Yahoo Autos Voices of Speed: The Enthusiasts' TV Channel Goes Dark
It was “our” channel. Whether you were a gearhead, a hot rodder, a racer, a rider, a pilot, a boater, or just an enthusiast of anything with a motor, New Year’s Eve 1995 brought a television channel that was just for us. It was originally called Speedvision, later changing to Speed Channel before ultimately settling on simply Speed.
Started with a $100 million investment, Speedvision originally broadcast to 3.2 million homes. On its first day, founder Roger Werner sat with his small team in the control room overlooking the harbor in Stamford, Connecticut. “We were all extremely excited about it. Personally, I felt that we had realized a dream, a dream rattling in the back of my head for a decade or so. We could create a channel for guys like me, an electronic campfire for gearheads and speed freaks.” The key to the success of all incarnations of Speed was the passion of the people behind and in front of the camera. That fervor fed the spirit that defined “our” channel.
But on August 17, 2013, that channel goes dark. Owner Fox will replace the red Speed logo with the blue branding of Fox Sports 1 (FS1), a 24-hour multisport network that will go head-to-head with ESPN. FS1 will operate under the mantra of “bringing the fun back.”
In terms of motorsports, you will still largely be able to get your fix on FS1 and Fox Sports 2 (formerly FuelTV) via much of the same Speed programming. But save for coverage of the Barrett-Jackson auctions, the nonracing components of Speed are no more, including Wind Tunnel and the highlight show Speed Center, two of Speed’s signature titles. Their 179,000 and 157,000 weekly viewers (as tabulated by Nielsen Media Research) on Sunday nights were not sufficient to ward off the ax.
The demise of Speed was purely economic. Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch split his media empire into two separately traded public companies. Speed was parceled off to the newly formed Twenty-First Century Fox, where reinventing the channel as FS1 will be a major earnings driver, as will bundling FS1 and FS2 in contracts with content providers. Speed’s built-in reach of 90 million subscribers made the decision something of a no-brainer. Laura Martin, an analyst with Needham & Company, says Speed’s monthly 25-ish cents per subscriber charge can be raised to nearly a dollar with the Fox Sports channels, “and that looks like a good deal to the cable operators, compared to the $5 they have to pay ESPN.”
For many viewers, though, the final straw came on February 11, 2002, with Speedvision’s rebranding as Speed Channel. It was then, some months after Fox exercised its right to buy out other partners for $750 million, that the channel began to emphasize NASCAR programming; more than 65,000 people immediately signed a petition to minimize so-called NASCRAP. The eclectic nature of Speedvision—not the wall-to-wall stock-car racing of Speed Channel—is what had attracted viewers like Jay Leno.
“You could see one of Alain de Cadenet’s Victory By Design videos, and then you would see the rare footage of Frank Flockhart Speed Car,” says Leno. “I liked the randomness of it. I like things that roll, explode, and make noise. I just like the fact that I learned something I didn’t know. Like, ‘Here’s a documentary on Corvairs, let me watch that.’ That was kind of cool.
“Now, when it went to Speed [Channel], it just became all NASCAR. That’s great if you like NASCAR, but I’m more interested in the automobiles, the engineers, and the designs, and the personalities. That’s really when it lost me. It became, ‘Here’s some stuff going fast.’ ”
Sam Posey, 69
With Speed: 1996–2013
Currently: NBC Sports Network, Formula 1 broadcasts
Sam Posey had been at the height of motorsports broadcasting, working for ABC Sports during its halcyon days.
“The ABC years were unbelievable, working with Roone Arledge, all these guys who are legends in the business, but it wasn’t fun in the sense that they were all television professionals.
“At Speedvision, they were all race fans who happened to be very good at television.
“A big thing for me was that one of the first shows Speedvision put on the air was a Trans-Am piece I had done. I asked Roger Werner, ‘Roger, what are our ratings?’ At ABC, ratings were everything. He said, ‘Did your mother watch the show?’
“Those early days were amazing. We didn’t have any commercials, so we slugged in black-and-white English commercials from the ’60s for Rover, Hillman, something for liquid suspension, I don’t remember what that was…trying to look like we knew what we were doing!”
Allen Bestwick, 51
With Speed: 1996–2005
Currently: ABC/ESPN, NASCAR Sprint Cup broadcasts
Photo courtesy of ESPN Images
Bestwick hosted Inside Winston Cup, a show featuring drivers Michael Waltrip, Kenny Schrader, and Johnny Benson that started in the network’s second month. It was a bit haphazard at the beginning.
“We were in Daytona in February for the 500, and I’m walking around the garage, and I walked up to Waltrip and said, ‘I hear we’re doing a TV show together.’
`Yeah, I know, I heard that, too, but I haven’t heard any more. What are we doing?’
‘Well, as far as I know, we’re starting after the 500. Be at such-and-such a place at 11 on Monday.’
‘Okay.’
“And that’s kind of how the first show went. But it was a blast, an absolute blast. I look at my time with Speedvision as being one with great creative freedom and great license to have fun on television.
“We had fun talking about racing on television and people watched. How cool was that! That show and that experience really taught me people can’t have fun watching television if you’re not having fun making television.”
Rich Christensen, 48
With Speed: 2005–2010
Currently: MAVTV, Won & Done
Photo by Robert Grice
Under the overall stewardship of Jim Liberatore from 2001 to 2005, Speed Channel tried to balance the demand that it become NASCAR-centric while retaining the ethos of Speedvision. Liberatore eventually lost the battle, but one show under his aegis that hit a home run was the reality show Pinks. Featuring amateur drag racers competing for pink slips, Pinks fell victim to an increasing emphasis on NASCAR. For creator and host Rich Christensen, the cancellation still stings.
“Pinks was getting a million viewers per week cumulatively. You don’t take the number-one show and bury it. When 33,000 showed up at Concord [Z-Max Dragway] on August 25, 2009, all four lanes going, I thought I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. I was right up there with Dog the Bounty Hunter and Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs. It’s not easy to shine in that cable universe.
“They lost over a third of their audience [when changing the emphasis to more NASCAR], ad sales were down, the satisfaction ranking was down, the ratings were down.”
For his part, Christensen appreciates the Fox strategy to convert Speed to FS1. “In the current climate, in the current situation, it was a brilliant business move. Despite my animosity, I hope they succeed and give a challenge to ESPN.”
Dave Despain, 67
With Speed: 1998–2013
Currently: Fox Sports 1
Photo courtesy of FOX Sports
The signature motorsports show on Speed is—or was—Wind Tunnel with Dave Despain. It ended on Sunday, August 12, after a 10-and-a-half-year run that included more than 600 shows and 1200 guests. (The final WT interview was with Jeff Gordon; watch it here.)
Despain is a very special talent, according to Eddie Gossage, the president of Texas Motor Speedway: “Dave has always been to me the thinking man’s journalist on Speed. A lot more depth, incredible knowledge. They had some people [at Speed] with incredible knowledge, but Dave is without peer, and I’m going to miss Wind Tunnel a lot.”
The start of Wind Tunnel in 2003 was as unique as that of any Speedvision program, says Despain: “There was no blueprint for the show. We were very much making it up as we went along, but the initial concept was ‘fan phone-in show,’ a radio call-in show that just happens to be on TV, thus the look of the show that last eight or nine of its years. That big goofy radio microphone served no technical purpose. It was a vestige of how we started, which was basically a radio show on television.
“The first week we were on the air was in February 2003. That week Chip Ganassi had announced his decision to move from Champ Car to the IRL, which we thought was a pretty big story, so in the course of planning our first show, we said, ‘Let’s call Chip and see if we can get him to do an interview.’
“Sure enough, he did it, and we thought, ‘That was pretty good. Maybe we ought to do more of that. Maybe we ought to get a big-name interview every week,’ not having any idea if we could.
“As it turned out, we were successful beyond our wildest dreams and, for whatever reason, attracted a who’s who of motorsports guests over the years, and that became the hallmark of the show. It started as a half-hour experiment and ended up having a 10-and-half-year run.”
Mario Andretti, 73
Photo courtesy of Mario Andretti
After Liberatore was cashiered, the next two regimes—the first led by Hunter Nickel and based in Charlotte, the second based in the Fox corporate offices in Los Angeles—placed an even greater emphasis on actual racing content. Mario Andretti was appreciative. “I think probably when it came on the scene, originally, I thought it was the greatest thing since hot dogs,” says the former F1 World Champion, Indy 500 winner, and Daytona 500 winner. “Over the years, when everything failed, I turned on Speed. It is a compliment that the ‘Speed Performer of the Year’ was named after me.
“You could watch every discipline on the planet played on there. There was something—national, international, series—always playing. We’re going to miss a channel that highlighted motorsports globally. Being able to watch the Super V8s or rallying, that was always important.”
The demise of Speed does not make Andretti happy. “For us, as racers, it has got to be a negative. It’s something that is being taken away from us. As a man in the business, as a racer, I am somewhat disappointed. It’s the fact that when I’ll turn it on, I’ll see baseball,” he quipped.
As for Roger Werner, the man who created “our” channel, and who is still rankled by the fact that he had to sell in 2001? Where will he be when the switch is flipped to FS1?
“Probably at my home in Canada, sipping a very strong drink.”
You Might Also Like
