Most of you have probably seen John Daly's outstanding blog devoted to television coverage of NASCAR, but if you haven't, it's an absolute must-read for those among us who aren't at the track every week watching in person.An entry earlier this week about old Cup Series races being rebroadcast on ESPN Classic got me to thinking about my own biggest pet peeve with auto racing coverage on television. I'm as annoyed as the next guy when it comes to the graphics, the talking heads, the boogity-boogity-boogity and the terribly dull coverage of ABC/ESPN. But my biggest disappointment always comes at the camera angles themselves.
We're routinely reminded of how big Daytona and Talladega are — 2 1/2-mile restrictor plate behemoths. We're told of the breathtaking speeds at places like Michigan and Atlanta, and even to some extent at Bristol, where the racing seems to defy physics. We're brow-beaten with talks of sellout crowds numbering 100,000 to 200,000 strong.
But we're never given the chance as an audience to put it into perspective for ourselves.
I want to see wide-angle shots from atop the tower at Daytona. I want to see a panoramic view once in a while of 15 or 20 cars in a pack at Atlanta. I want to see just how ridiculously fast 43 cars look on the small Bristol high-banks.
The closest thing I ever saw was the IMAX film NASCAR had a hand in making a few years back. Seeing those IMAX views of the entire backstretch at Daytona, to this day, have fueled my desire to see the place for myself once and for all.
Once in a while we get glimpses on television that could put things in perspective — usually only so advertising graphics can be shown over a shot from the blimp high above the track — but mostly we get extreme close-ups, in-car camera shots and the crying wives.
The best thing about a NASCAR event in person is that it's an event — something so large in scale it assaults all of our senses. The speed, the massive crowds, the sounds, the colors, the smells, the physical size of the tracks. Let's showcase that event. It's all part of the race package, isn't it?
A package we should see from time to time on the boob tube.
3 comments:
I don't want to see "the event" on TV, I want to see the racing, and the close-up low angles used are often the best. At Daytona, for instance, they stopped using the first turn camera tower after CBS left and FOX took over. Bring that angle back and stop using that ridiculous high-angle shot over the grandstands between the trioval and Turn One - it looks tacky.
And for chrissakes stop showing the wives.
Maybe NASCAR doesn't want to show panoramic shots because they don't want fans to see how many empty seats there are at the tracks.
Once in a great while a journalist will point out the obvious: there are a lot of unsold seats at previously-sold out events.
Maybe people are getting tired of high ticket prices, cookie-cutter race cars and lack of serious competition beyond the top 10 well-heeled teams.
Mike lange - it isn't cookie cutter tracks people don't like, it's lack of good racing. No one would care if a track was "cookie cutter" (a meaningless term to begin with) if the racing was good.
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