FOX Daytona 500 Preview Press Call Highlights
2015 MARKS THE 15TH YEAR THAT FOX ANNOUNCERS MIKE JOY, DARRELL WALTRIP & LARRY MCREYNOLDS HAVE WORKED TOGETHER IN THE BROADCAST BOOTH, WHICH IS LONGER THAN ANY OTHER THREE-MAN BROADCAST CREW IN PROFESSIONAL SPORTS. THE TRIO RESPONDED TO HOW THEY’VE LASTED THIS LONG.
JOY: The main difference is that FOX Sports is an analyst-driven production. You see that in football, baseball, and you see it in NASCAR. That in and of itself was a big culture shift from the way that CBS, ABC and NBC were putting sports on the air, where their anchors were at the top of the telecast and then they would fill in with analysts specific to a given sport. This was very different right from the start and I think that’s one of the big reasons it works so well."
WALTRIP: “I live this sport. I live it. I breathe it. I want to know what’s going on, I want to stay involved, and I want to be connected. I thrive on NASCAR. It’s who I am. It’s what I do. When you take people, and this is what FOX has been so good at, who are passionate about their sport and put them together, you’re going to have a great telecast. We love it. It’s a labor of love. I wish we did every race (of the NASCAR season)."
MCREYNOLDS: “We’re all so different, we’re almost alike. I think that we all know our roles and compliment each other. We try to give each other the space that each one needs to perform that role, but at the same time, we have each other’s backs. The biggest thing that makes it work is that outside of the booth we’re friends. We care about each other."
FOX SPORTS PRESIDENT ERIC SHANKS ON SUNDAY’S DAYTONA 500 GROUP QUALIFYING FORMAT: “I know it’s not the usual way of qualifying and some people thought it might have been a bit messy, but I was really entertained throughout the whole thing. FOX or TV is not the reason that qualifying is the way it is for Daytona, but how much do we all love green-white checkers? A restart that’s going to end up, on a superspeedway, having five minutes of great action to the checkered flag. There was a lot of chaos and jockeying and it looked a bit like a train wreck at times on pit road, but then there were five minutes of really intense action and people responded to the entertainment value of it. I’m not quite sure what else they could do to tweak it, but it was different, and having those intense moments is different than the way Daytona qualifying has been in the past."
MCREYNOLDS, WALTRIP COMMENT ON THE SUCCESS OF LAST YEAR’S CHASE FORMAT AND THE WAY IT UNFOLDED:
MCREYNOLDS: “(Kevin) Harvick had been at Richard Childress Racing his entire career, and obviously I have spent some time there, and the big philosophy of Richard Childress Racing is try to win races, but also to be good and consistent. Well, unfortunately, consistency wasn’t the whole answer. Until this past year, if you had one bad run, one bad issue in the Chase, you were pretty much done. It pretty much eliminated you because of the way the competition was. Last year, Kevin obviously was winning races, laps and doing all those things, and then it came down to the fact that it wasn’t about consistency, it was about winning the right races in that Chase and that’s obviously what he did at Phoenix and at Homestead."
WALTRIP: “It was one word if you want to know what created all the controversy, excitement, drama – and that was elimination. You knew every three races that someone was going to be eliminated. That one word is what caused all of the excitement and all of the drama at the end of the year, knowing that the big price at the end of the year is Homestead. So I think that created the excitement we saw. And Kevin (Harvick) is one of my best buddies but I call him ‘the instigator’ because if there is something he can instigate, he does it. Just like when he pushed Brad [Keselowski] into Jeff Gordon at Texas, or Saturday night when he got up in Joey Logano’s face, he just likes to do that stuff. He likes to instigate things. We talked more about him than who won the race and that is part of his plan too. He doesn’t do things off the cuff; I think he kind of plans them out actually."
WALTRIP, MCREYNOLDS & JOY RANK NASCAR’S BEST DRIVERS:
WALTRIP: “You look at Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and there are some talented young men in our sport. I look at guys who go out and race hard like a Kevin Harvick. There are just too many good drivers right now for me to say that anyone is better than the other. Carl Edwards is obviously a great driver and how he handles his sponsors the best in the garage by mentioning his sponsors without making it seem like he’s reading them off of a list. So, I love Carl. He’s a great driver, he’s good with sponsors, and he has a good following. Carl has always been at the top of my list. I have told him, and I have said it many times, that if I were starting a team tomorrow, I would choose Carl…"
MCREYNOLDS: “Kevin Harvick will be high on my list, not just because he won the championship last year but he is a smart racecar driver. And how in the world can you not even mention the name Jimmie Johnson, a guy who has won 60 races and six championships? What impresses me the most about Jimmie, and I know he had an off year last year and there are a lot of drivers who would love to have a year when you’ve won four races, but the races and the championships he’s won with all the different Chase configurations, rules and cars. He even won the championship one year when we ran two different cars. So I don’t know how you would not include Jimmie Johnson in this conversation and I don’t know how you wouldn’t include Jeff Gordon in this conversation, especially to be as competitive as that man has been since 1993."
JOY: “At this moment, Kevin Harvick is the best driver in the sport. Not just because of what he did last year, or should I say what he and Rodney Childers did, which is head and shoulders above everybody else, including his own team. But I think if you have a ten lap shootout, of any race, we don’t call him a closer for no reason. I say put that steering wheel in Kevin Harvick’s hands for a green-white-checkered shootout at just about any track. Now with that being said, I would take Jeff Gordon’s savvy, his marketing experience, his skill, and his desire last year over just about anybody in the garage. And then you would have to look at Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the season he has had in a decade along with Jeff Gordon."