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DIFFEY: Behind The Scenes At The Rolex 24, Pt. 1
SPEED's Leigh Diffey explains what goes into SPEED's broadcast for the 50th Rolex 24 at Daytona...
Leigh Diffey  |  Posted January 26, 2012   Daytona Beach, FL
The behind-the-scenes aspect of our job at SPEED is something quite interesting, and I’d personally love to be a “tour guide” to help show you what goes into the production of a GRAND-AM telecast, especially with the 50th Rolex 24 at Daytona, our biggest race of the season, coming up in a few short days.

Between the myriad of people, trucks, equipment, everything has to come together. It’s no easy feat, as everything has to work perfectly. Audio has to be working in harmony with video and the commentary team, the director, the producer... everything. It is quite a massive undertaking to make it work. But over the course of the 25 hours, to join it together and make it work for that period of time is quite the challenge.

Even though we’re not doing flag-to-flag coverage, it gets even more intense every year as you want to improve from the time before. There's always a drive to bring something different and new. How are we going to change it? What are we going to do better than last year? Social media now plays a role as well, so we're trying to integrate that into the broadcast. While it's almost always unachievable, there's a drive to tell almost every story that there is out there.

For us, the preparation began at the Roar Before the 24 test at Daytona earlier this month. We didn’t always used to come to the GRAND-AM post-season and pre-season tests. But we’ve been coming recently due to the drive and determination to make the broadcast better each year. We had the biggest team ever at the Roar test and made such an effort in order to be on top of it, even more so than ever.

During a typical weekend or test, we go around and endeavor to speak with every team and the majority of the drivers to get what's not in a press release or what's not on the internet. We're always looking for something different that we can bring to the table to tell the viewer what they may have not read in a magazine or on a Web site.

It's a very hard task, especially for the Rolex 24, as there are close to 60 cars in the race and we also have the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge to cover as well. While research is the primary reason we're at the tests, there were also pre-production meetings that went on, so we could get a jump start on race week. It was important to get as much as we could "in the can”, so to speak. And with this being the 50th anniversary, there's even more pressure on getting those in-depth interviews done.

Since the test, there have been a lot of conference calls and planning. We all do our own research from the broadcast side of it, but the production team is working harder than what we do to put all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together.

Check back Friday for Part 2 of Leigh's "Behind the TV Scenes" feature.

Leigh Diffey brings his considerable hosting talents and personality to a number of SPEED's road racing broadcasts after years of covering every major form of international motorsports in his native Australia and abroad.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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