Remote Patrol

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 2001 by Fritz Quindt

Fox spins its wheels gearing up for Daytona

As if it ain't enough that Fox has to "reinvent the wheel" for NASCAR, its premiere is at the Daytona 500, the Super Bowl for gearheads. What pressure!

Welcome to another 21st Century Fox Sports docudrama. CBS is handing over the keys to Daytona after NASCAR negotiated a new network contract, a $400 million foursome worth four times what racetracks banked in cutting their own check-your-local-listings deals last year. (In this "viewer-friendly consolidation," Fox owns the first half of the season, with Fox Sports Net. Then NBC gets the races. Unless they're on TBS.)

Count on Fox to apply daring, cutting-edged, best-in-class touches--as it does whenever it throws a new sport in the back of its pickup. The new kid is gonna show them good ol' boys ...

Stop. Apply brakes gently. Comparing Daytona on Fox with Daytona on CBS is like comparing Survivor with Temptation Island There could be more differences between Toyota's '00 and '01 Camry.

Fox boss David Hill said he told his lieutenants to start from scratch on NASCAR. But look at the hires: Mike Joy, lead announcer, appeared on the last 18 CBS Daytona 500s for CBS; Neil Goldberg was ESPN's producer; Artie Kempner directed for Turner, etc. Good ol' boys.

Fox's rep as innovative risk-taker is due for debunking. When it got the NFL, it imported Summerall-n-Madden from CBS, plus Terry Bradshaw. Only FoxBox, the omnipresent time-and-score invention, qualified for a U.S. patent. What risk was Fox taking? Nielsen families were going to watch regardless.

Ditto Daytona and NASCAR, a.k.a. television's No. 2 Sport. Fox--which introduced hockey's "glowing puck" five years ago and hasn't lived it down--has the technology to make a car glow too, but it won't be tried at Daytona. That's because nobody called for a TV repairman when CBS and ESPN were the key players in past seasons with talent dating back to The Dukes of Hazzard offering race analyses supposedly consisting of "Dale was going real good in the Pennzoil Z-7 Viagra History Channel Special till it blowed up."

Here Fox is tweaking. Instead of Ned Jarrett or Benny Parsons, Fox is casting Darrell Waltrip and lovable Larry McReynolds as Bradshaw and Madden; they're so contemporary, they ran in the Y2K 500. Drivers will be referred to only by numbers or names (the CBS way), not their sponsors (the cable way).

"Announcers may even lay out for laps at a time," Joy says. Vrroom!

More obvious: FoxBox version 2.0, a constant graphics leader-and-clock display across the top of the screen doubling as a NASCAR, not NASDAQ, ticker.

"The challenge is making the sport look like more than five-o'clock traffic," Joy says.

Please try.

Contributing writer Fritz Quindt covers TV for THE SPORTING NEWS.