Tag Archives: SPEED

Motorsports Week – The Good, Bad, & Sad

Posted on by
Reply

This past week has been quite a mix – happy things, not so happy things, but lots of emotion nonetheless.  Starting last Sunday, on the good side, a SoCal racer named Charlie Kimball won his first IndyCar race at Mid-Ohio with an inspired drive in a back up car.  Staying happy, another couple of SoCal racers had quite a battle in the GT class of the Grand-Am race at Road America on Saturday.  Bill Auberlen in a Turner Motorsport BMW passed Patrick Long in a Park Place Motorsports Porsche late in the race to win the GT class. The Grand-Am – ALMS double-header at Road America was a great setup for sports car fans, and Sunday’s ALMS race was shaping up to have a fantastic finish across multiple classes, but a full course yellow with just under 9 minutes remaining left us with an anticlimactic finish under yellow.  Not so good.  But probably the worst part of the motorsports week was Sunday evening’s final broadcast of both Speed Center and Wind Tunnel as SPEED becomes Fox Sports 1 in the next week.

Motorsports Week – Charlie Kimball’s First IndyCar Win

In last Sunday’s Mid-Ohio IndyCar race, Charlie Kimball drove a fantastic race to take his first win in the series for the Ganassi Racing team.  He passed Simon Pagenaud on lap 73 of the 90 lap race for the final lead change of the race.  Kimball was on a different, and ultimately better strategy than his Ganassi teammates, Scott DIxon and Dario Franchitti.  Dixon and Franchitti were initially on a two stop, fuel save strategy, while Kimball was clocking off great times lap after lap.  He ultimately led 46 of the 90 laps.  The whole story was all the more remarkable because Kimball was driving a backup car due to a severe crash on Saturday morning practice.

Motorsports Week – Grand-Am Road America GT Race

Road America was the site of Grand-Am – ALMS double-header this weekend, which was quite a spectacle for sportscar racing fans.  In Saturday’s Grand-Am race SoCal’s Patrick Long and Bill Auberlen battled for the lead throughout the latter part of the race.  With just over 16 minutes to go in the 2 hour, 45 minute race, Auberlen got a good run on Long off of Turn 3 in his Turner Motorsport BMW and passed him for good under braking into Turn 5.  Long stayed close for the rest of the race, but ultimately finished second, still a great finish for his Park Place Motorsports team.  Also in Grand-Am race, Brendon Hartley and teammate Scott Mayer took advantage of a relatively late full course yellow and notched their first win for the Starworks Motorsport Daytona Prototype team.

Motorsports Week – ALMS Road America Race

Sunday’s Road America ALMS race was shaping up to a fantastic finish with tight battles across multiple classes and several leading cars getting low on fuel when a bad wreck by a GTC car brought out of full course yellow with about 9 minutes to go.  Unfortunately, as Johnny O’Connell said on the broadcast, ‘… I think they’re just taking too long here…’, and race control was not able to manage a return to green flag racing.  The set up for a tremendous finish was missed.  Even with a finish under yellow, Road America did not disappoint once again with a particularly tight battle in the GT class, which was ultimately won by the #91 SRT Viper driven by Marc Goossens and Dominik Farnbacher.

Motorsports Week – Farewell To SPEED, Speed Center, and Wind Tunnel

In both the bad and sad news of the week, SPEED broadcast their final weekend of racing, which also marked the end of Speed Center and Wind Tunnel, much to the chagrin of racing fans everywhere.  We’ve known about the Death of Speed for quite some time now, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.  I must say that while I was watching the final episode of Speed Center and Wind Tunnel, I was both saddened and somewhat unbelieving that Fox Sports 1 decided not to continue these popular enthusiast programs. I’ll especially miss Dave Despain and his excellent guests and regulars like Robin Miller.  I hope all those effected find even better opportunities in the near future.  Thanks for the great fun and great memories!

Death of SPEED

Posted on by
2

Before SPEED

Death of SPEED?  Say what?  Let’s start with a brief history.  In 1996 a new cable channel called Speedvision was launched to the great happiness and enjoyment of motorsports nuts across the country.  That first year, Speedvision picked up Formula 1 broadcast rights for the US beginning with replays.  By 1998, Speedvision had exclusive Formula 1 broadcast rights in the US.  The network grew its audience rapidly, especially among males, with innovative programming – remember Victory By Design and the SCCA World Challenge Series – and access to live events that just didn’t exist before on broadcast television.  I think of it as a whole channel dedicated to the motorsports programs of the old ABC Wide World of Sports.  Speedvision was awesome.

Along Came Fox

In 2001 News Corp invested in Speedvision and then bought out other investors to have a controlling share.  As Fox Sports had recently acquired NASCAR broadcast rights, Speedvision began including more and more NASCAR programming to complement Fox’s coverage.  During the 2002 Daytona 500, Speedvision was relaunched as Speed Channel, and over the next several years NASCAR and NASCAR-related programming took an even greater share of the broadcasts including the Craftsman Truck Series from 2003 along with NASCAR practice and qualifying sessions.  Throughout the mid to late naughties, SPEED also included plenty of other motorsports coverage including ALMS, Grand-Am, 24 Hours of Daytona, and Le Mans.  2008 brought High Definition broadcasting to Speed, launched as SPEED HD.  So far, so good.

SPEED – The Salad Years

With the launch of HD broadcasting, viewers were treated to some great coverage on SPEED.  NASCAR was still going strong, ALMS had some great years with epic battles in both prototype and GT classes, and in 2011 Formula 1 added HD broadcasting.  The SPEED 24 Hours of Le Mans coverage was truly fantastic, continuing with interesting and innovative programming even when the French feed was down to a bare minimum of cameras during the night.  However, some cracks were starting to show.  ALMS coverage was lost to ESPN.  Reality based programs began replacing true motorsports programming.  UFC showed up.  What’s happening to the neighborhood here?  Then SPEED2 showed up with a glimmer of hope and lots of true motorsports action.  But alas it’s still just a glimmer.  Hopefully it expands and maybe someday becomes a broadcast network of its own.

Death of SPEED

In the Spring, we started to hear that by 2014, SPEED would likely morph into Fox Sports 1, a national general sports channel somewhat similar to ESPN (like we need another one of those to add to ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPN News, ESPN Classic, and on and on).  NASCAR coverage would probably be reduced.  Things seem to be going in that direction with many of Speed’s broadcasts featuring a Fox logo along with the SPEED logo.  Supposedly much of the motorsports programming would move to Fuel  TV.  Last month, Formula 1 announced that they had secured a four year contract with NBC beginning in 2013.  Wow!  Another kick in the gut.  The team that brought us Formula 1 since the early days of Speedvision would be no more.

To me, the symbolic, emotional death of SPEED as we know it comes this very weekend, with the last Formula 1 broadcast and a week after the end of the NASCAR season.  If rumors/stories are true, and Fox Sports 1 takes the place of Speed in 2014, presumably 2013 will be a transition year, but to me, we already have the death of SPEED – at least in spirit and in its original incarnation – even if the life support machine stays plugged in a little longer.