NASCAR insiders make plea to TV broadcasts for change to camera shots

It’s early in the NASCAR season and opinions on everything ranging from the actual racing at the track, to the format of the racing, to the camera work have flown.

The latter drew the interest of insiders Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic, who recently covered a race in a different way. Normally at the track, this time Gluck was covering the Atlanta race remotely.

And something immediately stuck out.

“It’s always a slap of reality when I get home from being at the track,” Gluck said on The Teardown podcast. “Like Daytona I was just there in the press box watching this whole race, seeing the whole field. Then here I am today trying to watch the race and it’s zoomed in on the two leaders of a superspeedway race. What’s the pack doing? I can’t see anything. Are they three-wide? What’s going on? Where are the runs coming from?”

Gluck asked exactly the question many fans ask on a weekly basis: Is this the best way the sport can be presented?

Credit FOX with some compelling early season broadcasts, but that has been as much about the racing itself as the actual camera work. Gluck pointed out the difference in what you see on TV versus what you’d see in person is stark.

“When you’re at the track you don’t watch it like that,” he said. “You watch it zoomed out, you’re watching the whole field. Why are they zooming in on like the whole super zoomed?”

Bianchi chimed in with a potential solution on the camera front.

“I will go to my grave that it should be a requirement that networks, any network, don’t care who it is, at a superspeedway race, particularly like a drafting track, their primary shot should be almost like an overhead cam,” Bianchi said. “Like a zoomed-in helicopter cam so I can clearly see who’s who and the moves that are coming. That’s what I want to see.”

It’s not that NASCAR can’t feature the up close camera or spend certain segments of the race focusing on certain drivers. It’s just that, when the race starts getting into key moments, it’s often easier to see the whole field than a zoomed-in shot.

“Occasionally you can go to something else, but primarily I want to see that shot of the overhead camera,” Bianchi said. “And I would say this, on like an intermediate track — Kansas, Las Vegas, Charlotte — I want to go to that shot particularly on restarts. For the first five, 10 laps after a restart, and then you can go something else.

“But really on a drafting track give me that overhead camera, let me see the runs and who’s coming and up and that kind of thing. I think that would be a great way to educate and really show the beauty of this racing. Because this really is, to me, I love it. It’s like a chess match in a lot of respects and sometimes that gets lost, the nuance of it.”