By Caleb Whisler, Staff Writer
“This is the Performance Racing Network *beep* 15 seconds from airtime… Stand by… *roll opener* 20 seconds…. 10 seconds… Now here are Mark Garrow and Doug Rice…. Welcome to a foggy Atlanta Motor Speedway for the Rinnai 250.”
Those were the words and moments leading up to the NASCAR Xfinity Series broadcast at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Performance Racing Network.
PRN covers Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series and NASCAR Xfintiy Series events at Speedway motor sports Inc. facilities across the United States, while Motor Racing Network covers the other events.
While only covering 12 races on the schedule, the men and women of PRN have to stay sharp. For Doug Rice, Brad Gillie and Rob Albright, staying fresh with the minutiae of the sport comes easy.
For Gillie, staying fresh comes with hosting a radio show on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Monday and Tuesday evenings and filling in sporadically throughout the week.
“Because of the SiriusXM deal, I am immersed in it every week,” Gillie said. “Before that, I kept up with the score, plain and simple. It is not like we don’t watch the races when we are not there. We are keeping up with what is happening and listening to a lot of stuff in the media. That is the way it works for me.”
With the PRN headquarters being located at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Rice says that he is in the epicenter of anything and everything NASCAR. In addition to being located at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Rice also hosts “Fast Talk” Monday evenings at 7 p.m. ET.
While also staying fresh with the storylines of the sport for its broadcasts, PRN also has to determine views to broadcast the race from. In 2018, PRN had to determine broadcast locations for the road course at Charlotte Motor Speedway, while in 2019, have to determine the views at Sonoma Raceway with the carousel.
For the road course at Charlotte, Rice, Alexis Perkins, Albright and Gillie went to the main broadcast booth on the frontstretch to time how long the cars will be in different portions on the course.
“We went up to the broadcast to see where the cars were and timed how long they were going to be in that section because you can’t talk one guy for 10 seconds and another guy for 45 seconds,” Gillie said. “You have to make it all fit. We looked at what we thought would make since.
“What we thought would make sense from the booth, Doug went down on the ground with our director of operations Sean Johnson and drove around. All of sudden, he realized that what he thought initially made sense from up in the sky doesn’t make sense from the ground. We actually had to change things a little bit. It depends on that and timing.”
For the carousel at Sonoma, PRN will rely on their colleagues at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Radio Network to determine where to place broadcasters.
Since majority of the PRN races are at 1.5-mile facilities, PRN will place a turn announcer either on top of a building or a billboard in both turns. Albright is typically in Turn Two with the call from Mark Garrow and Rice being dropped in Turn One. Once Albright completes his call by about the middle of the backstretch, Pat Patterson will pick up the call and take it to around the exit of Turn Four.
“We have three broadcast positions: Doug and Mark in the booth; I am generally in Turn Two when they drop the call to me in Turn One; I drop the call to Pat Patterson about halfway down the backstretch,” Albright said. “In theory, most of the time we are talking about a 12 to 15 second call per position. You build a little bit of a “dance.” They drop. I have to recognize when they are dropping and immediately pick up the call, and Pat does the same thing. It is a choreography
The main goal for the network is to have all of the track covered and to give the listener the sensation of the cars on-track:
“One of our big goals is to have 100 percent of the track covered,” Rice said. “You think, ‘Well, we have 90 percent of it covered,’ but someone is going to spin, wreck, or be up against that inside wall that we can’t see. TV will be able to see that, so we need to be able to see that on our own.”
Booth
For over 30 years, Rice has been a part of Performance Racing Network. Today, Rice serves as president of the network and is the co-booth announcer with Garrow during race broadcasts.
For Rice, radio is something that he always wanted to do. During his time at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, the veteran broadcaster worked at the campus radio station from the morning DJ to spinning records at night to dabbling into sports.
It wasn’t until working at a local radio station in Salisbury, North Carolina, where Rice immersed himself into sports.
“The guy who was doing local high school football quit a weekend before the season started, and I said that I could do that, but I had no idea what I was doing,” Rice said. “I knew sports and football. At that time, the only big league sport in North Carolina was stock car racing.
“There was a lot of it with two races at Charlotte, two races at North Wilkesboro, two races at Rockingham plus Martinsville and Darlington. There was a lot of racing very close to home. I was a fan.”
From there, Rice began stringing for the North Carolina News Network, United Press International and sometimes The Associated Press where he would file two 30 second reports and a wrap from the event.
Rice’s big break with Speedway Motorsports Inc. occurred on a NASCAR media tour when a running journal was kept with interesting quotes from the tour.
“At the last night, Ed Clark, who was then GM at Charlotte Motor Speedway, asked if I would read something at our last dinner because I was a radio guy, but I also studied oral interpretation which is taking what people write and turning it in certain ways,” he said.
“I did that, and Ed liked how I did the piece. He called me the next day and asked if I would come down and interview for the head of PRN, which I was the only employee of. Jay Howard of Jay Howard Events had the job before me. That is how I got started.”
When it comes to preparing for a race weekend, Rice doesn’t have to lock himself into a room and do four hours of research. Instead, he will handwrite two to three pages of notes specific to the upcoming race weekend.
“I will handwrite out two or three pages of notes specific to that race,” he said. “Who is best performance here, there best performance of the season to date, their performance at the track, and then I will have two to three storylines jotted down.
“I am the storyteller. Mark is the stats guy. Mark has too many stats, but he is going to cover that part of the equation while I do the story telling part.”
As time has passed, Rice is continuously working on his craft when it comes to painting the picture for the radio audience. According to Rice, the biggest challenge is saying the same thing differently. When it comes to painting the picture, Rice tells a story about his first trip to Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“The first year I went to Indy and met all the guys at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Radio Network, who had been covering racing since Ben Hurr and chariots,” Rice said. “The guy met we one day, and we met again the next day when he called me out. He said, ‘What is it that you do for a living?’
“I said, ‘Well, I broadcast NASCAR races on PRN.’ He goes, ‘No that is not what you do.’ After about the second time he said that, I started asking, ‘What is it that I do since you knew more about me than I do.’ He goes, ‘You are not in that business. You are in the transportation business.’
“I remember this like it was yesterday. I said, ‘Well, we don’t own any trucks.’ He was kind of like, ‘Don’t you get it?’ I was like, ‘I had no idea what you are driving at.’ He goes, ‘It is your job to transport the people that are listening on the radio from their car, bass boat or garage to the football stadium or the racetrack. Once you do that, you have accomplished your job.’ That is the overwhelming thing and our PRN philosophy of transporting the listener from where they are to where we are. Once we achieve that, everything is else is window dressing.”
When in the booth, Rice and Garrow have to deal with various stimuli. While also listening to turn announcers and pit reporters, Rice also has to listen to a producer about when to hit a read out or breaks. He is also listening to what NASCAR is saying on the scanner.
The biggest challenge with all the stimuli for Rice is watching the racetrack, specifically his part of the track.
“I don’t watch the all-around the racetrack, that is Rob and Pat’s job to watch their turns, but I have to be very conscious of what is happening between Turn One and Turn Four on a traditional oval. It is a big juggling act,” he said.
With a second person in the booth, the booth call of the race will alternate between both anchors, which sometimes provides a challenge, but with years of experience, a system was developed.
“We alternate every other lap which was a bit of a challenge for the ROVAL was because I would do my part and the cars would disappear, they would come back around, and Mark would do his part, it would be almost three minutes between times you were able to speak,” he said. “It felt like an eternity because we weren’t used to that. We have a system for about everything. Coming out from commercial, we will decide who will be talking first.
“When it comes to calling the first and last lap of the race, we alternate. If Mark has the start of the race and the green flag lap, then I am going to call the checkered. Over the years, we have developed out systems that keep us from stepping all over each other.”
Unfortunately, the races do get strung out. During that time, the booth team will get into a storytelling and news mode. According to Rice that means that the racing on the track is not the greatest at that given moment.
Luckily, this time also gives the broadcast a chance to answer fan questions and to lean on the pit reporters to share information from what they are hearing on the scanners and talking to crew chiefs. The booth, turn and pit reporters are always searching for various storylines.
“If we are doing play-by-play and describing action, I don’t want to say it is easy, but it is natural because that is what we are up there for,” Rice said. “If we are having to work to find storylines which can be a bit more taxing. That is where we are more prone to get out over our skies because you start talking.
“It is easy to start sounding like a talk show, but we can’t do that because we have to be live action. That is why we are working to find that battle for eighth place if the lead is four seconds out in front.”
For Rice, a good call from the booth is one that has high energy and descriptive. The goal is for someone that never saw a lap to be able to sir in a dark room and let them see that mental picture. In his eyes, that is a good race call.
One of Rice’s hard fast rules comes with crash and injuries. The rule is that the broadcast should not speculate, guess or say anything. The only thing that can say is that the driver got out of the car and walked over to the ambulance.
“One of the other hard fast rules that we have that I feel is important has to do with crashes and injuries,” he said. “We don’t speculate, don’t guess, don’t say anything. The only thing we can say is that the driver got out of the car and walked over to the ambulance. You might say they gingerly walked over.
“Past that, we don’t talk about injuries because I don’t want to be the person that claims that he is OK, but they have a compound fracture or worse. We are very sensitive to that. We let the team representative or someone from the speedway tell us about injury.”
Overall, when it comes to calling a race from the booth, there has to be a certain awareness about what is going on around the racetrack.
After many years covering racing on the radio, Rice has called some very special moments. His top three favorite moments are: the inaugural ROVAL race at Charlotte Motor Speedway, calling Tony Stewart’s first Brickyard 400 win at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and calling Adam Petty’s ARCA win at Charlotte.
Pit Road
“Now let’s go down to O’Reilly Auto Parts pit reporter Brad Gillie.”
Gillie started his radio career right out of college at KEGL, a rock station in Dallas, Texas, in the 1990s around the time Texas Motor Speedway opened. He was always a race fan and had the opportunity to do PA for the speedway, which turned into a full-time gig.
“At that time, I got to know Doug through PRN as they are under the same banner of SMI,” he said. “When Texas got a second date, we decided to start our own syndicated radio show out at the speedway because the stations were talking about Dallas teams. When we started that, we came here and visited with Doug with what we needed to do to get things going.
“That strengthened the relationship with Doug, which ultimately led me to my first race with PRN was the 2006 Xfinity race at Atlanta. That is how it started for me. For me, I got to have the best of both worlds by working at the racetrack and do radio at the same time.”
As a pit reporter, Gillie’s preparation is a little bit different from Rice’s. He has to know more about the individual teams he is covering, especially when he receives his pit road assignment.
“I will look a lot more things about their performance at the track because if I can slip in something about someone at that particular track, it adds a little bit of color to what I am saying,” he said.
“For me, that is the kind of preparation I do. Just studying who I am going to be covering. On a broader sense, we could be talking about anybody during the pre-race or qualifying show. We typically get half of the field. We still have to know what people are doing, what they have done recently, or how important the race might be for them.”
For Gillie, the biggest role a pit reporter has on the call of the broadcast is finding stories. The pit reporter’s role is to find a story and pitch it to the producer. The story can come through what is happening on the race track or through pit road. He does not want to miss any part of the storyline.
If Gillie hears the booth or turn guys mention a driver in their assignment is slow on the track, he instantly runs over to the pit stall to find out what is going on.
“We are scanning all the relevant teams,” he said. “I don’t mean this as disrespect to the backmarkers, but the story is out front. Those are the ones I am focused. It may simply be scanning or standing at a cut out on pit road, so I can see what is going on. You can see a team jump up on the pit wall.
“If I don’t hear something on the scanner that will clue me in that something is going on. It is all about finding that story, so I can report on it. If I have something, I can pitch it to our producer and director and say that I have an update on so and so, so and so is doing this, or it might be that Kyle Busch is coming in right now, so we can jump in on something like that. We are always looking for something to tell that story.”
With each pit stall assignment, Gillie has to filter out certain driver who are not likely going to be on the lead lap and focus on those who are likely to be part of the main show. Throughout the race, he is also taking detailed notes about who pitted, when they pitted, and what they did on the pit stop.
On pit road, efficiency and accuracy are two important traits. The goal for a pit reporter during live pit stops is to make the call while the car is in front of them before passing the baton to the next pit reporter.
“That ambient sound is very important to us because we talked about painting the picture and putting people there,” Rice said. “Whoever it is, you need to hear the wrenches, tires squealing, etc. because that is important.”
One of Gillie’s most memorable races was the 2008 Brickyard 400 when tire failures was the main storyline from the race. This was his most memorable call because the pit reporters were getting calls every 10 laps.
“I walked away going from that saying we killed it and that it was fantastic,” he said about the event. “Honestly, in no way, shape or form in my mind did I think for some people that was the worst possible thing that could happen in a race because I enjoyed what was going on. There have been times where things have happened, and we jumped on it.
“Maybe I have pitched a story there and all of sudden, it played out to be a major part of the race. The one race I remember leaving the track with a big smile on my face was that Indy race, but we were down there telling the story not realizing how bad of a story it was for other people.”
Turn Announcer
“Now let’s bring in two additional voices you will be hearing throughout our broadcast. Let’s go to Rob Albright out in Turns One and Two.”
Unlike Rice and Gillie, Albright had no intentions to get into broadcasting. While growing up in Indiana, Albright’s father owned a Lincoln Mercury dealership and raced on the weekends. Post-college, Albright worked in financial services and raced on the weekends.
“I decided that it was too time consuming and expensive, so I told the track owner that I would not be racing anymore,” Albright said. “He said, ‘What if I pay you to come to the racetrack?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘I need a PA announcer.’ I said that I had never done anything like that before.
“He said as a backhanded compliment that I know the sport
and talk a lot so let’s give it a shot. For two years, I was a PA announcer at
the Speedrome in Indianapolis. The folks in the ASA series happened to be there
one night and I so happened to become their public address announcer.”
From there, Albright was able to work the first five ASA seasons on TNN. During
that time, he got to know Johnny Benson and was able to work on his business
affairs in Charlotte. From there, Rice called Albright and asked if he ever had
done radio because the network needed a turn announcer. From there, the rest is
history.
As a turn announcer for network, Albright is one of the main voices on the broadcast. In order to prepare for the broadcast, Albright and co-turn announcer Pat Patterson is watching every practice session and mock calling the cars on track.
“My preparation is watching every minutes of practice and in my mind calling the cars so that it is imprinted in my mind,” he said. “That has become increasingly significant and important through the years because it used to be that the same guys were in the same cars and paint schemes pretty much every week. It is no longer paint schemes and it may change from week to week.”
When it comes to calling NASCAR Xfinity Series races, Albright has to make sure that he is able to properly identify who is in the car and what the car is.
“I have to make sure that I am prepared to identify the car and not have to think about it,” Albright said. “I equate it to typing fast. If you type really fast, you never think about the letters. Your fingers know where the letters are. When we are doing play-by-play, we can’t stop and think about it. It has to be what we see has to immediately come out of my mouth.”
One of the biggest things a radio broadcaster has to do is to know when to pick up the call from the next person. Over the years, Albright, Patterson and the booth team have found an approximate geographic on the racetrack to drop the call. Despite having approximate geographic locations, there is no specific science.
Overall, the bottom line is to make the transitions between broadcast positions seamless, but also have to constantly be aware with what is going on.
“We have different voices, delivery styles, accents and inflections in our voices,” he said. “If we carry the same level of energy in each lap, I don’t mean that we are all monotone. If Doug and Mark pick up on a great battle, they raise the level of intensity, then I need to match that level.
“If that battle dissipates halfway through the turn, I may back it down a little bit when I drop it to Pat or if its settled out and I see a fight for fifth when they drop me the first place battle, I try to telegraph that to Pat as, ‘They settled out for the race lead, there is a great fight four spots back between so and so and so and so as they are halfway down the backstretch,’ so I don’t cold drop Pat.
“I never want to say, ‘he is building on that lead, but we have a great fight down the backstretch for 15th.’ What is Pat going to say? I think constantly being aware even though I have to focus on my third of the racetrack, I have to be aware of what is going on.”
While calling the current battle on the track, Albright is using his peripheral vision on the other parts of his turn position. What happens if Albright does miss something? The booth team will use the magic word “trouble.”
“Occasionally, I may be carrying a fight off Turn Two and have my head turned to the right when something happens entering Turn One,” he said. “What will generally happen, Doug and Mark will get a sense that I am still calling play-by-play, they will pause a beat and say, ‘Trouble
in Turn One.’ They will then be quiet knowing that is my area and that I will then pick up on it.
For Albright, a good turn call consists of two things: matching the energy of the entire play-by-play team and by making the transitions seem seamless. He alludes to the fact that people’s attention spans are very different from they were 10 to 15 years ago, which makes their challenging.
One of Albright’s most memorable race calls actually turned into a valuable lesson. It was at Atlanta Motor Speedway when Carl Edwards were battling for the lead in the closing laps.
“As they came out of Turn Two, this rolled out of my mouth, I said, ‘Off Turn Two, Kurt Busch and Carl Edwards are fighting for the lead. We have a tussle. We have a fight. We’ve got a war,’” Albright said.
“I just dropped it. I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever said, but not long after that, I got a call from Miller Brewing wanting to use that call in a TV commercial. I learned from that. What I though was stupid was energy and made the fans take notes with what they were hearing on the radio.”
Overall, one of the biggest things for PRN is that the race call cannot be contrived. If things car contrived, it falls flat. At the season ending awards banquet, the highlight video showcase calls that described the action, not something written down.
PRN will return to the airwaves Thursday, May 23, for Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series qualifying at Charlotte Motor Speedway.