"Live From" Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals

[Pinballer]

I can't figure out what kind of audience they're looking for with these FS1 telecasts. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad something drag racing related is on TV, but the programs are just kind of OK in my book. They don't have bad camera work, lack of picture, or the sound quitting in the middle of the telecast like something else out there available, but the incessant interviews with their psychiatric-like questions of "how did you feel about ___, what were you thinking when ___ happened?" and the long personal bio's gets really old in a hurry. I would imagine the sportscasters get mighty tired of having to do them constantly to create fill-in. You can easily tell that sometimes it's a real intrusion into what the driver or team might be doing at that exact time and they have to force themselves to do their public relations part.

So, I'd have to think from the standpoint of who would tune in to watch these kind of events in the first place, it's most likely to be a gearhead or some kind of racer who already knows what a competition atmosphere is all about, regardless of what motorized sport he participates in, and he has at least heard some of the top drag racing driver names before to identify with. A casual sports observer, who is the exact person you'd want to draw to your presentation, probably knows very little about the insides of drag racing other than somebody gets to the finish line ahead of another guy and wins. This casual observer is looking around on a cold winter Sunday with the remote control on fire, and is way more likely to end up with college basketball on than this stuff, so all the lengthy background information of the professional drivers isn't of much use. The vast majority of viewers already know enough of what they need to know about them.
Just hit the highlights on the drivers and what's new with their lives/teams in short order and move on to the action on the track. That's why we're all tuning in--even the casual observer. We want to see the ACTION.

I will say this to be fair: Kudos to FS1 for showing the Stock final.
You know, it wouldn't hurt to show ALL the Sportsman final rounds. Take out 3 minutes of interviews and we could all see who won in the rest of the categories and even have time to explain what the category is all about.