August 7, 2007
By Brian Watkins

Brian Watkins

While I’ve been out a while due to surgery, I’ve been able to use speech to text technology to start writing again. This column, not unlike some previous ones, bemoans the television coverage of NASCAR events. This week, what’s wrong with the current system of broadcasters covering NASCAR.

On a personal level, it’s messing with my DVR. You can’t simply tell it to record NASCAR events once, you have to change it each time the broadcaster changes. If you’re busy that weekend and want to go back and catch the race you missed, you’re out of luck. Speaking from personal experience, there isn’t anything that’s much more frustrating than settling down to watch a race to find out it never got recorded. Yes, I know there is some personal responsibility here, and part of the blame also lies at the feet of the DVR software designers. However, it is yet another symptom of the multiple broadcaster problem.

My biggest annoyance with the broadcast changes through out the season is the fact that just as soon as you get used to one networks annoying habits, you have to get used to the next. Fox gave us the annoying computer generated replays and Boogity-boogity. Next came TNT which started off as a NASCAR fans dream by airing a race, even through the cautions with very minimal interruption of the action. They aired commercials in the bottom corner of the screen, but you never missed a bit of the race. Pure genius; until the next race when they went back to interrupting action to take a commercial break, only to come back from the commercial so the commentators could catch us up on what we’d missed. After having experienced the glory that was the first uninterrupted broadcast by TNT, the next hurt even worse. It’s like meeting someone who is incredibly nice and friendly and genuinely cares about you, but on the second date it turns out they’re just as conceited as the last three you went out with.

That brings us to ESPN. For a network that is dedicated to sports coverage and has been around as long as they have, you’d think they’d have a clue. But they don’t. For instance, live on the screen is a car turning sideways, smoke pouring from the rear tires as they slide across the track. Will they hit the wall? Will they take out other drivers? We’ll never know because the genius Director in the truck switched cameras and showed us another shot of the race far from the action. Yes, people make mistakes, but when you’re covering a sporting event, especially one whose action peaks during wrecks and spin-outs, you don’t cut to a different camera in the middle of a mishap. Even if the director didn’t notice, the Technical director (the guy or gal who hits the buttons that change cameras views at the directors command) should have been smart enough to leave the shot up. I may be getting a little too deep into the video broadcasting jobs, but that’s where I’ve made my living for the past 13 years and those are the kind of annoying moves that get under my skin.

But lets say you didn’t even notice that above mentioned camera switch, what did you think of the announcers urging you to log on to ESPN.com keyword this or that every three seconds to find out more about this or that aspect of racing. This is annoying for several reasons. First of all, why would anyone watching the race choose to get to see less of it than they already get to thanks to commercials and mundane cutaways to explain the size of brake pads or just what duct tape over brake vents REALLY looks like, by running to their computer and going to the ESPN website? Another reason it’s annoying is because it was constantly being repeated through out the broadcast. “If you’d like to learn more about how to annoy your audience, log on to espn.com keyword shut-the-heck-up.”

The text messaging poles they have are a hoot as well. This week it was “which track has the most difficult turns”. That’s a great question for a driver, or a crew chief or even a crew member, but in case they hadn’t noticed it in the broadcast booth, those folks were already busy. So they ask the fans a non-fan question. Makes no sense.

To top it off, the absolute most annoying agitating aggravating aspect of the ESPN broadcast was there latest contribution to stupid broadcast tricks, the animated air coming off the cars. Yes, we all hear about clean air and drafting all the time. Most folks have a pretty good concept of it without having to see it. ESPN thinks that it would be much more exciting to watch a reply of a pass that happened a few minutes ago with wind animation on it than it would be for you to get to watch the actual action on the track. I’m sure the money they spent developing that technology would have saved the need for a few commercials, which would have actually added value to their broadcast and made it more enjoyable.

I can’t close without getting into the whole ESPN commentators vs. Tony Stewart thing. They actually said that his use of a very mild expletive at the close of the Brickyard race “ruined” their broadcast. No, their speedometer/ tachometer/brake graphic that takes up half the screen ruined it- along with their holier than holy attitude by commenting that Tony has problems because he said he was going to drink beer to celebrate his very stress relieving win at Chicagoland. Had he said he was going to go shoot homeless people, buy a pound of heroin and share it with the kids at the local daycare or take the Home Depot Chevrolet for a spin down the crowded sidewalks of New York City to see how many people he could splatter before he ran out of tear-offs, that would illustrate that he had a problem. Telling NASCAR fans around the world that he was having a few brews to celebrate the end of his winless streak? That’s about as down home racing as you get.

I’m to the point now where I’m ready to give up on watching races for free and waiting for NASCAR to offer a pay-per-view version of the race, covered by professional broadcasters who narrate the action but don’t plug their website, air commercials, or voice their opinions about drivers. Better yet, at the end of the race, they show shots of victory lane and air audio, but don’t shove mics and cameras into the faces of drivers as they pull themselves out of the car. How nice would it be as a driver to be able to share the moment with your crew and friends before having some jerk or jerkette with a mic and ridiculous looking headphones, start asking you questions about how you feel.

Hot, tired and happy would be my guess. It’s amazing that more TV reporters haven’t been punched.

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.