minutes before a race, working from a scanner feed, three people talking in her ear, and whatever she picked up from the crew that morning. At the Olympics, she’s reading an athlete for whom this competition may represent years of preparation compressed into a few seconds, someone who, win or lose, is about to hand her one of the most exposed moments of their life.
At a conformation dog show, there’s no athlete to read at all, at least not one who can answer back. There, the question redirects to a handler or a breeder: how does the dog seem today, and how does that compare to yesterday? The subject changes each time. The underlying question, some version of what’s the emotional or physical state of the thing I’m about to cover, stays fixed across every assignment she’s given.
The same instinct shows up away from broadcasting entirely. When Stavast took over as event chair for a St. Jude fundraiser in Las Vegas after years of the event falling short of its million-dollar goal, sweeping changes were made to the format, changes people were initially skeptical and nervous about. Getting a room full of donors, volunteers, and sponsors to buy into an overhaul required the same kind of read she’d built on pit road: gauging how people were actually feeling about the changes before deciding how hard to push and where to compromise. The event raised just shy of $1.1 million the following year, the first time it cleared the million-dollar mark. The question behind that result traced back to the same instinct she’d relied on for years on pit road: reading the room accurately before deciding what to do with it.
The Discipline of Asking Quietly
None of this works if it’s obvious. A driver who feels like he’s being diagnosed rather than talked to will shut down exactly the way anyone would. Stavast’s approach depends on the read happening quietly, folded into ordinary conversation rather than announced as an assessment. She’s described race-day prep as running from the night before straight through to the moments before a driver climbs into the car, and that entire window is also the window in which the read can happen without ever calling attention to itself.
That’s part of why the question doesn’t show up in any transcript of her broadcasts. It was never meant to. It happens in the walk from the truck to the car, in a driver’s tone answering a totally unrelated logistics question, in whether someone laughs at something that would normally get a laugh. By the time the camera is rolling, Stavast already has her answer. What airs is built on top of it, not instead of it.
Why It’s the Right Question to Lead With
It would be easy to assume the most important question in an interview is the one that ends up in the broadcast, the one with the sharpest angle or the most quotable answer. Stavast’s career suggests otherwise. The question that actually shapes the interview is the one asked first and never spoken aloud: what state is this person in right now, and what does that tell me about what I can reasonably ask them?
Get that wrong, and even a well-researched question lands flat, or worse, comes across as tone-deaf to someone who just had the worst day of their career. Get it right, and the rest of the interview follows from information nobody else in the building has. That instinct is portable in a way a rehearsed list of questions never is. It traveled from a driver’s tone in the tunnel before a race to a diver’s face in the seconds after a bad dive to a room full of donors deciding whether to trust a new format for a charity gala. The setting kept changing. The read stayed the same.
That’s the actual value of the question Stavast asks before every single one. It’s not designed to make air. It’s designed to make everything that does.
