Behind The Scenes of Remote Race Control

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome, everybody, to another edition of NASCAR's Hallertalk. I am NASCAR's Mike Ford joined, as always, by Amanda Ellis and Amanda. How are we doing? We are doing great. All right. I'm excited to meet you. And excited to head back to Chicago, LAM. I spent many of years attending Reese in the Chicago LAM, just like the two of you. So excited to head back there this weekend. Well, speaking of Chicago LAM, and excited to be back there, also joined, as always, by Nate Ryan, who spent at least four years learning, getting that big brain filled with all his big words at Northwestern University. Nate Ryan, how you doing, bud? I bought my first car, which I still own, by the way. I bought my first car in Jolietta, Illinois, not for-- No, really. --of the rent speedway. So that's my frame of reference for this race track, is whenever I think about that there's NASCAR, Cupseries Racing, and the other Nashville Series Racing in Jolietta, Illinois. Like I think about, yeah, that was where I bought my first automobile, went into Jolietta, Toyota, sometime long ago, and bought a car. Now they're racing the Cupseries there. So it was always surreal to me. I never thought-- not only did I go to Northwestern, I also grew up in the Western suburbs of Chicago in Naperville. So they've been-- --with this track. Oh, you know, when the track first opened, my mom used to still live in Naperville, so I'd stay with her and just commute to the race track. I think a lot of teams actually used to stay around-- In Naperville, yeah. Yeah, Naperville. Great. Naperville, a great little town, by the way. It is. Has a very nice-- Yes. If you have a chance to visit Naperville, you totally should. While you're also visiting. I like you going up there. So yeah, the entire thing is just surreal. And so now that it's back, I'm even more happier about it, because obviously, we don't need to go back in my Fontana PTSD, but yeah, I was starting to get it myself. Yeah, where you go? My god. You guys are just killing race tracks that I have this personal connection to. So thanks for reestablishing this one. I appreciate it. If you want to feel really old, because we obviously-- all three are here on this spot, guys-- Carter Zillich in 2019, which is the last time we race in Chicago, and was 13 years old. Yeah, wow. That's what I was. That is really putting it in perspective. It's very-- yes. Well, the best news I heard all day was that you still have that car. I know you've gotten picked on a lot about that car, which I don't think is deserved, because it's actually in pretty good shape. When did you get that car? I know what you're talking about. It's fantastic. It's calling me out now. All right, let's put a data on it. What the hell? I think people can look this stuff up online, probably. "March of 1995" is how long it has been. That's fantastic. That car. So fantastic. It's 31 years old. Fun fact, when you reach the third-year market in North Carolina, you no longer have to go into an inspection station. You can just renew online. That's more-- The ability-- That was keeping it. I just wanted to see if that actually was true. It is, by the way, for everybody who's interested. I feel like two for cars for three years. That's bizarre. You would think that would be extra expected. I thought. Right. You would think, at that point, they would say, no, you can't drive that car. I thought that's what that you're going to say. I'm trying to put it illegally. We're not inspecting your car anymore. You're just going to think of it. No, I can keep driving. So almost 94,000 miles in counting. So we'll keep it rolling. That's actually not that much for a 31-year-old car. I feel like. All right. Well, we'll get back to the-- Yeah, this is good. You can tell that there wasn't much to talk about in Sonoma after we just ate up a good 5, 10 minutes on that conversation. But to that point, so in all seriousness, yes, the Sonoma Race Weekend was pretty clean from a holler-talk agenda item perspective. So what we figured we'd do-- we do a little bit of a different format this week. So not really going to dive into the Weedy stuff at Sonoma just because there's not much to pull from the Race Weekend in northern California. But I did notice one tweet, or I guess, post, as they call them now, on X from Jeff Glock. That talked about Elton Sawyer was in at the Race Track this weekend. And he was officiating doing his role on a Race Weekend from the NASCAR Production Facility and the Remote Race Control in Concord, North Carolina. And some of the replies I noticed suggested that that was a bad move, or Elton couldn't do his job as well doing it remotely and things like this. And understand some of those comments. So thought it might be helpful to explain what happens in Race Control, in Remote Race Control. And to do that, we're brought on the competition strategies at NASCAR, Scott Miller, former Senior Vice President of Competition. So before we get into that conversation, I do want to talk about Elton's role in Race Control specifically. So Elton-- I think there are-- let me go back. I think there are a few roles that need to be onsite. And believe it or not, Senior Vice President of Competition probably isn't one of them. I think it's important that he's there more often than not, which he is. This is his first week and off probably in two years, if I had to guess. But Race Director is certainly one of them. You need a Race Director looking out the window and making sure the lineup is correct and all that. Two, I think the Series Director, he needs to have the pulse of what the garage is happening. And probably the chief score, timing scoring, Kyle McKinney in this case, probably the three that absolutely need to be there, and also the emergency service coordinator. So Chase for Shears, who's been on the Hallertalk several times. And he directs the safety vehicles where to go and dispatches those and so on and so forth. And has a lot of roles outside of Race Control as well. So those four individuals probably have to be at the racetrack. Elton's job largely in Race Control is to be the chief decision maker. If there's a big decision that needs to be made or he needs to weigh in from a senior executive level, he that's his role in Race Control. He's not directing anything that's going on out the window. That's all Tim Berman or whoever the Race Director is. He's not making a lot of the blend line rule calls or restart violations. That's the series director's decision. He'll weigh in if necessary. But he's kind of there as the tiebreaker, if you will. So Elton can do pretty much every single thing as far as from green flag to checkered flag. He can do that remote race control, same amount of effort and know how and has all the tools, the same tools that he needs, whether he's on site at Sonoma Raceway or off site and Concord, North Carolina. So he chose to check it out. He also did that a few times. He did that for the truck race and the O'Reilly race. At Charlotte Motor Speedway, otherwise, he's always been at the race track and in Race Control. So I wanted to sort of clean some of that up and clear that up in case anyone had some questions. And then to go a little bit deeper and get into the weeds as we do at Haller Talk, wanted to have Scott Miller into really going depth into remote race control. So with that foundation, we are now joined by our very special guest for this week's edition of NASCAR's Haller Talk. And that is former NASCAR senior vice president of competition, current competition strategies, Scott Miller, Scott, how you doing, my friend? Doing well. Hope you guys are. We are. Yeah. So the reason we have Scott on is there were some chatter over the weekend about remote race control. And so-- and we've talked about it a lot on here on Haller Talk on various episodes. Haven't really gotten deep into it. So we wanted to do that. We wanted to get a little bit deeper into it. And Scott Miller has been leading the remote race control at the NASCAR production facility in Concord, North Carolina, leading that project from its inception what, two years ago, how long has this been going on? Probably been going on for the better part of two years now. Yeah, it was a little bit of a slow process in the beginning, getting all the technologies up and running. But over the probably past six, eight months, we've really, really made a lot of headway there and are now pretty much integrated into every race weekend as a support arm for those in race control at the race track. Perfect. OK, so that's a perfect jumping-off point. So this is obviously an audio podcast. So can you take us for someone who's not been in race control? I think all three of us have seen it. But for our listeners, what's the setup like? What kind of tools do you have at your disposal? How does it help officiate a race? So the tools that we have-- there are are plentiful. Basically, kind of the, kind of the heart of race control is two things. That's our partnership with Samsung on the video wall, which is 32 feet wide and nine feet tall. And we can divide that up into probably up to about 24 different quadrants and place whatever cameras or data that we want and each each one of those quadrants. So coming coming in and and basically that's driven with another partnership we have with catapult sports who provides the software for us to be able to take all the video feeds, all the radio feeds, all the car telemetry and sort of put it in a in a one stop shop that we can from there then display it on the on the wall, how we see fits a little bit different for each race weekend. But we're ingesting pretty much every bit of data that's being generated at the track, timing and scoring data, all of the in car cameras, all of the broadcast cameras, all of the specialty cameras that we have, you know, comp cams, choose, cone, commitment box, all of those different restart zone, all of those specialty cameras that we set up are being ingested, all the telemetry data, all the in car communications drivers to pit box. So we have a lot of information at our disposal and, you know, one of the challenges has been to make that concise enough to where we can view it quickly when we need it. Scott, obviously you were a former crew chief, a six time winning crew chief, Cup crew chief, I should say, but what would it have been like, you know, now that you've been in that seat for, you know, many races now in your vantage point, what would it have been like back then to have kind of capabilities that not only does NASCAR have it they're disposed of now, but race teams do as well when you hear them reference their war rooms and things like that. Basically, when I was on top of the box, all we really had was timing and scoring radio communication with the pit box to the driver and basically any little sort of programs that we had written for fuel mileage or whatever. So obviously, back when I was on the box, we didn't have a lot at our disposal except kind of our eyes and ears and as things have evolved over the years and, you know, more and more data has been generated telemetry data. It would have been, it would have been quite a different experience. I'm sure it's quite a different experience crew chief and today from the top of the box with the amount of information that they that they have. Now, they don't, they don't have all of the information that we have. Some of it is, you know, some of the telemetry data and different things are proprietary to NASCAR at this point in time, but they do have an abundance of information that they can, you know, send back to their war rooms, which are actually kind of similar in nature to what we're doing and then communicate back to the pit boxes at the track. So it's a, it's a different world crew chief in these days than what I was on top of the box and I'm sure, yeah, I got a little bit of insight into what that must be like with my experience obviously in the in the remote race control because it would be very similar. It would be really nice to have all that information up as a crew chief trying to manage your race. You still won six times without it, so you did okay. And now you probably are privy to more information than anybody has got because like he said, some of that stuff is proprietary in NASCAR that what you're looking at. And when you're talking about like that screen where you can put up 24 different screens or whatever, you have all this data coming in. You mentioned that just trying to figure out how to be efficient in streamline it. Like how have you sort of managed that? Do you sort of have to retrain your brain a little bit on how you digest or absorb a race when you have all of this information in front of you? Well, yeah, you do. So the experience in at track race control is quite different than the remote race control simply because the at track race control fortunately, you know, I might have a lot of experience in doing that in my past. And that's sort of a that's kind of a visceral experience. Everything is unfolding right in front of you. And at remote race control, you're relying on cameras predominantly and it takes a while to kind of get a feel for you lose a little bit of that overall perception of what's transpiring in front of you. But on the other hand, you have a lot more finite information with than is available to you for reviewing things and whatnot at remote race control than you do. You know, we obviously have replay and race control and everything, but at remote race control, you have the luxury of not having to be sort of in the moment as the race is unfolding, you can kind of go back and continue to look without feeling like you're, you know, you know, the ones that in at the at track race control have got that covered while you go back and try to help them, you know, relook at whether it's an incident of violation, whatever it may be that you're digging into for them. So it's really, it's really just a lot of support that, you know, I think that most of everybody that's in race control has kind of come to rely on there's a lot of a lot of questions back and forth. Hey, what was that? What was this? Can you find this? And it's just much easier to do from the remote race control with the resources that we have that they don't have in the tower. That leads perfectly into the next question I have for you, Scott. So are you when you're monitoring a race or helping officiate race from from race control, do you have assigned responsibilities? Are you specifically monitoring something or are you kind of the how, you know, using the NFL or MLB analogy of, you know, they're going to throw it back to New York to review. Are you strictly whatever support is need from onsite race control? Hey, can you review that or is there or do you have assignments or you on your team? How does that all work or sort of kind of depends a little bit of both? Well, so we do provide some some redundancy as just a matter of process like, you know, reviewing the restarts, you know, making sure that the shoes go and they're doing all those same things in the in the tower, but it's just it's always the more sense of eyes you have on something, you know, the less likely you are to to miss anything. So there is some redundancy in the normal sort of workflow at the remote race control. I would look at it as just a backup, right? For that. But, you know, a lot of times if there's a question or a crew chief calls in about their, you know, position on the in the lineup and looking at loops or whether they beat the pace car off a pit road, like I can I can get to all those things really quickly. So they'll ask, hey, do you have anything on that? And then I gotta go back and dig in and find it as quickly as possible to give them the information that they that they need to kind of help make the call. Again, they're doing all those same things in the tower, but like we want to be 100% sure that whenever we put somebody somewhere in the lineup or put them a lap down because they didn't beat the pace car off pit road that, you know, that we're 100% correct in those decisions that we make. Scott, I wanted to ask you about obviously, like, you know, using technology like we use in remote race control is something that, you know, other sports have also adapted based on the technology that is, you know, available in their sports as well. Obviously, like the World Cup that is going on right now, you know, they have a VAR room and I know like the NFL also utilizes remote, you know, officiating throughout their season as well. So do you know if we worked with other sports as we were building the remote race control room or is that something that was very unique to just what we do? So we have, it's interesting that you ask. I was, I did have the privilege to visit the NFL, send it to New York facility, not during a live event, but the gentleman that manages that whole program gave several of us to her. And we had developed our race. NASCAR is obviously a unique set of circumstances that have to be managed. One of the, one of the more difficult things for us is that as compared to say the NFL is they play on a 100 yard long by 50 yard wide field every single weekend. And what I come came to understand is they have a specific sort of diagram of cameras that are at every single venue. So they can have super consistent views on everything across all the games because the field is the same. Obviously we race at different venues and each and every one of them poses its unique challenge to get full camera coverage where you need it. So I'm kind of envious that they play on a 50 yard wide field. But we do, we do a good job setting up, you know, setting up our cameras. And we're always looking to expand our capabilities with potentially more cameras and more views. So that we just continue to evolve this process and just provide the best assistance that we can to those that track. Yeah, you've got a little bit more to manage when you have a 2.66 mile oval as opposed to like a football field or baseball stadium. But it's interesting to me Scott, like following up on the man I was asking about in terms of technology and sports. All sports are now pretty much accepting this, whether it's baseball with the strike zone or hockey or soccer with off-sides calls or basketball like who committed the foul football. Obviously we know all about how the replays use there. How do you think NASCAR kind of fits into that trend? And maybe it's different from NASCAR, but I sense that, you know, especially like soccer, you know, how much it can sort of affect the outcome of a game or the pace of play. Is there a sense for NASCAR, like how using technology kind of fits into officiating a race where you don't want to get too, you know what I'm saying? You don't want to get too overly controlling, I guess, like with other sports where you're actually impacting what's happening in the field of play. Maybe it's a little bit different for racing. I'm just curious, like if you run into that at all from your remote perspective where you know what it's like to be on on site officiating a race and you don't really want to impede like what the guy is in the tower or doing. Yeah, well, so the other thing that's quite different when it comes to officiating a race is where when we throw a penalty flag and blow whistle, the game doesn't stop, right? The game, the game continues to go on. So, you know, we would never get in a situation where it would be sort of disrupting the action or anything like that. But I think what we're trying to do is just take the traditional race and the traditional things that we officiate and maybe that expands to some different things. But we would never, we would never set ourselves up to where we would really be like waiting on officiating to sort of delay the game or create a break in the action or any kind of disruption. And honestly, what we strive to be is kind of invisible, not be the story, but get the calls right that that that need to be made. And Scott, just to kind of follow up on the concrete examples as I was preparing for this, I was looking back at some stories, Ford mentioned this. We've talked about remote race control on the on the Holler Talk podcast and I was looking at a story, I think it was Bristol last year, where you would help the tower in determining incident responsibility where you got, you know, they weren't sure on site if a driver had intentionally spun somebody and you were able to relay. No, we looked at, and if it was SMT or the replays and determine there was no responsibility on the part of the driver in that instance. Can you give us examples of that? Like, does that happen often? Is that like one way, concrete way that you guys are kind of involved in terms of helping the on-site tower? Well, yes, yes and no, I guess. You know, we would, if we're looking for, did a driver do something or did a driver not do something, the data is, that's up to some broad interpretation, right? I mean, there's some things that are obvious that I think nobody questions, but like some of the ones that could be a racing incident, could be on purpose, like, it's really tough to determine that a lot of times because, you know, like I said, the steering, the brake, the throttle, all the driver inputs, you know, I mean, there's analyzing that as very can be very subjective. So if we're going to make a call, we have to, based on data, we have to be very, very certain that there's something that stands out that can't really be interpreted in any other way. I think that, you know, we would tend to lean more toward the given, the driver, the brake side of things, unless the data points to something completely obvious. So Scott, we asked you earlier about how the game has changed for you if you had these tools on top of the pit box as a grew chief. In your role as Senior Vice President of, of, of NAS, of competition for NASCAR, you were in race control for, for many years. And how much of a, of a game changer has it been, in that role, if, you know, you'll get a Elton Sawyer who's doing that role right now? Were there any calls that come to mind or in general that, that were missed maybe back in those days? That wouldn't be missed now. And, and it really in a broad way of saying it, how much of a game changer do you think the remote race control is? Well, I, it's hard to determine whether it, if, if we miss, if we miss something likely we didn't know we missed it, right? So, so that's, so that's, so that's a, so that's a little bit of a, a tough answer. But I think that, you know, remote race control along with, you know, so many other systems and so much evolution just with, you know, the people, the skill level, the training, you know, Elton's done a great job sort of, you know, nurturing people along. And, you know, old and unaccountable for getting better with every aspect of their job. So, like, I think race control is just another one of those, evolutions to where we're always trying to get better. We're always trying to get better, learn from each experience that happens at the race track and discuss what we would do different next time if there is any kind of thing. So, I think that we have just evolved in so many areas that remote race control is just another one that is along those lines of us trying to get better at everything that we do. And one last one, very, not in the weeds, but just a mop up, I should have asked at the beginning, but I'm not a professional interviewer, so I blame Nate on doing this since he is. How many people are in race control right now with you, Scott? And every, the remote race control? So, it actually varies a little bit. Typically, so I'll just give you a snapshot of what we had for Sonoma. So, it was myself, Chad Little, doing the, you know, as the senior person for the Crow Trailer Pit Road officiating, he was there. Jay Fabian was there, who is a former series director that obviously is well versed in tower goings on was at a station, helping me sort of do what I do. Elton Sawyer was there. We had a gentleman Phil Brown there, monitoring engine telemetry data, and we had Scott Goodman there from the competition technology side of things. monitoring all of the things that he monitors with loop performance and all of that sort of thing. And then we had the timing and scoring person there that supports Kyle McKinney at the race track. So we had a full house. Every weekend is not the same. It's just kind of who's going to travel and who's not. You know, one of the things about staffing remote race control is most of the folks that go to the race track have jobs other than sort of race control, especially like the pro trailer officials and things like that. Many of them are inspectors or serve other functions at the track. So it's not like you can just. We could do that entirely remote, but there's a certain amount of people that have that skill set that have other tasks that the race track. So it's just a matter of who's traveling that weekend and whether or not they come to remote race control or whether they're at the track doing their other jobs. And one follow up on what that room is like, Scott, just kind of a fun one, actually, that you know, that did sound like you have a full house in there. And you've got that screen you mentioned where I think you said you could put up 24 separate screens like who gets to decide and is it ever like fighting over the remote control to ever have like you ever use all 24 spoons at once and have like 12 people watching 24 screens at once. Well, so at the road courses where we have more specialty cameras that cover each of the corners on the race track, the wall was pretty much covered up with all of that on on a normal race weekend. We will oftentimes put the program feed in a big quadrant in the middle and then have other timing and scoring and telemetry data off to the side. So really it depends on it depends on what we're getting back road courses. The wall is pretty strict, but other weekends we can do, you know, we can do a lot of things. I mean, everything isn't done necessarily off the wall either like you have all of what your particular responsibility is in front of you on monitors. So the monitors on the front row don't necessarily have to be what's on the wall a lot of times the wall can be a secondary support items. And you don't have the super cross race on any of those. I know you're a big fan. So this is the math car thing. That's number one. That's right. Across MotoGPM. I'm into that. You know, just just marks a big weekend. The head first. He did. Yes. Second and MotoGP and wanted Sonoma with with Shane. So quite a weekend. Outstanding. Well, Scott, thank you for the time. Appreciate all the insides and to remote race control and appreciate all the work you're doing or all the help you've given this group here over the years. So have a great weekend and good luck watching from afar remotely in Chicago. Okay. Thank you guys. And anytime happy to chat. All right. Well, that was Scott Miller. Hopefully that was informative. And you enjoyed that discussion about offsite race control. And I thought was interesting that you know, he talked about all the people that were there. So we are pretty full. Full and remote race control. A lot of eyeballs and ears to help officiate and those at the race track. Elton will be back in race control on site at Chicago land speedway. So everyone that was worried about that on X. Your fears are no more. No idea what you're talking about, by the way, for you. But yeah, keep going. Yeah, sometimes X gets me gets me all nervous. Jeff Glock. As usual. Get me gets me all fired up. Love you, Jeff. By the way, speaking of Jeff Glock and things that I didn't realize that I needed to be fired up about. But maybe I did one thing we do want to clean up a little bit from Sonoma before we kick it over to Sonoma or Chicago. Sorry, is the fastest lap point. There was some conversation about did Tyler reddick deserve the fastest lap point. I don't know how. Yeah, so this one. This is one thing I can't weigh in on with social media during the race was it there did seem to be some confusion about would reddick be eligible for the fastest lap. And of course, if he would have went to the garage, he wouldn't have been eligible for the fastest lap, but he didn't go to the garage. And therefore he did get the fastest lap because they made all their repairs out to the power steering the lane. But but yeah, on social media at one point, like there was a collect and others were kind of posting about there was chatter between the team and reddick. And apparently there was confusion on whether they could go to the garage and still get fastest lap. So the entire thing just got a little bit confusing between what the team was saying on the radio. So we're being reported and then at the end of the race, oh, he got the fastest lap when everybody just presumed I think we're not everybody, but some maybe presume that not clock. But maybe others in the social media universe were thinking like, oh, well, how did he get fastest lap? Because I thought like you have this power steering problem. So yeah, that is kind of good to clean up for it. Because the point because we that's something we discussed on our talk that there was that will change this year that we broke it here. We talked about it probably more than any other podcast. That's right. Yeah, I mean go to Vietnam and ask them about this and there's no confusion over there about like what's going on in terms of fastest lap. Like you can't get it the way you could last year with Carl arson had these problems. They go to the garage Mexico city and what walk in the line. I think and he comes back out and sets fastest lap. That was no longer possible this year. But the differentiator in this case. The reason reddit was able to get fastest lap despite being lapsed down was because he didn't go to the garage for repairs. That's no that is correct. Yeah, the simple as that if you go to the garage, you're no longer eligible moving forward in that race. So if reddit got it on lap three and then once the garage, you'd be able to keep it if he got it at lap 80 like he did. After going to the garage, then he wouldn't, but he never wants to garage. So simple as that. If you go to the garage after that, you're ineligible to get it. Yeah, so it's it's pretty clear. Like you said, you know what Vietnam though falling out of the top five. That's unbelievable. But you know who climbed up. They may they may be super sad because their soccer team is no longer in the world cup. If Germany, good news, you have a great episode of Hallertalk ahead of you. Number three, they are number three in the charts right behind United States and Canada. Two teams that also are having some good world cup runs and hopefully will continue to do so. We'll see once a night. You love us in Hamburg. They're going to have something to listen to now that 13 has been knocked out around the 30s time on their hands. Maybe we should do a world cup addition for of Hallertalk here before July 19th when the when the tournament wraps. We should just do the like the Hallertalk like parade of nations who listen to this podcast. I like that. I mean, this is the this is the most we've ever in my life have talked about the world cup. We've mentioned it twice during the Scott Miller interview. Once again, now this is incredible. So anyway, Chicago and you got anything for us on Chicago land. Yeah, I do. I do. Like I said, this tracks near and dear to my heart. So I was very pleased to learn that in NASCAR's first race weekend at Chicago land speedway since the June of 2019. I was looking this up actually the other day of it June 30th 2019 was the last cup race at Chicago and Speedway Alex Bowman got his first cup victory in that race. And unfortunately the tracks been dormant since then post pandemic. You know, the it's it's outlook was a little bit uncertain, but here it is. It's back on the cup schedule on the NASCAR schedule this year and part of the news of going back to this speedway in July, Illinois was that $5 million in improvements have been spent. So I thought there might be an opportunity here for. Can you highlight where NASCAR spent some of that money to get Chicago land speedway back up and right. Yeah, so the good news is that there wasn't a ton of revitalization if you will needed it. It has been an operational facility. Even since 2019 when the cups years last ran there, there have been other events including NHRA and Supermotor Cross. So there has been a team at the facility maintaining the track in that regard. But there absolutely did need to be some some new upkeep I guess or you know some some things needed to be done to get ready for a major weekend like the NASCAR Cup series NASCAR Rally or apart series on Saturday. So here are the here are a few of the things stuck to Jerry Caproth who was a friend of the show performer guest. A lot of the money the big big money came from the safer barriers. The end. It was all replaced all. All the foam was completely replaced throughout the entire facility. So all new, safer foam, which you see this foam, you probably like, oh, that's probably not super expensive, but that mildly costly, costly patching throughout the racetrack. There were several areas that needed patching. Lots of upkeep from, there were some weeds. You talk about, remember when North Wilkes Boer came back, there were the photos of weeds growing out of the cracks. Kind of a similar situation came with Chicago land, so clean to all that up. Lots of tire packs, some safety improvements, tire packs, and on the inside and each of the turns as well. So those were kind of the four big things that were needed. Some clean up in the infield care center, racetrack control, a little bit clean up there as well. So a little bit more sprucing up than a complete refurbishment of the racetrack outside of the safer barriers. Those were a big undertaking. That's good to hear because yes, the aesthetics certainly would need some work, even though it did have a super motocross event in 2023. And like you said, so some other events, certainly nothing as big as an Ascar race and you could certainly understand how the media center and areas in the infield would certainly not be as much in use. So that sort of handles like the off track, the facility stuff. The other question I had was there was a test in April with Kyle Larson, Ryan Blaney, Denny Hamlin, all being back on track. And a Rylee Auto Parts drivers, Justin Algyron, Brandon Jones, so you had five drivers, all three manufacturers represented. And obviously they're just turning laps on kind of amazing, like a surface that is the original surface from when Chicago Lance Speedway opened in July of 2001. Kansas opened the same year. It's been repaid since then, but Chicago Lance Speedway is still the same asphalt. And it was always known as one of the fastest unrestricted tracks on the circuit. Certainly one of the fastest one and a half mile over. So I thought I'd check in forward and just ask, what did NASCAR learn from that April test in terms of speeds? Are we still expecting this to be one of the fastest tracks in NASCAR? Yeah, I think so because you look at the tire that's going to be used, it's been used at the same tire set. It was used at Nashville. But interestingly, the left side tire, since Nashville was also used at Michigan, which is known as one of the fastest tracks or maybe the fastest track in NASCAR. Also that left side tire is also used at Pocono, which you know, the speeds on that long front stretch. So I think we are going to see some speeds and I think teams are going to have to manage those tires. You look at Nashville, Michigan and Pocono. You know, there was some attrition there for sure. So I think there are going to be some pretty fast speeds. And if you look at the other mile and a half, so we've seen over the course of the last four years, five years since next gen was introduced, some pretty awesome racing. So I hope fans tune in. If you want to get tickets to Chicago and I think you should do that ASAP. It's they're going fast as well as the rumor going around. So hopefully we see some packed grandstands and a big rating. A lot of people tuning in for the return of Chicago. So yeah, I think that's everything. I think we got Sonoma in the books. The one thing we talked about Sonoma was riveting and then we had a good remote race control interview in our Chicago and Amanda, who usually takes his home, had to bolt, unfortunately, for another engagement. So you got me saying goodbye. So thank you for listening. Please rate, review, give us those five stars, tell your friends how great this podcast is. So we get a bunch of downloads from the United States would be great, but especially if you're international, even better. So hopefully you will enjoy the races this weekend in Chicago and Speedway and we'll talk about it next week and recap it all. Thanks everyone. Have a great one. (upbeat music)