NASCAR

Overview

A layered signage framework — five stakeholder interviews identified wayfinding as the top unmet need across NASCAR venues, compounded at sites like San Diego's Coronado Naval Base, where nearly all attendees are first-time NASCAR fans navigating an unfamiliar military installation. Noble designed a modular kit of portable and fixed digital screens, a content governance model, and a scheduling logic that shifts with the race clock — then piloted it at Watkins Glen before scaling to Coronado.

Approach:

• Conducted stakeholder interviews across NASCAR's Operations, Safety, Data, and Marketing teams to rank fan experience priorities
• Designed a five-layer framework — Vision & Goals, Venue Context, Hardware Kit of Parts, Content Architecture, and Playlist & Scheduling — that ladders every screen decision back to a measurable outcome
• Built a content hierarchy that protects navigation and emergency messaging above sponsor content on every screen, at every moment
• Piloted the system at Watkins Glen to validate CMS latency, content pacing, and staff workflows before deploying at scale for Coronado's first-ever race

Designing for a Venue Portfolio That Looks Nothing Alike

NASCAR's calendar spans permanent ovals, road courses, street circuits, and now first-ever temporary sites — each with a different fan journey and no shared standard for measuring it. Our response was xScore: a framework that scores how a venue Informs, Wayfinds, and Engages, producing a comparable baseline across venues as different as a military base and a decades-old superspeedway.

At Coronado, that meant designing for a fan who has never attended a race, reached via shuttle, security checkpoint, and pedestrian bridge — with egress consistently the lowest-rated moment in the fan journey across every NASCAR venue. Content shifts with the race clock: wayfinding dominates pre-race, live data and sponsor content take over dwell zones during the race, and navigation reclaims priority for egress.

Built to Evolve

Watkins Glen proved the framework in a familiar environment. Coronado deployed it at scale, for an audience and a venue with no prior data to build from. Phoenix and Miami follow next, each adding to a season-long data model that compounds — crowd flow, dwell time, CMS performance, and post-event scores feeding forward into how the next venue is configured before its gates open.

Noble continues to support NASCAR as the framework extends across the calendar, turning each race weekend into a faster feedback loop than a season-end survey ever could.