Jamie McMurray, a former NASCAR Cup Series competitor and Daytona 500 winner, who now serves as a color commentator with CW Sports for the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Part Series as well as being an analyst with Fox Sports, addressed fans who criticize remote booth broadcasts and favor announcers being at the track.
McMurray spoke with Kelly Crandall at Racer.com, about it. In Crandall’s coverage of her interview, she revealed that The CW booth located in Concord, North Carolina has more than 25 cameras alongside a bevy of data that includes live timing and scoring.
As for McMurray’s thoughts on fans preferring broadcasts be done from the tracks and not in the remote booth. He shared, “I’m kind of bitter about this. I’ve seen people be like, ‘it’s not fair to Adam, Jamie, and Parker to not be at the track’, and that’s simply not true. The balance of CW will be at more races this year than any other network.”
“But the studio is exceptional – the monitors that we have and the different camera angles actually let us see more than we can see at the track,” he explained. “The racetrack is nice to look out the window at pit stops because you can see all of pit road. However, you can’t look out the window and call the race.”
“We’ve heard broadcasters talk about a spin that you don’t see on TV, and one thing that Adam really emphasized when we started doing this is that people at home can only see what’s on our screen. So it doesn’t do us any good to talk about anything that’s not happening with what they can see,” he elaborated.
While McMurray is right to point out that viewers can only see what’s on their screen that does not mean they don’t want to know what is happening. If the cameras don’t catch something happening, viewers will still want to know about it. Look no further than the criticisms that the Fox broadcast received from this past weekend at Watkins Glen where it failed to highlight key wrecks involving Josh Berry, Carson Hocevar, Bubba Wallace, John Hunter Nemechek, and Cody Ware.
It’s also not out of the ordinary for an announcer at the track to spot something happening on the track that directs the camera and the production team to highlight it. And it’s not just wrecks. There might be a better battle happening on the track than the one that is currently being shown by the cameras. This on-site awareness cannot be replicated in a remote booth no matter how well-equipped it might be.
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