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Shifting gears NBC, TNT have tough act to follow with race coverage
NEW YORK (AP) -- A lot of the same technological doodads will be there, as will the pronounced effort to attract both hard-core racing fans and viewers new to the sport. Still, NBC and TNT have (mostly) a tough act to follow as they prepare to take over from Fox for the last half of NASCAR's season, the first under a new TV rights package. And there will be at least one careful observer: Darrell Waltrip, color analyst for Fox. "I'll watch with a great deal of interest. We're all covering the same sport and we all have the same goals: to grow the sport and to take it to the fans in a way it hasn't been taken to them before," Waltrip said. "I'm sure they've been watching us and we'll be watching them. We brought a lot to the table and I'll be curious to see how much of that they capitalize on and what they've got up their sleeve." Waltrip joins Mike Joy and Larry McReynolds in the booth for Sunday's Winston Cup race in Sonoma, Calif., the final event in Fox's portion of the NASCAR package. NBC and TNT take over starting with the July 7 race in Daytona Beach, Fla. The ratings have been superb on Fox, averaging a 5.3 -- 29 percent higher than last season, when races were all over the dial (each rating point represents 1.02 million TV homes). NBC is playing down its ratings expectations, perhaps with good reason. Unlike Fox, NBC has to contend with competition from football: Nine of the 13 Winston Cup races on NBC will go up against NFL games. More impressive than the viewership totals, in large part, has been Fox's coverage itself, with star-in-the-making Waltrip, the steady Joy and McReynolds, and various innovative graphics to attract and keep people who are flipping through the channels. While the announcers said it's been mentioned to them that they stray into jargon, Waltrip thinks that's an asset. "How many other sports have a crew chief nicknamed 'Fatback'?" he said, referring to Michael McSwain, Ricky Rudd's chief. "This is a sport that has a lot of characters in it and we've all been part of that scene. We can't walk into that booth and change our personalities. The stuff that we do in the booth is the same stuff we do when we're in the garage areas." That's precisely where NBC plans to take its cameras. While Fox's prerace shows are mostly from a broadcast booth, NBC will have host Bill Weber on pit road. "Our goal is to take the viewer places they can't go," Weber said. "There's no other sport where so many important things happen while the primary star is standing still. The race plays out on the track, but the strategy plays out in the pits." Weber -- who, along with analyst Benny Parsons, the 1973 Winston Cup champion, comes over from ESPN -- said he wants to transmit the same "tremendous energy and enthusiasm" that Fox's announcers have. There will be some other changes. Instead of a scrolling information bar atop the screen, NBC will have three drivers' names at a time in a fixed graphic box. Also, the "FoxTrax" arrows used to identify cars on the track will be replaced by floating balloons with cars' numbers and colors. "All the technology that was available to Fox is available to us," said producer Sam Flood, who oversaw NBC's coverage of one NASCAR race in 2000. "We're just executing things in different ways." One difference that would be appreciated would be to avoid sophomoric commentary such as, "I think we're going to have more passes today than at a singles bar," which actually was said during Fox's Daytona 500 telecast. Something else to avoid: overly enthusiastic self-promotion. During its Braves-Yankees telecast June 9, Fox used its NASCAR "Crank It Up" graphic and piped in roars of cars as John Rocker trotted out from the bullpen in the eighth inning. Why not let viewers hear the Yankee Stadium fans? Fox has no plans to stand pat next year. "I have a number of things that I think we need to look at," Fox Sports chairman David Hill said. "All of us are going to sit down Monday in California and we're going to have a full post-mortem on the season. I want to go through every aspect of the broadcast."
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