Checking the Numbers for ’06
Yeah it’s me again. Thanks to the readers who asked where the hell I was over the past few months and also to the people who came up to me at the drags wondering where my column was. Other than a major career change, I haven’t been doing much. As you have probably seen in DRO’s Agent 1320 column, my son Zak took up sprint car driving on dirt this year here in Southern California and while I love drag racing the most-est, there are so many other forms of motorsports out there and a methanol-powered, 360 cubic-inch sprint car gets me going almost as much as a nostalgia nitro funny car or an NHRA flopper.
No, I’ve not gone over to the dark side, but like many motorsports fans, there are a lot of choices out there for your entertainment dollar, lots of competition for the hard-earned buck. Much the same can be said for the more casual fan who only gets his motorsports from the tube. Yeah, NASCAR is still the king on the racetrack, radio and on TV, but please spare me the excuse that the visceral feeling you can only get by living a nitro drag race in person hurts the TV viewership, that it just can’t translate onto the television screen at home or in your local pub. So if the true experience cannot be captured on videotape, why bother?
May I suggest to you nitro purists, if after all these years it still can’t be compelling to the average, casual viewer via super slo-mo, lame rock ‘n’ roll anthems, digital infrared heat sensor-cams, blimp-cams, nine different camera angles, helmet-cams, shifter-cams, front-suspension cams, telestrators, animated graphics, split screens and super-expert, first-round loser, nitro-racer analysis and the very best announcers available, then the best we have to offer on TV is really not very mainstream, is it? Please don’t tell me that five different camera shots of Brandon Bernstein’s tire shake during second round qualifying are relevant or compelling TV; its not. Let’s call a spade a spade -- it is big-time Official Sponsor appeasement, nothing more.
Based on this year’s data from Joyce Julius & Associates, today’s NHRA POWERade TV show appears to be watched by an average core group of only 1.7 million households for the combined qualifying and eliminations shows on ESPN2. I suggest that not even raising our dear departed Steve Evans from the grave and returning him to the announce booth would give a huge boost to the ESPN2 viewership at this point. If the TV households watching the recent Pomona World Finals didn’t pin the needle on all forms of drag racing audience TV measurement, then nothing can, not even a contrived “Race for the Championship.”
So, let’s go to the stats. Click here.
It’s going to be a long, hard climb back to the salad days of 2002 when almost 10 million more households watched our beloved NHRA drag racing. For most of the events in 2006, the households watching the NHRA POWERade TV show are a little better, and over the past two years regained about 13 percent from the awful 2003-2004 crash of 24.4 percent. Hey, but upward is always better.
This year NASCAR had trouble keeping viewer interest in their contrived “Race for the Chase.” If any of you out there think there will be one more “stick and ball” newspaper journalist parked in a seat in the Shav Glick Media Center at Pomona Raceway for the 2007 World Finals, I have a bridge in Banning for sale that might interest you. Most “stick and ball” journalists are lazy; they have not even taken the time to learn how a simple-to-understand series like NASCAR works and we in drag racing expect they’ll jump at the chance to cover our already complicated “Chase.”
We’ve had our own, very unique “chase” since Winston added the points-earning, money-paying championship in the 1970s. Yeah, we are different, unique, and special, and the differences between drag racing and any other kind of racing should be trumpeted, not changed to follow the leader NASCAR.
It’s time for wholesale change. Throw out the Wide World of Sports-Diamond P model of coverage in order to become competitive in the TV marketplace and I don’t mean adding Jell-O wresting from sport compact racing. Create a concise Sunday afternoon TV show with 45 minutes of qualifying in all professional categories and then 45 minutes of LIVE TV leading up to our “money shot” - the final elimination round of the event broadcast live.
With the addition of NASCAR to ESPN and ESPN2 in the last half of 2007, NHRA POWERade Drag Racing will be fighting for any good airtime before midnight and hopefully NHRA will step up to pay enough dough for a better schedule. We won’t be seeing any NASCAR coverage delayed by extra innings of the Thailand Woman’s Softball Finals but NHRA drag racing coverage…well that’s another “kettle of fish” as far as the ESPN programmers are concerned. They base their decisions on numbers of eyeballs glued to the 52-inch flat screens and evidently the numbers for drag racing just don’t light up the boards. 
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