Take this moment from the Neighborhood Excellence 400, run in June at the Monster Mile in Dover, Dela. Lap 273. A mild collision forces ace driver Jimmie Johnson into the pit. Watching the action from Fox’s pre race-show studio on the speedway infield, Jeff Hammond, a NASCAR crew chief turned TV analyst, notices a member of Johnson’s pit crew scrambling around the car with a rubber ring clenched in his teeth. When a car is “loose,” or wobbling through turns, a crew member will jam this ring into a wheel’s suspension to stiffen it. A vital detail? Not really, but NASCAR fans lap up this stuff like frothy Budweiser. Hammond radios producer Neil Goldberg, who’s stationed 500 yards away in the Fox truck. Goldberg’s job is to weave a race’s dozen-plus story lines into a broadcast unfolding live at 160mph. He has a sliver of a second to react and make multiple decisions. One: figure out which camera, out of four on pit row, caught the detail. Two: have the replay booth cue up the footage. Three: get the graphics team to pull up a pretaped animation that demonstrates how the rubber ring works. Four: alert Fox’s three-man announcing crew, led by NASCAR legend Darrell (D.W.) Waltrip, that Hammond is about to bust into their call with spot analysis. Five: toss all the components over to the guy next to him, director Artie Kempner. Now all Kempner has to do is find 25 seconds of TV time–a full lap of live racing–to slot in each component and pray that nothing exciting happens–a crash, a crucial pass–in the interim. It works. Everyone exhales. Then it’s back to racing.
A bunch of cars going around in circles for four hours may not sound like the toughest gig in televised sports, but it is, by a country mile. Other than golf, no sport is more sprawling, more packed with competitors than auto racing–and golfers move a bit slower than stock cars. Covering a race, says Goldberg, “is like landing 30 planes on the same runway all at once.” Team sports like football and basketball have a back-and-forth flow, but a NASCAR race can go haywire anywhere, at any moment. Which is why Kempner, 47, and Goldberg, 48, stash a camera wherever they can, including up to 12 mounted on dashboards and bumpers for a driver’s-eye view. The sheer size of Fox’s weekly racing operation dwarfs everything on the sports calendar, including a certain Sunday football game. “Dover alone is bigger than the Super Bowl,” says Kempner, who’s also a top director for Fox’s NFL coverage. The production price tag for Dover, according to Kempner: $600,000. Covering the Super Bowl costs half as much. And it’s only once a year.
Fox gladly shells out all that dough because its NASCAR audience is large, growing and freakishly faithful. The network averaged 9.6 million viewers per race during the 2005 season, a new high for NASCAR during an era when ratings for all other major sports, including pro football, are in decline. During the waterlogged May 1 race in Talladega, Ala., Fox’s rain delay coverage–nothing but shots of cars covered by tarps and extended interviews with bored drivers–logged a higher rating than the NBA playoffs, the NFL draft and the final round of a PGA tournament. Such numbers helped propel NASCAR to an eight-year deal with Fox, ABC, ESPN and TNT that begins in 2007 and is worth a reported $4.48 billion–a 40 percent increase on the sport’s previous TV deal.
The face of Fox’s Emmy-winning NASCAR coverage is Waltrip, a magnetic star who kicks off each race with his patented country-boy caterwaul: “Boogity, boogity, boogity! Let’s go racing, boys!” Two hours before the engines rev in Dover, he’s in the broadcast booth sizing up the race. “I’ve won here a couple times,” he says, clipping his fingernails onto the booth’s carpeted floor. “But I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’s terribly in love with this joint.” The Monster Mile is essentially a giant concrete bowl, banked 24 degrees in the turns and nine degrees on the straightaways. “It’s a fast, fast, fast track,” says Kempner, who lives in nearby Wilmington and brought his three young sons to the race. “And because of the banking, you don’t see as much. If there’s a wreck, most of it will slide below camera level.”
Today’s race, though, is mostly clean. No pileups. With 100 laps to go, Kempner, who’s got the pale complexion of a guy who spends too many hours in a darkened truck, is in a rhythm, buzzing with energy and snapping his fingers every time he calls out a camera change. “Ready, one. [ Snap ] Go, one! Ready, Sigma. [ Snap ] Go, Sigma!” He cuts about every three seconds –4,500 snaps in a four-hour race. “When things are going good,” says Goldberg, “you can tell by the tone of our voices. It may seem like mayhem, but there’s a cadence to it. And when things are going bad, it gets really quiet–or really loud.”
Even on a good day, like this one, there are loud moments. During an update from a pit reporter about driver Clint Bowyer, Kempner cuts to a shot of Bowyer’s No. 7 car, but graphics is late flashing the driver’s standing. “Come on, just gimme the goddam position,” he says. “Get your s–t together, guys.” Kempner yanks off his baseball cap and looks down at one of his sons, who’s crouched beside him. “Earmuffs.” The kid obliges. “That was s—ty. Let’s not be fancy. Just put up the pertinent crap: where is he in the race right now ?” Seconds later, though, Kempner’s back in the flow. It’s been a gripping race. Nextel Cup points leader Jimmie Johnson began the day in 42nd position and has climbed all the way into the top 10. Matt Kenseth will end up taking the checkered flag with a dramatic pass on lap 397. And Kempner’s crew catches all the big stuff. “If there’s such a thing as survival of the fittest in this business,” he says, “it’s this job. This sport. Because it just happens too fast. If you screw up a few times, lose your edge, it’s probably time to go back to basketball.”
title: “The Nascar Network” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-27” author: “Jeremy More”
Take this moment from the Neighborhood Excellence 400, run in June at the Monster Mile in Dover, Delaware. Lap 273. A mild collision forces ace driver Jimmie Johnson into the pit. Watching the action from Fox’s pre-race-show studio on the speedway infield, Jeff Hammond, a NASCAR crew chief turned TV analyst, notices a member of Johnson’s pit crew scrambling around the car with a rubber ring clenched in his teeth. When a car is “loose,” or wobbling through turns, a crew member will jam this ring into a wheel’s suspension to stiffen it.
A vital detail? Not really, but NASCAR fans lap up this stuff like frothy Budweiser. Hammond radios producer Neil Goldberg, who’s stationed 450 meters away in the Fox truck. Goldberg, who left Fox for rival ESPN prior to publication, is tasked with weaving a race’s dozen-plus story lines into a broadcast unfolding live at 260kph. He has a sliver of a second to react and make multiple decisions. One: figure out which camera, out of four on pit row, caught the detail. Two: have the replay booth cue up the footage. Three: get the graphics team to pull up a pretaped animation that demonstrates how the rubber ring works. Four: alert Fox’s three-man announcing crew, led by NASCAR legend Darrell (D.W.) Waltrip, that Hammond is about to bust into their call with spot analysis. Five: toss all the components over to the guy next to him, director Artie Kempner. Now all Kempner has to do is find 25 seconds of TV time–a full lap of live racing–to slot in each component and pray that nothing exciting happens–a crash, a crucial pass–in the interim. It works. Everyone exhales. Then it’s back to racing.
A bunch of cars going around in circles for four hours may not sound like the toughest gig in televised sports, but it is, by a country mile. Other than golf, no sport is more sprawling, more packed with competitors, than auto racing–and golfers move a bit slower than stock cars. Covering a race, says Goldberg, “is like landing 30 planes on the same runway all at once.” Team sports like football and basketball have a back-and-forth flow, but a NASCAR race can go haywire anywhere, at any moment. Which is why Kempner, 47, and Goldberg, 48, stash a camera wherever they can, including up to 12 mounted on dashboards and bumpers for a driver’s-eye view. The sheer size of Fox’s weekly racing operation dwarfs everything on the sports calendar, including a certain Sunday football game. “Dover alone is bigger than the Super Bowl,” says Kempner, who’s also a top director for Fox’s NFL coverage. The production price tag for Dover, according to Kempner: $600,000. Covering the Super Bowl costs half as much. And it’s only once a year.
Fox gladly shells out all that dough because its NASCAR audience is large, growing and freakishly faithful. The network averaged 9.6 million viewers per race during the 2005 season, a new high for NASCAR during an era when U.S. ratings for all other major sports, including pro football, are in decline. During the waterlogged May 1 race in Talladega, Alabama, Fox’s rain-delay coverage–nothing but shots of cars covered by tarps and extended interviews with bored drivers–logged a higher rating than the NBA playoffs, the NFL draft and the final round of a PGA tournament. Such numbers helped propel NASCAR to an eight-year deal with Fox, ABC, ESPN and TNT that begins in 2007 and is worth a reported $4.48 billion–a 40 percent increase on the sport’s previous TV deal.
The face of Fox’s Emmy-winning NASCAR coverage is Waltrip, a magnetic star who kicks off each race with his patented country-boy caterwaul: “Boogity, boogity, boogity! Let’s go racing, boys!” Two hours before the engines rev in Dover, he’s in the broadcast booth sizing up the race. “I’ve won here a couple times,” he says, clipping his fingernails onto the booth’s carpeted floor. “But I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’s terribly in love with this joint.” The Monster Mile is essentially a giant concrete bowl, banked 24 degrees in the turns and nine degrees on the straightaways. “It’s a fast, fast, fast track,” says Kempner, who lives in nearby Wilmington and brought his three young sons to the race. “And because of the banking, you don’t see as much. If there’s a wreck, most of it will slide below camera level.”
Today’s race, though, is mostly clean. No pileups. With 100 laps to go, Kempner, who’s got the pale complexion of a guy who spends too many hours in a darkened truck, is in a rhythm, buzzing with energy and snapping his fingers every time he calls out a camera change. “Ready, one. [ Snap ] Go, one! Ready, Sigma. [ Snap ] Go, Sigma!” He cuts about every three seconds–4,500 snaps in a four-hour race. “When things are going good,” says Goldberg, “you can tell by the tone of our voices. It may seem like mayhem, but there’s a cadence to it. And when things are going bad, it gets really quiet–or really loud.”
Even on a good day, like this one, there are loud moments. During an update from a pit reporter about driver Clint Bowyer, Kempner cuts to a shot of Bowyer’s No. 7 car, but graphics is late flashing the driver’s standing. “Come on, just gimme the goddam position,” he says. “Get your s–t together, guys.” Kempner yanks off his baseball cap and looks down at one of his sons, who’s crouched beside him. “Earmuffs.” The kid obliges. “That was s—ty. Let’s not be fancy. Just put up the pertinent crap: where is he in the race right now ?”
Seconds later, though, Kempner’s back in the flow. It’s been a gripping race. Nextel Cup points leader Jimmie Johnson began the day in 42nd position and has climbed into the top 10. Matt Kenseth will end up taking the checkered flag with a dramatic pass on lap 397. And Kempner’s crew catches all the big stuff. “If there’s such a thing as survival of the fittest in this business,” he says, “it’s this job. This sport. Because it just happens too fast. If you lose your edge, it’s probably time to go back to basketball.”
