Sports

The 48 Hours of Charlotte? Hey, this NASCAR All-Star weekend may never end

SPEED TV boss Hunter Nickell is all cranked for NASCAR All-Star Week
(Photo credit: SPEED)

By Mike Mulhern

To translate this web page into Spanish click Here

CHARLOTTE

When it comes to entertainment promotion, NASCAR executives have the shotgun approach: if it moves, shoot at it. And if it doesn’t move, shoot at it anyway to get it moving.
Hard sell, hard push, these guys are the masters.
Little wonder that NASCAR’s TV buddies are so hopped up too: Saturation marketing, saturation promotions. Saturation, saturation, saturation.
And that’s the way it is again this NASCAR All-Star week, which kicked off with Thursday night’s annual Sprint Cup Pit Crew Challenge, pitting stock car racing’s best over-the-wall men head-to-head.

Brian Vickers’ crew, headed by crew chief Kevin Hamlin and coach Greg Miller, lived up to expectations in the finals – an all-Toyota championship – by narrowly beating Denny Hamlin’s crew (22.902 seconds vs 23.011 seconds, barely a foot). The cars are pushed by the crews.

The Brian Vickers-Kevin Hamlin crew wins the NASCAR Sprint Pit Crew Challenge by a foot over Denny Hamlin
(Photo by Jerry Markland/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Vickers’ team—Brian Haaland on the right-front, with Aaron Schields tire carrier, gas man Doug Newell and catch-can man Mike Metcalfe, rear-tire changer Danny Kincaid and rear-tire carrier Jake Brzozowski, and jackman Shaun Peet – beat the Kevin Harvick-Todd Berrier Chevy team in the semifinals. Hamlin’s crew – Mike Hicks right-front tire changer, Brandon Pegram tire carrier, Jonathan Sherman rear-tire changer and Heath Cherry tire carrier, and gas man Scott Wood and catch-can man John Eicher, and jackman Chris Anderson— beat the crew of teammate Kyle Busch in their semifinals.
Vickers’ crew won $70,000, as a team. The night’s competition had two stages, one measured team against team, the other measured man against man. The evening’s individual winners, each earning $10,000: Nick Odell and Brad Donaghy, right-front tire changer and right-front tire carrier for Kyle Busch; Dave Smith and Jason Binger, rear-tire changer and rear-tire carrier for Matt Kenseth; Caleb Hurd and Jamie Frady, gas man and catch-can man for Jeff Gordon; and jackman Eric Wilson of Kasey Kahne’s team.
An example of how seriously these crewmen take this competition – jackman Mark Jacobs suffered severe bicep tears last week while practicing for this event. Jacobs, of the Juan Pablo Montoya-Chip Ganassi team, underwent surgery Wednesday and is expected to be out three months recouperating.

To consider Bill Shakespeare, perhaps this is all something about ‘surfeiting the appetite with too much,’ or maybe it’s Mae West, about ‘never too much of a good thing,’ but if you want a little NASCAR this weekend with your TV dinners, well, how about 48 straight hours of non-stop coverage of this All-star thing?
A little NASCAR gluttony never hurt anybody…..
“The All-star race for us – right now, at this stage of SPEED—is the most important event for SPEED, and the most highly rated event: The NASCAR All-Star race Saturday night,” Hunter Nickell says.
“This is the coolest thing we do.
“So beginning about 9 a.m. Friday, we’re going 48 hours straight.”

Jimmy Spencer is every bit as outrageous with a mike as he was behind the wheel
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Nickell, three years now in this gig as head of Fox’ cable-NASCAR network, is sitting out in one of the dozens of anonymous TV trailers that surround the weekend stock car tour stop, amid an army of big Fox-SPEED haulers that carry everything from the several command-and-control centers, some with 60-some TV screen shots for the director-and-producer to pick from, to more esoteric games like the in-car camera stuff, the DirecTV stuff, and specialty sets like the SPEED Stage.
Nickell’s chair, like in all mobile rigs, is bolted to the floor, but wheels and spins like a Shanghai crane. And he can’t stop moving. This is no static performer.
Nickell’s crew carried Thursday night’s Sprint Cup pit crew challenge live, for the first time, and he seems almost giddy about the All-Star weekend….even though SPEED’s cable operations churn out thousands of hours of NASCAR coverage each season.
“Before we got the All-star race on SPEED a couple years ago, we did over 30 hours of programming around it,” Nickell says. “Last year we had the race and did 74 hours around the event. This year we have 87 hours, including the race itself Saturday night (9 p.m. start for the feature).”

The Trackside crowd at the SPEED Stage is sometimes wildly enthusiastic, sometimes just wild and crazy.
Check it out when Kyle Busch is centerstage.
(Photo credit: SPEED)

Still, in this NASCAR TV world of giants like Fox, ABC and ESPN in all its various permutations, just where does SPEED fit in?
Well, it fills in the blanks….like the hours and hours of pre-race practice (TiVo practice at home, perhaps).
And it surrounds each weekend’s feature event with hours of pre-race and post-race talk-talk and analysis, and more than a dash of goofiness and laughs.
It’s not quite The NASCAR Channel, but it does more NASCAR than anything else, and it does one heck of a lot of NASCAR.
And when NASCAR execs need a favor – like when ESPN decided to drop its Friday night Nationwide broadcast at Richmond a few days ago, in favor of an NBA game – SPEED steps into fill the void. That particular incident was interesting – the event was simulcast live on SPEED and ESPN Classic, and Speed’s broadcast got the better ratings.
“NASCAR is a huge, huge part of what SPEED is,” Nickell says dryly. “That’s obvious I guess.
“So when NASCAR calls and says ‘We’re in a jam,’ it’s cool to be able to say ‘Yes, we can.’
“For us the whole deal is being the ‘coolest,’ best NASCAR programmer to fans. That is it.
“It comes back to – Fox, ESPN, ABC, Turner, SPEED – everybody is doing great NASCAR programming. But we think we’re doing the ‘coolest’ NASCAR programming.”

An All-Toyota Night: The Brian Vickers-Kevin Hamlin team (blue car, right lane) beats the Tony Stewart crew in opening round competition en route to NASCAR Sprint Cup pit crew challenge championship
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Well, any set with Jimmy ‘Who needs Jerry Springer’ Spencer on it, has to be watched. Just to see what outlandish things he might come up with.
And then there’s the Kyle Petty Show too….in which he finds some hapless journalist – and there are plenty ‘deer in the headlights’ in the NASCAR garage—and tries to rip them to shreds. Well, not literally of course, but Petty, while he may not be up front on the track, off the track he’s fearless, and a much faster thinker on his feet than most around the sport. (The ‘outtakes’ from Petty’s show would make a good show in itself, if Petty himself were brave enough to go for it.)
And SPEED loves to do its thing out in front a live audience, which can be daunting at times, but still visually exciting. Especially when Kyle Busch is on stage – facing a live racing crowd that at times seems almost rowdy enough to call for the chicken-wire safety netting.
But Nickell loves it all.

Not all the drivers spent Thursday pumping up their pit crews. Tony Stewart (L) and Greg Biffle were building a racing-themed playground in Charlotte
(Photo Credit: CIA for KaBOOM)

“I think we’re doing the coolest stuff,” Nickell says. “And when I watch our guys, I get so fired up because I know how much into NASCAR our guys are.
“We’re not worried about ‘Hey, what is Fox doing, what is ESPN doing?’ Everybody looks at everybody else’s stuff. But we’re working on ‘How can we make Raceday cooler this week than last week?’ ‘What can we try we’ve never tried before?’ ‘How do we make Trackside more fun?’”
Well, may taking Jimmy Spencer off valium?
Nickell laughs.
Well, why not bring in Danica Patrick to do those pre-race hot-lap segments?
Maybe Nickell needs his own late-night version of Elvira or Vampira for some of this coverage. After all, sometimes NASCAR action – particularly All-Star week—does seem as wacky as Plan 9 from Outer Space…..
Or, hey, how about being brave enough to bring back The Pit Bulls? Hmmmm.
Nickell seems seldom at a loss for ideas: “This year we’ve added a show called ‘NASCAR in a Hurry,’ which we put on in front of Race Day.
“We figured out there is so much stuff that goes on each weekend that very few people, if any, get to see all of it. So we built this show to let people know ‘Hey, before you watch Race Day, here’s all the cool stuff that’s been happening.’
“So we go back over the stuff that ESPN had, that we’ve had, stuff that’s happened on the track and off the track. So we stuff that in just before Race Day, to get the fans fired up.”
Last weekend at Darlington, for example, the race itself started about 740 p.m.; NASCAR in a Hurry came on at 4:30 p.m., and Race Day ran from 5 till 7.
And this week it’s the 48 Hours of Charlotte.

SPEED’s boss Hunter Nickell wants to create the next ‘Cool’ NASCAR race. Any suggestions?
(Photo credit: SPEED)

In this sometimes curious world of NASCAR TV, just where does SPEED itself it in? Compared to Big Brother Fox and ABC’s legendary ESPN, SPEED sometimes seems like ‘the other’ channel.’
That just makes Nickell bristle.
“It’s not us versus ESPN or versus Fox or who,” Nickell insists. “They have their deals and we have ours. And NASCAR is the largest piece of SPEED’s programming, by far.
“We’ve got the trucks, and weekend after weekend it’s not us-versus-anybody. It’s us versus, well, the next coolest NASCAR show, whatever that might be.”
What really is the purpose of this SPEED thing anyway? Where did this channel come from?
“It started back in 1996 as SpeedVision, as the video version of the magazine rack ‘everything about vehicles,’” Nickell says.
“Now as time has gone on, while we still have an enormous amount of enthusiast programming, motorcycles, automobiles…but when Fox and SPEED got into the NASCAR business, we got the opportunity to create a ton of NASCAR programming. And we’ve been adding hours ever since.
“SPEED has 21 on-air personalities. Heck, we used to produce all of Daytona’s SpeedWeeks with just 21 people; now we’ve got 21 on-air personalities alone: Steve Byrnes, Larry MacReynolds, John Roberts, Wendy Venturini, Krista Voda, Jeff Hammond, Darrell Waltrip, Jimmy Spencer….that’s ‘our gang.’”
The Trackside, Raceday, and post-race shows are the bedrock.
But competition? How about dueling 6 p.m. NASCAR daily newscasts? These networks may be a bit too scared for that.
“It is rare that a NASCAR show on SPEED or ESPN or Fox or Turner will overlap…..because that’s how NASCAR has built its TV deals,” Nickell insists. “It works for all of us, and the fans, most of the time, because we’re not going head-to-head all the time.”
Hate for the fluff to get in the way of any hard news here.
But then, hey, in this new media age, hard news may be way overrated anyway.
Of course there is the obvious economic issue too – covering this sport is so labor-intensive and equipment-intensive that the networks covering each weekend’s event share a lot – cameras, cameramen, uplink vehicles, command haulers.
“The relationship on the production level, week-in, week-out at the race tracks, is incredible,” Nickell says. “It is working.
“To watch the cooperation between production teams is awesome. It’s amazing to watch.”

SPEED’s Wendy Venturini, one of the network’s 21 on-air personalities
(Photo Credit: Wenty Venturini)

So what’s he dreaming up next? “That’s my favorite question – In the big picture we’re trying to find the next coolest NASCAR program to create,” Nickell says.
“Now that might sound like something everybody ought to be trying to do…..and maybe they are.”
Maybe something with Hannah Montana, a good ol’ Nashville girl who might need a new gig herself?
Nickell laughs again.

As Jimmie Johnson so well knows, a driver’s TV work is never done
(Photo credit: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images for NASCAR)

“Two things we are working on right now,” Nickell says: “First, we’re cooking up something special for the Truck series this year, to build programming around.
“Second, we would like to add the next ‘big’ NASCAR event. Not just one, but more. Like this All-Star race.
“We have the Truck series, all but two events. And we have SpeedWeeks (at Daytona), which is huge. And we have the All-star week.
“But we want to work with NASCAR to find the next ‘big’ event on SPEED. Because SPEED will make it a huge event; we will put the resources and the hours around it to make it a big event.
“We’ve got something huge in February, we’ve got something huge in May. What can we and NASCAR do next?”
Maybe a new IROC series? Cross-promotion with Danica Patrick and Ashley Force, maybe John Force versus Jimmy Spencer?
Hey, 320 mph is 320 mph.
And after all, this isn’t necessarily just about sports but about entertainment.

Hey, not so heavy on the rouge, please: They didn’t send you over from the MAC store, did they?
(Photo credit: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images for NASCAR)