I was watching the recent Hall of Fame ceremonies and it got me thinking about why racing back in the day was seemingly more exciting to watch than it is today. NASCAR wasn't exactly new when I first became interested in it in the 60's. I was 17 years old in 1969 when ABC broke into an episode of Wild World of Sports and showed the terrible crash of Don McTavish that took his life at Daytona. It was horrifying to watch, but what also caught my attention was the fact that the cars were flying around that track. Sportsman cars, with their flat mid-60's front ends and back ends, creating all kinds of drag, were racing over 180 miles an hour. Incredible!! Can you imagine what kind of a wake those cars made through the air, and what it must have felt like when they blasted past the slower cars? Describing how it felt was very important.
Catching a NASCAR race on television back than was frustrating at best. I don't recall the frequency of the broadcasts, maybe four for the year at the most, but they were usually shortened and spliced, taped delayed broadcasts, split and squeezed somewhere into a segment of The Wild World of Sports, which also might of had figure skating intermingled with the racing. The saving grace of those races were the broadcasters. They would get as excited during the race as a fan sitting in the seats at the track. Why? Probably because a lot of them had also broadcasted the races on radio, where they had to describe the action on the track in a way that made the listener paint the race into their mind. They would suck you right into the screen. It caused you to grab the arms of your chair and drag it across the carpet to get you closer, not the television screen, but to the track.
Back in the day, they might of had one announcer and a driver in the booth, and one pit report. What do they have nowadays? A talking head, a former driver and former crew chief in the booth, another former crew chief by a cut-away car, two or three pit reporters and three "hosts", all giving the viewer copious amounts of unnecessary and superfluous chatter. Throw in a scrolling list of drivers along the top of the screen, with the letters being of different colors and all meaning one thing or another, popups of promos for upcoming TV shows on the bottom, taking up space on the screen, and you kind of lose focus on the race itself. Throw it all together and you have information overload. They give us so much information all we have to do is sit back and put our minds in neutral, that is, if we even had it in gear to start with. Let us be part of the broadcast too. Help us keep our minds engaged in the race.
Want to get the viewer engaged in the race again? Just broadcast the race, focus on what drama there might be, and announce the race, just don't talk about it, describe it. Lose the crew chief in the booth and just use the crew chief by the cut-away car to explain that side of the story. And for heaven's sake, stop saying the same immature intro to the races over, and over, and over. It's run it's course and is worn out. Go back to having two drivers in the booth, who had different driving styles when they raced. Ken Squire could call a race like no other, but for combinations, Bob Jenkins, Benny Parsons and Ned Jarrett, in my opinion, were the best to come along. Benny and Ned would explain directly to Bob how a driver would handle a situation, and do it in way that would drag the viewer along with them.
If they feel the need to have hosts, use them for the opening and the ending only, the rest of the time it would just be keeping the viewer from the racing action. Heck, dump the hosts entirely. They really aren't needed. Don't have a continuous crawl across the top, and or bottom, and stop jamming those promos on the screen, if you think they're such a great idea, paste them right on the commercials instead. Leave a little mystery in the broadcast, don't tell me what the points would look like right at that moment. Really guys, it means "bupkiss" and is totally pointless, literally. The vast majority of people watching have computers, and if it's important to them than they can get that information at NASCAR.com during the race.
I'm hoping someday there will be a button on my remote that will block out all the clutter on the screen and just leave the race, nothing but the race. If they got rid of the peripheral information, people would have to be glued to the television. I have a tape of a NASCAR race from back in the late 80's where the broadcasting homebase had issues, but the track feed was still working. It lasted nearly the whole race. Nothing but the action at the track, no commercials, and we got to witness how the broadcast was directed. It was great! Want to fill the seats at the tracks again? Get them interested in the races on the television first.
