Report: Mike Joy returning to FOX NASCAR TV booth in 2025

Mike Joy intends to once again lead the NASCAR on FOX broadcast booth in 2025, according to Adam Stern of Sports Business Journal.

Joy, whose contract with FOX is said to be up after this year, wrote in a text message to Stern, “Looking forward to next year.” FOX has not yet publicly announced its broadcast booth for the 2025 Cup Series season.

Joy, 74, has been NASCAR’s lead play-by-play announcer on FOX since the network began airing races in 2001. His future in the booth, however, appeared to be uncertain after NASCAR announced $7.7 billion in media rights deals with FOX Sports, NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon for 2025-2031. As a result of the new media rights deals, FOX will carry just 14 races, including The Clash and the All-Star Race.

“Fox Sports, part of the publicly traded Fox Corp., is making several changes to its coverage for next year as the new seven-year media cycle through 2031 begins,” Stern wrote.

Mike Joy finishing up 24th season in FOX broadcast booth

Apparently, those changes won’t include moving on from Joy, who has covered the sport since 1977 and called his 45th Daytona 500 this past February.

“It’s a technical sport and you don’t get to see the range of emotions in a driver that you do in a baseball pitcher or a quarterback or an athlete in other sports as they compete,” Joy said last year. “Secondly, in other sports, there’s only one ball in play at a time. In NASCAR there’s 40 of them and the next storyline you need to flush out can come from any driver anywhere in the pack at any time.

“That makes our job way, way more difficult to prepare for and difficult to anticipate as the event is going on, compared to traditional stick-and-ball sports.”

Joy, along with broadcast booth partners Clint Bowyer and Kevin Harvick, will call their final race of the season in this Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway. NBC Sports will finish out airing the remaining 20 races on the schedule.