"(Ladies And) Gentlemen, Don't Start Your Engines Yet"
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09/29/2015 Frank Buhrman |
Before we do anything else, let’s give thanks that NASCAR doesn’t have TV timeouts – you know, those awkward stick-and-ball breaks when the players stand around scratching and telling jokes and the fans look at their watches and remember when the event used to end 45 minutes earlier, all while somebody tries to sell you beer, life insurance, or pills that do wonderful things for men.
OK, maybe some caution flags last a lap or two longer, but that’s nowhere near as bad as basketball’s prescribed four TV timeouts per half (and yes, football’s even worse).
Having said that, I’d like to curse TV for taking the pre-race excitement of simpler times out of the pre-race. Yes, you get slightly-below-arena-popularity-level singers doing the National Anthem instead of the local high school band, but whatever happened to the Parade of Visiting Pace Cars? That was excitement: “Hey, that’s Miss Swamp Bottom Speedway” in that convertible,” or “Look, Ralphie’s Raceway has a 200-lapper coming up on the 23rd.”
Maybe if they still made more big-car convertibles, it would help.
Is it just me, or are there fewer parachute jumps before the green flag these days?
Part of the problem may be that those who are selling things (which is to day, everybody) want you buying those things until the last minute and not watching something that’s free, for some weird reason.
Mostly, though, it’s about TV. At every track’s media coverage hub, the big question for hours before a race is, “When is the ‘minute-by-minute’ going to be ready?” That’s the schedule for those minutes before the race when all the VIPs get introduced, get to do their thing, shake hands with other VIPs, and then go back to their suites. All of that is critical to the TV schedule. Back in the day, at Richmond, Kenneth Campbell did the minute-by-minute, and it always seemed that he must have been asleep or something, because it was never ready, and anxiety levels continued to increase, minute-by-minute, in its absence.
In all fairness to Kenneth and everyone else who does these, they’re a no-win situation. As soon as you put one out, something about it changes, and you have to revise it, but by then there are hundreds of copies circulating with incorrect information, and things just keep getting worse from there. So the real secret to doing one right is to wait and release it after all the stuff has happened, by which time changes are a lot less likely.
Let’s go way back to get to the real entertainment of pre-race. When I started attending races on the Richmond dirt half-mile (accompanied by the excellent film camera operator Mr. Fulton after the first year), the whole show took place in one afternoon, so practice and qualifying were the real pre-race (not to take anything away from the parade of visiting pace cars). At Richmond, fans were still coming into the infield while practice was going on (crossing the track, mind you; this was way before any tunnels). A couple of track employees (perhaps using that term loosely) looked at how far down the backstretch the next car was and, if it looked far enough, motioned for you to get moving and cross.
One time some guys were crossing when their cooler’s handle broke, dumping its malt beverage contents and ice onto the racing surface. Talk about a basic conflict in human emotions: Your beer or your life? I have this image of them trying to kick as many beers as possible down the slight banking toward the infield before half-running, half-diving for cover, all the while hoping that the driver of that next car liked the high groove.
(I’ll leave it to Mr. Fulton to comment on the folks who hoisted their coolers up into the trees along the backstretch to watch the races for free, until the branch cracked under the extra weight of those refreshments.)
Sponsors – especially the Fortune 500 ones – wouldn’t like to be part of any life-and-death entertainment pre-race spectacles, but most of the fans seemed to like that stuff. What’s not to like about seeing some guy trying to sneak into the infield through the drain pipe in Turn 2, then trying to escape the not-quite-in-optimal-physical-condition security guards?
I say cut the pay for National Anthem singers, bring back the high school bands, and spend a few bucks on a pre-race we’ll remember long after we’ve forgotten who finished fourth.
OK, maybe some caution flags last a lap or two longer, but that’s nowhere near as bad as basketball’s prescribed four TV timeouts per half (and yes, football’s even worse).
Having said that, I’d like to curse TV for taking the pre-race excitement of simpler times out of the pre-race. Yes, you get slightly-below-arena-popularity-level singers doing the National Anthem instead of the local high school band, but whatever happened to the Parade of Visiting Pace Cars? That was excitement: “Hey, that’s Miss Swamp Bottom Speedway” in that convertible,” or “Look, Ralphie’s Raceway has a 200-lapper coming up on the 23rd.”
Maybe if they still made more big-car convertibles, it would help.
Is it just me, or are there fewer parachute jumps before the green flag these days?
Part of the problem may be that those who are selling things (which is to day, everybody) want you buying those things until the last minute and not watching something that’s free, for some weird reason.
Mostly, though, it’s about TV. At every track’s media coverage hub, the big question for hours before a race is, “When is the ‘minute-by-minute’ going to be ready?” That’s the schedule for those minutes before the race when all the VIPs get introduced, get to do their thing, shake hands with other VIPs, and then go back to their suites. All of that is critical to the TV schedule. Back in the day, at Richmond, Kenneth Campbell did the minute-by-minute, and it always seemed that he must have been asleep or something, because it was never ready, and anxiety levels continued to increase, minute-by-minute, in its absence.
In all fairness to Kenneth and everyone else who does these, they’re a no-win situation. As soon as you put one out, something about it changes, and you have to revise it, but by then there are hundreds of copies circulating with incorrect information, and things just keep getting worse from there. So the real secret to doing one right is to wait and release it after all the stuff has happened, by which time changes are a lot less likely.
Let’s go way back to get to the real entertainment of pre-race. When I started attending races on the Richmond dirt half-mile (accompanied by the excellent film camera operator Mr. Fulton after the first year), the whole show took place in one afternoon, so practice and qualifying were the real pre-race (not to take anything away from the parade of visiting pace cars). At Richmond, fans were still coming into the infield while practice was going on (crossing the track, mind you; this was way before any tunnels). A couple of track employees (perhaps using that term loosely) looked at how far down the backstretch the next car was and, if it looked far enough, motioned for you to get moving and cross.
One time some guys were crossing when their cooler’s handle broke, dumping its malt beverage contents and ice onto the racing surface. Talk about a basic conflict in human emotions: Your beer or your life? I have this image of them trying to kick as many beers as possible down the slight banking toward the infield before half-running, half-diving for cover, all the while hoping that the driver of that next car liked the high groove.
(I’ll leave it to Mr. Fulton to comment on the folks who hoisted their coolers up into the trees along the backstretch to watch the races for free, until the branch cracked under the extra weight of those refreshments.)
Sponsors – especially the Fortune 500 ones – wouldn’t like to be part of any life-and-death entertainment pre-race spectacles, but most of the fans seemed to like that stuff. What’s not to like about seeing some guy trying to sneak into the infield through the drain pipe in Turn 2, then trying to escape the not-quite-in-optimal-physical-condition security guards?
I say cut the pay for National Anthem singers, bring back the high school bands, and spend a few bucks on a pre-race we’ll remember long after we’ve forgotten who finished fourth.