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BRUCE LOWITTThe circuit's blanket TV deal has brought new fans and technology.
DARLINGTON, S.C. - NASCAR fans who couldn't get to Daytona International Speedway for the July 4 running of the Firecracker 250 in 1961 could still watch it on television.
Bits and pieces of it, anyway ... in black and white ... on ABC's Wide World of Sports ... five days after the race. Forty-two years later, it's hard to imagine a sport televised with as much intimacy, immediacy and intensity.
And, relatively new to NASCAR, consistency. Before 2001, NASCAR had fragmented television coverage with each track cutting its own deal. From week to week, viewers bounced around the dial to find the race and the varying announcing crews that handled broadcasts.
But NASCAR, reaching for the big television deal that would validate it as a big-time sport, changed all that with a consolidated six-year, $2.4-billion deal with Fox, FX, NBC and TNT to broadcast all 36 Winston Cup points races.
"In any given year we were on six or seven different networks," said Paul Brooks, NASCAR vice president of broadcasting. "One week we'd be on ESPN, the next week we'd be on TNN, then ABC, then ESPN2, CBS the following week. ... We really didn't have organized programming, production, following story lines from one week to the next."
NASCAR grew through the 1990s and into the new century by shedding some of its old traditions. Television is a big part of that, helping it reach for new markets and fueling a hunger for more. It's television that thirsts for more prime-time races, for marquee races in major markets and for more advertising dollars from companies such as Nextel, new sponsor of NASCAR's top series.
In 2000, NASCAR came up with the idea of a split television season. Fox (14 races) and FX (two) televises the first half, before Fox turns its attention to the NFL. Then NBC, the only broadcast network with no NFL coverage, broadcasts 13 races and TNT seven the rest of the year. Fox and NBC alternate on the Daytona 500 and Pepsi 400.
And Winston Cup fans get technology and continuity.
Fox and NBC immediately upgraded the quality of coverage, said Neal Pilson, former president of CBS Sports, now a television consultant with NASCAR and other sports. "They got into GPS-positioned digital information regarding performance of cars and drivers. There's a lot of new graphical information."
We sit beside drivers, listening to them talk to pit crews while roaring into a turn at 200 mph. We see and hear what they do when cars are bumper-to-bumper - and when they crash.
The cutting-edge coverage leaves most other sports in NASCAR's dust, so to speak. Its TV ratings are second only to the NFL's, and its $400-million-a-year contract virtually matches Major League Baseball's six-year, $2.5-billion ($416-million a year) deal.
"For many years auto racing was denigrated, looked down upon by the sporting public in this country as a bunch of hot-rodders trying to kill themselves," said Chris Economaki, editor and publisher emeritus of National Speed Sport News and a respected racing analyst who broadcast that first tape-delayed NASCAR race. "Somehow, some way, that view changed and when that happened everything started to roll."
The view changed with CBS's live telecast of the 1979 Daytona 500. With a blizzard blanketing the East, 15-million viewers saw not only Richard Petty's victory but a last-lap crash involving leaders Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough ... and the two punching each other in the infield ... and Bobby Allison stopping to check on his kid brother and joining the fistfight. The NASCARing of America was about to begin.
After extraordinary growth in the 1990s, the consolidated TV coverage took NASCAR to a new level. Fox, with Mike Joy and analysts Darrell Waltrip and Larry McReynolds, leans toward entertainment and irreverence. NBC, with Allen Bestwick and analysts Benny Parsons and Wally Dallenbach, takes a more traditional news-and-analysis approach.
"Wally's kind of quiet compared with McReynolds," NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter said, "and Darrell's definitely more of a showman than Benny with that Boogity, boogity, boogity of his."
It is auto racing's version of John Madden's Boom! during NFL games. "It's just something I did at the beginning of one race and it caught on with the fans," Waltrip told the Nashville Tennessean. "It means "Hang on, here we go!' or something like that. ... Now, it's become like a ritual. If I don't do it, everybody's calling up and e-mailing: "Hey, what's going on?"'
If there's a drawback to sports on TV, it's commercials. Many NASCAR fans believe networks have piled them on to pay the rights fees of the new deal. But according to a motorsportsTV.com analysis of 31/2 years of NASCAR broadcasts there was an average of 14 minutes, 39 seconds of commercials per hour in 2000, the year before the $2.4-billion contract, and 14:47 this year through the Aug.3 Brickyard 400.
And for many the sophisticated developments in broadcast technology outweigh the roughly 24 percent of commercial time. Also, fans can (or soon will be able to):
- use cell phones to hear in-car audio of up to nine drivers,
- go online and decide which drivers they want to ride with on interactive digital cable,
- pick from as many as seven in-car points of view,
- keep pace with cars from aerial cameras going at maximum pit-road speed,
- receive text messages on cell phones, and, while traveling,
- tune into XM Satellite Radio, which delivers the same signal nationwide.
"The technology used today makes it so much better to watch it on TV than at the track," Economaki said. "You see so much more, hear more, know more, learn more that some people think, "Why go to the race and spend all that money?' I think the sport may be in getting into trouble because of the advancements in television, particularly now when ticket prices are escalating beyond belief."