CUP: NASCAR On FOX Pit Reporters Keep Busy

Sprint Cup

CUP: NASCAR On FOX Pit Reporters Keep Busy

The NASCAR on FOX reporters roaming pit road for the Daytona 500 aren’t just sitting back waiting on the TV booth to call on them...

Megan Englehart | Posted February 24, 2012 Charlotte, NC

Matt Yocum will serve as a pit reporter for NASCAR on FOX and SPEED this weekend at Talladega Superspeedway. (Photo: SPEED.com)

NASCAR ON FOX PIT REPORTERS OPERATE AT WARP SPEED IN SUNDAY’S LIVE COVERAGE OF SEASON-OPENING DAYTONA 500

“We don’t use golf carts, mopeds or pogo sticks -- we run!”

No, this is not a small child’s description of how he spent recess at school. That is Dick Berggren’s portrayal of the energetic manner in which he and his three colleagues execute their duties as pit reporters for NASCAR on FOX’s broadcast of the Daytona 500 (1 p.m. ET live on FOX).

The four NASCAR on FOX reporters roaming pit road for the Daytona 500, the network’s “guys back at the shop,” aren’t just sitting on a stack of tires for 500 miles, waiting on the TV booth to call on them. Berggren, Steve Byrnes, Krista Voda and Matt Yocum are hustling, gathering notes, talking to crew members and team PR representatives and pitching stories to their pit producer lap-after-lap. In short, they’re running around like mad men, all in a collaborative effort to tell millions of fans about their favorite drivers and teams each Sunday.

Everything is amplified in the Daytona 500, including the responsibilities and roles of a pit reporter. The four unanimously point to “The Great American Race” as posing the biggest challenges they face all season.

“The hardest part of the Daytona 500 is the distance from pit road to anything else on track property,” Berggren said. “The garage is big and spread out, and it’s sometimes a long run. Yes, we literally run to get to someone’s garage who has just fallen out of the event. It’s an even longer trip to the infield care center to interview drivers who have been in a crash. We don’t use golf carts, mopeds or pogo sticks -- we run!”

“The Daytona 500 is our most demanding race for several reasons,” stated Byrnes, who also hosts NASCAR Race Hub on SPEED. “Many teams have changed over-the-wall pit crew members, as well as other key personnel, during the off-season, and one of my toughest challenges is unearthing all those changes and learning who all those new people are.”

As any scoring monitor attests, the running order officially changes dozens of times, leaving pit reporters scrambling to stay abreast of where their cars are on the track.

“No race other than Talladega changes so frequently and so often among the positions on the race track,” Voda explained. “If I’m responsible for 12 cars, I keep tabs on the ones running the best. You think you’re in the place you need to be on pit road, but by the time they come back around to the start/finish line, they’re all jumbled around and your guy who was 32nd is now fourth. I stand there with my notes, asking myself, ‘How did that happen? Where did he come from?’ Then you toss aside your notes and what you were going to say and go in a new direction. It’s all about adjusting on the fly.”

While the volume of second-by-second lead changes is staggering, so is the number of spinning plates pit reporters keep in the air for 500 miles.

“The amount of information we monitor on pit road would surprise most people,” Berggren said. “I simultaneously listen to different things in my right and left ears. The broadcast itself and whatever Pam Miller, my pit producer, tells me is in my right ear. I listen to driver/spotter/crew chief conversations in my left ear. My pit spotter, Jeff Propst, listens to three scanners at once. He hands me notes about what he hears and sees. PR people come by with notes about what’s going on with their cars. I watch cars on the track to see if someone is beginning to smoke. I watch pit monitors to see if a driver’s lap times are getting better or worse. I go up and down pit road after pit stops to see what tires look like and to check with gas men to see if they got all the fuel in. It’s multi-tasking to the extreme for the entire race.”

“Some people might be amazed by the fact I use only about two percent of the notes I compile on any given week,” Yocum said. “My biggest motivation is having that unique angle or fact to work into a story at the right moment, because once that moment happens, it's gone forever. I love finding and telling a human interest story on everyone from the driver to the team cook. There are cool stories that I've held for a year or two just to make sure it plays at the right time.”

The “head juggler” for NASCAR on FOX pit reporters is their pit producer, Pam Miller, who sits in the production truck with race producer Barry Landis and his crew. Miller hands out pit road assignments on Saturday afternoons, splitting pit road into four sections. At that point, reporters go to work in preparation for Sunday’s event. They talk to the 12 or 13 drivers, crew chiefs and crew members they will cover during the race, inquiring about their car, changes they’ve made and challenges they’ve faced throughout the weekend.

When the four glean tidbits of information about their respective cars during the race, they key their radio to tell Miller, who serves as the intermediary between them and Landis.

“If I hear Matt Kenseth talking about something his car is doing, I try to sell my new story to Pam,” Byrnes relayed. “I say, ‘Hey, I know what is wrong with Matt and can add to what Darrell (Waltrip) just said about Matt’s car.’ She then tries to sell that to Barry, and sometimes it is amazing how fast that process can work.”

Each pit reporter travels up and down pit road with an entourage. They work with the same camera operator and pit spotter each week, in addition to a battery runner and someone holding a monitor carrying the race broadcast. Most pit spotters have been with their respective reporters since or before NASCAR on FOX’s first race broadcast in Feb. 2001. Since reporters constantly take notes, talk to crew members, communicate with Miller, listen to team radio communication and formulate stories, their pit spotters assist by taking notes and scanning radio frequencies of their assigned teams all day.

These spotter/reporter duos have been together so long that each has its own “language” with which they communicate throughout the day, whether via hand signals, notes or simply intuition.

“Just like a crew chief and driver develop chemistry, we develop chemistry with our pit spotters,” said Voda, who also hosts NCWTS Setup on SPEED. “John Gelzer, my spotter, knows exactly where I’m going when I turn to leave a pit because he knows how I think, just like I know exactly what he means when he hands me a note that simply says, ‘2.’ It’s that sixth sense we have about each other.”

While keeping tabs on white-knuckle racing at Daytona can wreak havoc on reporters’ nerves, “bloopers” still pop up from time to time. After all, it’s live television.

“I was calling a pit stop once and was moving from one pit to the next,” Byrnes recalled. “I called the first stop and slid over into the next pit to call the second. As I did, a crew guy shot the sign board back and the pole hit me square in the gut. It completely knocked the wind out of me while I was on-air and I literally could not speak or respond to tell the TV truck or booth why I wasn’t talking. They all got a kick out of the fact I was speechless.”

“I feel like I make a new blooper every race, although we’re our own worst critics,” Voda laughed. “Sometimes I kick a stack of tires or punch my fist in the air because I’m so mad at what I just said on-air. But you have to get over it. The race demands you get over it.”

Reporters, like drivers, experience a range of emotions during the Daytona 500. Drivers often climb from their cars emotionally drained. Pit reporters can relate to that feeling, although theirs stems from the mental demands of keeping track of countless lead changes and following the breathless pack racing showcased by 43 drivers.

“We feel the emotions and mental drain throughout the day,” Byrnes said. “We’re so close to all the action. We’ll look up and see two cars wiggling like crazy and just hold our breath hoping they can straighten it out and not take out half the field. There is a constant sense of apprehension and relief. It’s breathtaking for 500 miles but I’m exhausted when it’s over.”

Calling the action on pit road year-after-year, race-after-race, each of the NASCAR on FOX pit reporters says absolutely nothing compares to the pageantry and emotion the Daytona 500 invokes.

“You couldn't stick a screw driver in an electrical socket and come close to the electricity in the air and coursing through your body when the cars roll off the grid,” Yocum said. “It's one of those rare moments in all of sports when the excitement meter is pegged. The energy and anticipation of the fans and competitors resonates through you. You see the range of emotions in the competitors – everything from anxiety to anticipation -- and can't help but pump up your adrenalin.”

“There’s a buzz and electricity on pit road before the Daytona 500,” Voda elaborated. “When you look up, you realize there are tens of thousands of people who have taken time off from work to go to this race, and not only am I here, I am standing shoulder-to-shoulder with drivers as they get ready to strap in for the biggest race of the year. It’s mind-blowing.”

Pit reporters enjoy a front-row seat to some of the most memorable and emotional moments in all of racing because they are with teams throughout the race and are one of the first to greet drivers in moments of both defeat and triumph.

“The worst part of my job is interviewing a guy either in the garage or outside the infield care center because that means he just watched his Daytona 500 hopes go up in smoke,” Byrnes stated. “They just lost the race they look forward to all year. I understand and respect the effort they put in, so those interviews can be gut-wrenching for me despite how many times I’ve done them.”

On the flip side, there arise those once-in-a-lifetime, captivating moments in which pit reporters are first-hand witnesses to history, and it’s those rare instances that help define the sport. Their job is to convey that spectacle and atmosphere to the viewers at home.

“I worked Dale Earnhardt’s pit for his 1998 Daytona 500 win and it’s the one I’ll always remember,” Berggren recalled. “There was a tremendous amount of emotion in the pit that day, as you might imagine. Don Hawk, who at the time was Earnhardt’s business manager, spent about the last 15 laps in prayer. Then when it happened, when Dale finally crossed the line, his pit exploded in emotion and celebration. That was one of the most electric moments of my entire life.”