NASCAR’s post-season is going back to The Chase. The 16 drivers who made it to the revamped ten-race version of NASCAR’s playoffs were officially settled last weekend, after Ryan Preece won the first NASCAR Series Cup race of his career at Daytona.

But five weeks prior to that, director Ira Rosensweig and his Wavemaker Creative were shooting multiple spots with 20 NASCAR drivers – never all together, just one or two at a time as they were available, with each of them added in layers to what would become USA Sports’ final campaign for The Chase: USA Sports Racing School, taught by podcaster and comedian Theo Von.

“It was a three-day shoot in North Carolina. It looks really simple but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The whole thing was a huge logistics puzzle,” said Rosensweig. “All of the wide shots are in fact visual effects – we had to keep lining up the exact same camera positions over the course of three days, resulting in VFX composites that had up to 14 layers.”

Add in that Von also was not available at the same time as any of the drivers, so his part as Professor Chase was shot separately in front of an entirely different audience. 

“A lot of times you shoot promos with people and they aren’t thrilled to be doing it. Theo was so game and so into it – he kept wanting to push to be funnier,” Rosensweig said. “He’s incredible at improv so 50% of the extended cut is improv.”

While Von’s improv gave Rosensweig and his team plenty of comedy to work with, it also made a difficult job even harder, because now the team had to figure out on the fly how to add in driver reactions to that improv. 

“We shot some of the drivers before we shot Theo and then we shot more drivers. Depending on what Theo did, we had to change what we were doing with the drivers,” Rosensweig said.

Wavemaker also had to shoot the two-and-a-half minute anthem spot and the nine additional :30 campaign spots with Von over the short four hours that it had him.  

The first spot broke over the weekend on USA and NBC, as well as on relevant digital and social platforms. As each week of racing unfolds, another spot will roll out, making it ten unique spots in all.  

The Chase begins September 6 on USA Network, with the Cook Out Southern 500 live from Darlington Raceway in Darlington, South Carolina. The season's champion  race takes place November 8 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.