Even with its stellar track record, television and technology has its limits when trying to play catch up to the National Hot Rod Association.
“It’s a five-sense sport – so is there a way to convey the smell or even the taste of the burnt rubber that’s in your clothes?” asked Frank Wilson, Fox Sports’ vice president of production for motor sports.
Vibrating La-Z-Boy recliners with nitro-scented air fresheners? Crank the volume up to 111?
Give Fox and the NHRA enough time, money and creativity, and Pomona could be the gritty Petri dish for some high-end sensory overload experimentation.
The weekend’s Winternationals at the Fairplex Auto Club Raceway, leading into a three-hour live presentation on Fox’s national network Sunday afternoon, recalibrates the next set of milestones.
A sport that has traditionally seen its TV presentation of four-second bursts bundled into a tape-delayed, heavily edited production, often airing hours after the event ended and everyone took out their earplugs, is shifting gears and already seeing results.
While the 15-year joy ride with national coverage on ESPN and ESPN2, dating to 2000, is in the dust, the Glendora-based NHRA has invested in its own in-house media production unit and office studios. It’s a strategy of engaging viewers and fans who have grumbled about the fact the TV coverage was inconsistent, and they were seeing the results on social media long before they made it to the TV screens. It’s also about cultivating those younger cyber followers with more content and access.
The NHRA’s strategy to realign itself with Fox, and more specifically provide regular content for the FS1 landing spot that used to be branded as SpeedChannel, has already moved the needle. The 24-event Sunday final TV ratings jumped 24 percent in the first year at Fox (an average of 634,000 viewers in ’16) over the last year at ESPN (513,000 in ’15). The 18-to-49 demographic is also up 49 percent. The NHRA numbers also show 34 million total viewers online with video streaming, 14 million more than the previous year.
The pivotal moment in this NHRA re-do came in the summer of 2015 with new president Peter Clifford, replacing the retired Tom Compton after his 22 years. Soon after came the hiring of NBA Entertainment exec Ken Adelson as the new VP, executive producer and chief content officer.
“I was fortunate enough to see the growth period in the NBA with David Stern and Adam Silver and see how to take a sport and really figure out how to connect it with fans already there as well as potential fans,” Adelson said Saturday during a brief break in the qualifying sessions. “When we launched NBA TV as the first league sports network, it was also all about bringing out our past, with so much material in the archives that had no outlet. I think there is a lot of similarities with the NBA and this NHRA project.”
Fox has provided a fix for slotting the programming. The NHRA has done more with replacing robotic cameras with those hand-held, shelled out for a new mobile state-of-the-art production truck, introduced 5.1 surround sound and experimented with 4K Ultra High-Def video. They have also purchased one of the few Sony 4800 slow-motion cameras used in today’s TV production.
Play-by-play man Dave Rieff, analyst Tony Pedregon and pit reporters John Kernan, Bruno Massel, Jamie Howe and Amanda Busick are all NHRA-hired and paid employees. One of the latest hirings came last month with producer Kymberly Booth Higgs, who grew up as a drag racer in Kansas and has been involved in the ESPN production of NASCAR, IndyCar, off-road and 24 Hours of Le Mans.
“She is very passionate, very committed and brings in a new energy on top of being a great leader who knows how to make great TV,” Fox Sports coordination producer Greg Oldham said Friday night. “She showed already what she can do with that first Friday afternoon show.”
In that one, a live qualifying presentation on FS1 from 4-5 p.m., they managed to get in just one Funny Car run, which created a delay caused by an oil spill. A half-hour into the show, the rains washed the rest of the qualifying out. The format quickly changed to more taped elements and live pit interviews.
“Those are very hard shows to do, but this is a new commitment to the way Peter and Ken want it done,” Oldham said. “There are more compelling elements to the shows than in the past and it gets us down the path to where the fans can get more revved up.”
Adelson said the first year was “just the beginning of what we want to accomplish. I fell in love with this sport when I first came out there – the interaction with the drivers, the sheer power of the cars. I wondered where this had been.
“Once I was on board, I knew we could control our own destiny. It was exactly what I had been doing before (with the NBA). Working with Frank and Greg at Fox, it was an incredibly quick bond and we’ve been on the same page ever since.”
While Wilson echoes that “ESPN did a terrific job all those years” before Fox arrived as a partner, “in the end you need to get it down to a science. We’ve gone through some teething pains but the prime objectives remain – go live, have more feature content and expand the camera work. There has already been successes in all three.”
Contact the writer: thoffarth@scng.com
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