IndyCar analyst Paul Tracy leaves NBC Sports broadcast after contract not renewed

Paul Tracy, the colorful and sometimes controversial member of the three-man IndyCar broadcast team for NBC Sports, will not return to his role for 2022, he announced on his public Instagram page Wednesday morning.

"Life is full of change," he wrote. "When I was a race driver I never thought in a million years I would be a TV commentator. It's been eight great years with some great friends like (Townsend Bell), (Leigh Diffey), Kevin Lee and (Kelli Stavast).

"But we have decided to move on and go in different directions in racing. Thank you (to the IndyCar on NBC team) for the time and learning experience. To all my fans, don't worry. I have lots on my immediate future to keep you entertained with driving and future TV stuff."

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According to a statement provided by an NBC Sports spokesperson Wednesday, Tracy's contract was not renewed beyond the 2021 season. He had previously signed a new deal in November of 2020 to remain with the team.

"My agent called them and had some discussions, and it just came down to, really, we couldn't come to an agreement on things," Tracy told IndyStar on Wednesday. "It's not really a secret they weren't keen on (Tracy racing in) SRX (earlier this year)."

Tracy looking to start racing more

Tracy quickly became a driving force in Tony Stewart and Ray Evernham's six-race stock car series held in June and July on CBS Sports, both for his typical aggressive driving style, as well as his provocative banter in and out of the car. Though plans haven't been announced for SRX's second go-around, Tracy said, "I know they want me back."

After nearly a decade out of the cockpit, Tracy said his six weekends running short tracks largely throughout the Midwest this summer had reinvigorated a love for his old driving days. The legendary Canadian racer, who turns 53 next week, became increasingly adamant to find ways to fit more of it into his schedule in the upcoming year.

In the spring, NBC Sports executives suddenly balked at Tracy's SRX involvement. Tracy was announced as one of the series' drivers in July 2020, and NBC executives signed him to a one-year deal in November of that year. At the time, they left the impression that despite the Saturday night SRX races -- including three that fell over IndyCar race weekends -- his role would remain the same for the 2021 broadcasts. Tracy said at the time that he'd worked out travel arrangements that would be seamless for all but the Toronto street race, which ended up being canceled anyway.

Just weeks before the start of the 2021 IndyCar season, Tracy was told NBC was embracing a new philosophy of "less is more" that would have him calling just seven races over the originally-planned 17-race calendar. Eventually, the network walked back its hard stance, and Tracy went on to call 12 of the season's 16 races, missing only the four (two in Detroit, Road America and Mid-Ohio) where he was also racing in SRX that weekend.

But finishing seventh in points with a pair of fifth-place finishes, Tracy decided this fall that instead of scaling back his schedule to cater to the wishes of NBC, he wanted to find a way to do more.

"I've put a lot of racing opportunities in sportscars, stock cars and even racing gentlemen drivers on hold (since he joined NBC in 2014) because I was fully committed to NBC," Tracy told IndyStar. "There's a lot of things I've missed out on. I missed driving at the beginning, and then as time went on, that had kind of faded. But when I got back in the car this year, I realized I missed it as much as I ever had, and I wanted to continue to do it as much as I can before it's too late and I'm too old.

"With NBC, we couldn't work out the schedules."

Among other opportunities, Tracy said he's working through an appeals process to try to get his driver rating lowered from gold to silver -- "Come on, I'm (almost) 53 years old," he said -- which would allow him to accept an offer to join an LMP3 program in January's 24 Hours of Daytona for the first time in a decade.

"I've got an (expletive) ton of stuff I want to do, but a lot of it gets neglected because I'm traveling to go to races," he said. "I just like to drive. I'm not trying to make another career out of it. I just like driving."

Much of that longing to get back in the cockpit, he said, stems from the fact he didn't expect to make an eight-year run in the booth when he stepped in for a limited role in 2014. Tracy made his debut alongside Bell and Diffey at Long Beach that season and took on a limited role that year as former IndyCar analyst Wally Dallenbach Jr. was stepping back to focus more time and energy on his daughter's stock car racing career.

"I've learned a ton about TV. When I started out, I was purely a driver talking about racing, but I understand now how TV works a lot better than I did," he said. "But it's really about the people you work with. I'm going to miss the dinners away from the track, laughing and joking around and driving in cars together. That's the fun part of the job."

What's next for NBC?

NBC confirmed that Diffey, the lead announcer, as well as Bell, who created a famous level of live banter with Tracy over the years, will return to the IndyCar broadcast booth in 2022, though the network declined to elaborate whether it plans to keep it at two people or are looking for Tracy's replacement. The news comes at a key inflection point in the network's history with IndyCar, as the series prepares for a record 14 network races in 2022 coming off a multi-year exclusive broadcast rights extension announced this past summer.

Notably, during his partial-season IndyCar run in 2020, James Hinchcliffe joined the NBC Sports IndyCar broadcast team as a pit reporter and has often said he'd enjoy a broadcast role of some sort once his racing days are behind him. Though his chances to return to the sport full-time in 2022 remain slim, his name has often been brought up in discussions with paddock sources as a potential Indy 500-only driver for this coming May. It's also understood the Canadian IndyCar veteran is looking at potential racing opportunities in the IMSA paddock as well.

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.