How Fox covered the final lap of the Daytona 500
Much like many of us, Artie Kempner didn’t immediately know who won the Daytona 500.
Kempner, Fox Sports’ lead NASCAR director since the network started covering the Sprint Cup Series in 2001, had to look to his monitors in the production truck to figure out if Denny Hamlin or Martin Truex Jr. got to the finish line first.
“I actually thought, just from the angle, that Truex won the race,” Kempner said. “I was looking at camera 28 and it just looked to me that Truex got him by a nose and then if you look at the cut, we weren’t sure so we just stayed with the low shot until we got a definitive – basically from Hamlin’s crew going crazy.”
We spoke with Kempner this week to ask him how the network covered the finish of the 500, which was the closest in the race’s history. He took us through the steps of covering the final lap.
• The overhead shot for the majority of the final lap came from the Goodyear blimp. The blimp, which is in Daytona for all of Speedweeks, positions itself at the end of the race so it can be in position for the camera shot you saw Sunday of Kenseth leading the pack of cars.
“I just think the blimp at that point shows you the best perspective of where they are,” Kempner said. “And that’s our most difficult challenge in those situations is giving the viewer the best perspective … because when you get to the backstretch, our cameras are a little spread out more on the backstretch than they are on the front stretch.
Kempner, working his 13th Daytona 500, said it hit him, like many of us either watching at the track or at home, that the finish was going to be a fantastic one when Hamlin attacked the leaders in turn three.
“I was excited because when they got through three and they made the move, you kind of go ‘OK, we’re going to get this, this is going to happen’,” Kempner said. “And then you hope that somebody doesn’t screw it up and you end up with one car.”
• The broadcast went to camera 1 after the blimp. Camera 1 is assigned to the leader(s) the entire race and positioned at Daytona atop the roof of the tower adjacent to the spotters’ stand.
That’s the camera shot that had the field hurtling towards it. The “one car” quote from above is important here. The previous Daytona 500 closest finish came in 2007, when Kevin Harvick beat Mark Martin (in a race also covered by Fox) by 0.02 seconds.
But while Hamlin and Truex had the entire field stacked up in their rear-view mirrors, Harvick and Martin were all alone because there was a big crash behind them off of turn 4. The shot on Sunday had to ensure that many more than two cars were visible in the frame.
• The finish was also a good test of Fox’s high-speed finish line camera. The network installed the camera at the races it covers seven years ago and it’s positioned just above the outside wall at the start/finish line. Its main purpose is to provide cover for a finish like Sunday’s.
Those types of finishes don’t happen too often, but having the camera there just in case is worth it to Fox.
“We haven’t had anything like that — we’ve had some close ones, but typically you can tell [who wins the race],” Kempner said. “We haven’t had [Darlington 2003] finish like that. We have come back [to show] second place, who finished second or third. But we haven’t had it be that definitive with that camera that showed ‘There’s our winner.’”
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
