Racing Pit-Lane Reporter Amanda Busick Is Walking Proof That Pressure Makes Diamonds

Turn on many NHRA, IMSA, and NASCAR events—including the Craftsman Truck Series—and more, and there’s a great chance you’ll see Amanda Busick at work. She’s the voice you hear from pit lane, the first on-site when something notable happens, and the person bringing order and explanation when things change quicker than the blink of an eye.

As a freelance broadcast reporter, Busick works with Fox Sports and NBC, as well as this publication from time to time. “My job is to react to chaos, and somehow I’m great at it,” Busick said. “I don’t know what that says about me.”

Whether or not that last bit was meant in jest, we think we know what it says about Busick: She’s the one to call when you need someone cool, calm, and collected to tell everyone else about the race.

Always Meant to Be

Growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, Busick had always been “a total ham.” Since the beginning, she’s loved performing and watching the local morning news. And despite not majoring in journalism in college, she never lost her love for the profession. She combined her obsession with college basketball with a summer internship at the sports department of the very same local news channel she watched as a little girl.

“That was where I cut my teeth, going to and from the local game, bringing back tape, cutting highlights, and creating stories,” Busick said.

But then the recession hit, and with it went the job market. Busick found an unpaid internship with a sports agent in New York City that represented broadcasters. She moved there and supported herself for the next two and a half years by working at a steakhouse at night and spending her days trying to find and make any connection she could to a job in sports.

Busick finally took a job as a production assistant in Chicago and did some high school football work for Time Warner Cable back home in North Carolina. A family issue brought her to a tiny Boston apartment, with Busick taking a break from media to sell Italian sausage instead.

<em>Tony Stewart is interviewed by Fox Sports reporter Amanda Busick during the NHRA Nevada Nationals on October 28, 2022, at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Las Vegas, Nevada. Image credit: Photo by Jeff Speer/LVMS/Icon Sportswire via</em><a rel=

But she didn’t squander the time. “I grew my portfolio by a million pounds in eight months,” she said. When she heard about NHRA drag racing leaving ESPN for Fox, starting an internal production team, and searching for a digital host, she was ready. It was a second chance at living her dream.

“I basically auditioned myself,” Busick said. “I flew myself down to Dallas. I hired an old editor I worked with to put together two pieces for me I could present to the league.” One segment was on the 30th anniversary of Texas Motorplex; the other was about drivers in Texas.

Within one weekend, the NHRA invited her to host the red carpet at its awards show in Los Angeles. Less than two months later, it offered her the reporting job.

Looking back, “I was blind to the idea that I could even get into motorsports,” Busick said, even though she’d grown up with ball sports and racing in tandem and enjoyed it all. From the outside, motorsports can appear very homogenous, full of people that come from the same background. “It was pretty intimidating,” Busick said. “The opportunity to get into that world? Yeah, I’ll always look at that inflection point of my career as finding the place I was always supposed to be.”

Survival of the Fittest

That was all a little more than 10 years ago. Today, Busick has branched out beyond drag racing. You can find her reporting from the pit lane at Formula E, SRO GT events, for Ferrari, and with NASCAR. Each opportunity was hard-fought and hard-won—because sometimes what can go wrong will go wrong.

For a Formula 1 announcement in Las Vegas a few years ago, Busick said she suffered from “a broadcaster’s worst nightmare.”

She explained: “It was a timed, 30-minute show cast live to a stream, but they didn’t take the stream feed out of my headset. I was getting [my own voice] back to me from the stream on a one-second delay. We were on the rooftop of the Cosmo with the entire Strip in bright red for F1. We’re live to a global audience. There was literally nothing I could do.

<em>Sports reporter Amanda Busick, Liberty Media president and CEO Greg Maffei, and Formula One Group president and CEO Stefano Domenicali speak during the Formula 1 Las Vegas race’s 2023 announcement at the Boulevard Pool at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas on March 30, 2022. Image credit: Ethan Miller – Formula 1/Formula 1 via</em><a rel=

“I’ve talked about this to other broadcasters,” Busick continued, “and they’re like, ‘Oh no, I would have walked off stage.’” But Busick didn’t. She stayed and finished the job. “I’m so proud I did it, but that show will never feel good to me.”

Pressure makes diamonds, however, and it showed Busick something about herself. “If that happened at any point prior in my career, there’s no way I would have been OK,” she said. “It was almost like a test. Like, you ready, girl? Because here, it’s coming. Sometimes it’s survival of the fittest.”

From the way Busick describes her mindset going into a broadcast, it sounds almost like a meditative state. Even though she might be feeling a hundred different emotions inside, her presentation outside is always smooth and engaging. “It’s almost like an out-of-body experience for me,” she said. “It’s like I can see what the audience is feeling. If no one knows an issue or problem is happening, I’ve done my job.”

<em>Brittany Force, NHRA Top Fuel Dragster driver, reacts as she’s interviewed by Fox Sports reporter Amanda Busick after winning at the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals on April 3, 2022, at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Image credit: Jeff Speer/LVMS/Icon Sportswire via</em><a rel=

Zoom out a bit, and every job presents another chance to grow. “What feels like success now is that I’m getting opportunities based on the credence and credibility of the body of work I have,” Busick said. “And coming as a recommendation from people I’ve worked with—bosses, co-workers—I’m presented as someone that’s dependable and can handle the task. Right now, if I got a call to cover [racing at] Bathurst [in Australia], I feel confident in my ability to prep, know what the storylines are, figure out the rules and regulations, and slot myself into that role based on the last 10 years of skill I’ve built up. There’s a lot of growth in challenge.”

Indeed, most recently she was added to this year’s Rolex 24 at Daytona sports car coverage for NBC. “Working the Rolex [24] was almost like an audition for me,” she said. “It was the first time a new audience and a new network have seen what I’m capable of.”

Say Yes to Everything

Busick certainly loves facing new experiences and challenges and having the ability to work with different and diverse people. Standing in pit lane still makes her laugh in disbelief. How does she keep maintaining her wins? By saying yes to everything and knowing no job is too small.

“There are things I’ve done that have led to other things,” she said. “There is a lot of reward to pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. A lot of times I didn’t get the on-air role. But I got a production support role that got me on set, got me around. I’ve taken trash out of TV trucks, picked up talent from the airport, gone to Staples and picked up print work. But you’re there, seeing it, existing in it, and living it.”

It’s not all without sacrifice, of course. “There’s nothing normal about this life,” Busick said. “You leave on a Thursday, home on a Sunday. Inevitably you miss your friends’ weddings, baby showers, firstborn’s first birthday.” That said, she’s working on better time management to protect herself from things like burnout. But despite the industry initially seeming intimidating to a newcomer, Busick now feels her “road family” is an extension of her real family.

<em>Tony Stewart picks up and hugs Fox Sports reporter Amanda Busick after winning his class at the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals Camping World Drag Racing Series on April 16, 2023, at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Image credit: Jeff Speer/Icon Sportswire via</em><a rel=

“I tell my friends jokingly we’re the modern-day carnies,” she said. “We’re carnival workers that travel across the country, set up shop, put on a show, load the trains up, put the animals in the car, and head to the next one.”

But “it never leaves me that I am living my dream,” she said. “I’m so thankful for [my] mentors, people that hired me to be runners on those shows, that I would take the trash out or pick talent up, and I would travel across the country, pay my own way just to be there. Where I’m at now is the summary of all of it added together.”

To her 22-year-old self, working multiple jobs to make ends meet and chasing a dream, and to others looking to follow in her path, Busick said: “Trust the process, trust the journey, trust the commitment, trust yourself. It’s not always gonna be what you think. But it can be better.”