RICHMOND
It is lap 230 of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series race at Richmond International Raceway, and something big just went down. Pillars of smoke are rising above Turn 3. There’s gasoline and a mess of twisted metal all over the track. A red flag waves, and everyone stops.
The clear signs of trouble on the track give television producers from Fox, sitting inside a broadcast truck nearly a half-mile away, a chance to shine — an opportunity they relish. They’re reviewing replays. They’re playing back race communications between drivers and teammates. They’re ordering reporters and cameramen to race to the scene.
Within seconds, viewers learn that Patrick Carpentier spun out, triggering a crash that took out a dozen cars. The more than 100,000 fans at Richmond probably won’t find out the details until they get home.
“These are our most important moments,” says Barry Landis, who is producing the race broadcast for Fox. “We know exactly what we’ve got to do. There’s almost an unwritten rule that you put pedal to the metal, and ironically there’s hardly any chatter from us at all.”
The broadcast of a live NASCAR race is a gargantuan undertaking. No sport requires a broadcast compound as large. No sport requires more people, more investment or more preparation. And it is big moments like this that allow broadcasters like Fox to show off their goods — and they help justify the eye-popping investment made by networks to televise NASCAR events.
Fox, ESPN, TNT and Speed Channel collectively will pay nearly $5 billion through 2014 to show NASCAR’s Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Craftsman Truck Series events. DirecTV, meanwhile, last year launched a service that offers four channels, each focused on one high-profile driver throughout a race. All of these companies are investing hundreds of millions more on equipment to deliver quality broadcasts.
NASCAR events are the most complex sports broadcasts on television — and they take place every week from February to November.
“It’s the largest production we do on a regular basis here,” says Rich Feinberg, vice president of motorsports for ESPN, which broadcasts all Nationwide Series races and the second half of the Sprint Cup series. “We compare it to a Super Bowl-type production. And we do it every week.”
Starting up
It is Wednesday morning, a day before any cars take to the track, and in the shadow of the raceway’s grandstand there is a calm buzz of activity.
Nearly four-dozen broadcast trailers, still dusty from the previous day’s trip up from Talladega, Ala., are being powered up and tested. Operations staff members for ESPN and Fox are meeting in massive Featherlite trailers with sliding glass doors, conference tables and a reach-for-your sweater air conditioner.
In the back corner of one trailer, Paul Niesen, a field operations manager with NASCAR Media Group, pores over a diagram of the Richmond compound. There’s a slot for each truck, a space for the catering tent and an area to park the scores of golf carts that move everyone around.
“Anytime you take 500 or 600 people and camp them into an area and put them on the road for 42 weeks a year, there’s conflict,” Niesen says. “I’ve done countless Super Bowls and the Masters … the World Series. I’ve done them all multiple times. And I can tell you, this is a booger.”
Consider that the broadcast compound at a typical NASCAR weekend holds at least 20 trailers and more than 110,000 feet of fiber-optic cable, enough to circle Richmond’s track about 28 times. On modern tracks, setting up isn’t too difficult. But older tracks like Richmond, Bristol and Martinsville weren’t built with television in mind.
And problems do arise. In September at Auto Club Speedway in California, crews fought to keep trucks cool as temperatures rose above 110 degrees. Rain at the same track during NASCAR’s second week this February pushed racing back a day, cutting into preparation for the following weekend in Las Vegas. Also this year, a delivery of bad gasoline left ESPN struggling to keep the broadcast of the Nationwide race in Mexico City on the air.
The stress of ensuring race broadcasts go off without a hitch is exacerbated by the reality that everything must be taken down and transported to another raceway, usually within 48 hours.
’The most difficult’
Since the new television contract began last year with NASCAR, Fox and ESPN have introduced a flurry of technological advancements designed to enhance broadcasts.
All races are now shown in high-definition, including all shots from tiny cameras located in and outside the cars. Fox does in-race reports from a mobile studio known as the “Hollywood Hotel,” which features a model car that allows for technical analysis from Jeff Hammond. ESPN has a similar studio and a separate “pit studio” for the prerace show. The pit studio weighs 78,000 pounds; anything heavier than 80,000 pounds isn’t permitted on the highways.
Meanwhile, there are several trucks devoted to extracting sound clips from the audio between drivers and crew chiefs.
“You can hear the emotion of a driver saying, ’Oh, man, I’m so sorry I wrecked,’ ” ESPN coordinating producer Jill Frederickson says. “That’s stuff you just don’t get from other sports.”
Some of the most high-tech additions come from Sportvision, a Mountain View, Calif., company that installs GPS tracking devices in all competing cars. The devices can pinpoint the location of a car up to five times a second, allowing broadcasters to create special graphics that display a driver’s speed and spot on the racetrack.
But in many ways, the complexity of putting together a NASCAR broadcast is the direct result of the complexity of the sport itself. Aside from the speed of the action, most races contain more than 40 competitors, and each track has unique characteristics.
“This is by far the most difficult sport to broadcast because there are so many story lines going on at one time,” says Mike Joy, Fox’s lead NASCAR announcer. “When you’re doing a football game, on a play from scrimmage there’s only three things that can possibly happen: somebody passes the ball, somebody runs the ball or somebody drops the ball. That’s it. Here, it’s all reactive.”
The action inside the broadcast truck can often be nearly as electric as that on the track.
Inside ESPN’s truck during Friday’s Nationwide Series race, the din of the cars is replaced by the noise of as many as a dozen voices, from announcers and the director to pit producers, replay producers and audio from inside the cars. And with no possible way to shoot the race from a single vantage point, ESPN must rely on the dozens of cameras stationed at every turn of the racetrack; the truck is equipped with an entire wall of more than 100 monitors showing every conceivable view.
On this night, there’s an extra wrinkle: ESPN2, which normally televises Nationwide Series races, is contractually obligated to show Game 6 of the NBA playoff series between the Washington Wizards and Cleveland Cavaliers. This forces the network to move the race to ESPN Classic and Speed Network, returning to ESPN2 only when the basketball game ends.
Early in the race, Casey Kahne and Carl Edwards engage in a tense battle for the lead. It’s great racing, but the ESPN producers are getting nervous because there have been no caution flags, thus no obvious places to fit in commercial breaks. When they finally break, producers hope they don’t miss anything significant.
At lap 66, cars begin coming in for pit stops. A spotter on the track claims he saw a lug nut drop off a car. Producers find the replay shot, but there’s a NASCAR official in the way.
At lap 97, producer Jamie Shiftan asks for an aerial shot of the track and then sends it to reporter Tim Brewer, who’s inside ESPN’s “Tech Center” trailer about 50 yards away. There, Brewer uses a cutaway car to explain how some drivers are using special tape to increase downforce.
With 83 laps to go, Kahne crashes. But no one got a clear shot of what caused the wreck.
“Is that it?” Shiftan asks, arms in the air. “For real?”
But when Denny Hamlin takes the lead with fewer than 20 laps to go and then goes on to win, cameras are focused directly on him, knowing he had pitted to get fresh tires while other drivers stayed out.
It’s an entire evening of activity without a single break. Fox producers are getting ready for the Sprint Cup race the next night. But for ESPN, preparations for next week’s Nationwide race in Darlington, S.C., already have begun.
“Usually with the Super Bowl, you have a week or two to prepare and put it up,” says Clyde Taylor, operations manager for ESPN. “This traveling circus is up and down in about four days.”
A SUPER BOWL EVERY WEEK
• More than 600 workers
• At least 17 trailers and broadcast trucks
• More than 110,000 feet of fiber-optic cables
• At least 60 high-definition cameras
• More than 80 microphones
• More than 40 audio feeds from cars and pit crews
Sources: NASCAR, Fox, ESPN
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