NASCAR’s Roadmap to Victory Lane

Congratulations! You made the varsity of the podcast. My name is John Arandon, and I am Pucks Sports correspondent and the host of this pod and today. Just before NASCAR kicks off its season with a Daytona 500, NASCAR President Steve O'Donnell joins us. Steve's story is great. He joined NASCAR back in 1996, and one of his first jobs was as the Hat Dance Guy. That's the person who, after a race, would go to the winner circle with a bunch of hats that have sponsored logos, and he would have to get the drivers to have their pictures taken while wearing each one of them. So I'm happy to get Steve on the pod, and I will ask him about that. But before I get to Steve, today is Sunday, February 15th, and here's what I'm watching. I was in LA last week for the run up to the NBA's All-Star game. On Tuesday, my pal and pup colleague Peter Hamby snagged some great seats for our Lakers game. LeBron and Luca against Wembee. I was psyched. But as I was going to the game in an Uber, Peter sent me a text saying that LeBron wasn't playing that night. Neither was Luca or Austin Reeves or in fact any of the Lakers starters. I was legitimately bummed. I wanted to see the best players and what I got instead was the spurs winning by 28. The NBA has a term for this. It's called load management. Teams and players want to make sure their stars are healthy when the playoffs roll around. The Lakers, they know they're going to the playoffs in a random game in February. It doesn't matter much, but it sure isn't fan friendly. A few days before that, the 18 when you talk jazz, relieving a game going into the fourth quarter when the team inexplicably sat most of their starters. They didn't play the entire fourth quarter and the jazz lost. Now this wasn't load management. This is tanking. You talk obviously wants a low draft pick. And in fact, Adam Silver find the jazz half a million dollars for in his words, compromising the integrity of the game again, not fan friendly. Now here's the problem. These fines just start working. Over the years, Adam Silver has fine teams and the problem seems worse than ever. Plus, even with all the tanking and all the load management, the business of the NBA is doing really, really well right now. While media company executives complain every time a star sits out one of their games, they also turn a blind eye to it. They would much rather have the stars healthy and rested for the playoffs. Okay. Now let's get to Steve O'Donnell. Steve O'Donnell on Daytona 500 week. Can't thank you enough for taking the time. I know how busy you are down in Daytona. You are now basically running the day to day at NASCAR. And what I think is really cool about your story is you're kind of a NASCAR lifer. I started there in 1994. And my guys told me that way back then you were the Hattance guy. Yeah. So I started in '96, but I prior to it, I spent some time in minor league baseball and then over at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, but yes, started out. Victory lane. The Hattance guy and free race kind of logistics. So good and bad news on that, John. So if you were any good at your job or had decent personality interacted with drivers, owners, Fortune 500 people, right? You would sponsor the race. But if you screwed up, they also told you the story pretty quick as well. So it was a good way to get to meet people along the way and get kind of entrance into the sport. So to speak. All right. Back in 1996, how many hats did that Hattance guy take to the winner circle? So it was crazy. So I think Jeff Gordon, I'm going to say Jeff Gordon probably had a 36 to 40 that he was running through. So you did your normal handshakes and everything. But after that, it was one after another because a lot of sponsors on those race cars. That's great. Well, there's been some corporate changes at NASCAR that I've been covering pretty, pretty hotly. We've had Steve Phelps who's been on this pod in the past and he of course resigned about a month ago or so. And you, while you worked with Steve, you guys complemented each other very well, I thought. And when Steve left, you sort of stepped in to sort of take over the day to day. How is NASCAR? I know there's not going to be massive changes. You were part of NASCAR beforehand. But at the edges, like what's going to be different with you overseeing NASCAR now? Yeah, I think, you know, in Steve's case and Steve and I, you know, remain really good friends. And Steve had tremendous relationships, I think, especially within the sports industry and moving around New York and, you know, Super Bowl, that kind of thing. And so that's an area that, you know, we need to continue to lean in on. And one of the things with Steve is, you know, he had those relationships for a long time. And we needed to kind of bring those same relationships back into the garage area with our industry. And I think they were kind of two separate areas where, you know, Steve represented the brand very, very well to corporate America and with other leagues and with some big sponsors. And we need to kind of bring those relationships to the race teams, to the drivers, to the tracks and kind of bring it all together. So it's an opportunity for us, you know, like Eric Shanks from Fox told me a couple months ago that, you know, you got an easy job. And I said, oh, really? And said, you got to get the garage ball. And they said, your industry right now is, you know, the last two years has been kind of going in different ways, you know, with the lawsuit. And now you have the opportunity to bring the industry back, bring a little bit more fun back into the sport and then match that up with those relationships that Steve had as well and kind of bring the sport up into the upper echelon. You know who has an easy job. Eric Shanks has an easy job. He just puts a couple of cameras on your track. Watches of viewers come rolling in. It's fantastic. Now they do a great job. They're actually at, we're ready for, I think he's coming in today. We've got a meeting with him and the team tomorrow. So we're looking forward to seeing how they, how they show the 500 for sure. The sticking with sort of the back office, like your day to day, how has that changed, sort of, with you stepping up and sort of taking that over? I think so my relationships for the most part had been kind of in the garage right with a lot of our team owners, drivers and very comfortable there and then more day to day of our business operations. And I would say what's changed now is being more visible in terms of outside of the sport, making sure that new sponsors coming in, you know, are broadcast partners and really thinking more long term about where we're going and then setting that direction so that, you know, our industry understands what's the long term plan. We've got to have a few years to get there. But having those conversations with our major partners, you know, for the next three to five years of where we believe the sport can go. So I think that's an area that's a big focus. We've got a ton of talented people on our team that can really get the day to day things done. My job is to get the hell out of the way and let those experts do their job, but really try and put that future plan together so that we're all on the same page. I would think your background in the garage is going to help. I mean, just in terms of reading stuff on NASCAR and talking to various people, just that there's always been, is it distrust? I don't know. Would you go that far with that? Just a little bit of tension between, you know, the corporate hierarchy and the race teams and having somebody that has deep relationships, you know, within the garage is that that must be a benefit. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. I think, you know, the last two years, right, I've been really challenging and when you look at, you know, if you came into a race track in the garage area, I want to say everyone went their separate ways, but there were not a lot of conversations happening together about how do we really all grow this together? We talked about, you know, a race team may say, "Hey, here's how I'm going to grow my individual team, a track may talk about, here's how I'm going to fix our attendance problems or challenges or opportunities." But we never talked together, and I think that's the goal is to bring everyone together and talk about, you know, what is kind of that North Star, which is to be the biggest sport and entertainment property. And so we've got to set that agenda and then bring everyone together to work on it. And I think the good news is, everybody's ready to do that. We've spent the last two months, meaning with all the owners, all the drivers, sponsors, tracks, talking about kind of a reset and working together and the feeling is good, the proof will be in the pudding, right? We can talk about it, but now we got to do it. And, you know, when talking to our team, we got to get back to being hungry. And for a while there, the sport exploded. Things were great. And then there were some challenges. When things were really exploding, we had a lot of hungry people working really, really hard and really promoting the sport. And that's what we got to get back to. So in the role of a fan, in the role of a viewer, you're talking about sort of the reset between that relationship, which was obvious and necessary. You're kicking off the season today with the Daytona 500 on today being Sunday. And what's going to be different sort of moving forward? Because you've referenced it a couple of times and we've been writing about it. Like the past two years have been sort of not quite chaotic, but you know, it's rough. You come out of that. What's going to be different for that at home viewer? So I think the home viewer or our industry, we're looking through the windshield now and you're going to hear often that we're going to be on apologetic about who we are. We're going to embrace the sounds and the sights of NASCAR, the fan experience and really kind of get back to what drove this sport. It's the personalities, it's being accessible. It's showing drivers without their helmets out, the new brand campaign, having fun. In the past, we were running ads that we want to sell race tickets, right? But we would run an ad about buy your tickets here and we wouldn't talk about Ryan Blaney and what a cool guy is and what a bad ass is. We're going to get back to that and we're going to showcase what everyone loves about this sport. I'd say John overall, when I look at NASCAR, I'd say we are probably the only sport on bias. I know this but where the fans really feel like they own this sport and they got away from that. They didn't have that feeling in our jobs to bring that back and their voice is hugely important but they got to feel like the moves we're making have them in mind. I feel like we're on the journey to do that with some of the changes we made with the playoff format. I'm moving some races around, some of the rules packages. It's not going to happen overnight but I think we're on that journey to deliver what the fans wanted. So your answer, I started covering NASCAR basically in 2006 or so. You were already a long bet there by that point. There was always the sense of we need to attract new viewers and new fans and we can't piss off our existing fan base. That's been something that's been a common theme for as long as I've been covering NASCAR. Is that the right way of looking at it? I think that is the way we've looked at it and we've tried to always kind of chase that new fan. What's happened is I think the reason people fell in love with NASCAR is because we are who we are. We're on a polygetic. We're going to we're about a good time. We're fun and we just need to embrace that. We think that can be all things to all people. Everybody likes that fun. Everybody likes hopefully cars. All those things are part of our events, camping, different experiences. I think we chased almost too many things versus kind of being true to who we are. That's more of the mantra and we believe that new fans will come along. This is real kind of, I'd say small in the area but when people aren't having fun or don't seem happy in your industry, why would a fan watch? They want to be entertained. Getting back to the entire garage area saying this sport is awesome and let's go forward and you need to tune in. I think you'll see that. I think you'll see more of that from the industry as well. I live in Washington DC. I've been to New York and read and heard about what he called it the loudest billboard. A loudest billboard? Yeah. That's exactly what you're talking about there. It is. We're going to do something different, right? But it's kind of authentic to us. You're in New York City, you throw something out there and John, not all of it's going to work. We're going to try some things. I think we are going to probably make a few mistakes along the way but I think one of the stories or one of the lines you'll hear us talk to our industry about is we're going to push the envelope and that's something we typically haven't done. We're going to get, I think, just who runs our brand said we got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. That's what we want to do. And so I mean, I think what's unique about that is that it is going back to the roots. I mean, that's, I'll never forget. Back in 2006, we had David Hill and he was at Fox at the time and he sort of came in and gave us a description of how he was going to produce the Daytona 500. And just watching his excitement and hear him talk about the roar of the engines and being at the turn, that seems to be what really drives NASCAR and the people that really like NASCAR. Yeah. And I think it's a unique experience. There's a lot of different ways you can come into the sport. I'd use Taladeg as an example. So I've got some buddies growing up who didn't grow up on NASCAR. That's necessarily been, that's not on my typical NASCAR wasn't on their bucket list. But there's sports fans and if they're going to go to an event, all of a sudden going to Taladeg at Alabama, seeing a super speedway camping out, going down the bull part, was a really cool experience. And those are the things we want to embrace, not for everybody, but different angles that you can go to for different segments of fans. And we have huge opportunities. I mean, what the broadcast partner is we have, there's new sponsorship coming into the sport that's embracing NASCAR. Anything that's going to reach a broader audience. And canally, that's when NASCAR was booming, sponsorship was activating against our drivers in the sport. We're starting to see that come back and that's going to be huge for the sport. Go behind the scenes of one of TV's most watched true crime series with the 48 hours post-mortem podcast or correspondence and producers take you inside each case. Every Monday, listen to a new episode of 48 hours and then join me, 48 hours correspondent and Marie Green. Every Tuesday for a new episode of post-mortem. Follow and listen to 48 hours on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Steve, my crack research staff spent hours research. I've wanted to know. This is basically your PR people. You grew up in Egypt. You could have been an NASCAR fan growing up, right? No, it was very, so I grew up originally in Northeast. So some of the modifies that kind of thing. But I left, yeah, it was middle school through high school. So I spent six years in Cairo. So in 1996, when you take this job as a marketer at NASCAR, were you a fan? How did NASCAR draw you in? Yeah, no, I was, but I would say NASCAR drew me in because I was living in Florida, gone to school in Florida. So I actually was working at the Daytona Cubs, minor league baseball team. So it was right adjacent to NASCAR. The sport was slowly emerging. Jack Euron was in field. It's not that Daytona Robinson Hall Park. That's exactly right on the island. It's great in the park. Yeah, so I basically answered it was a random sport to add and went in and it was NASCAR. And so knew about the sport, but it was more kind of that intro to NASCAR from a marketing operations job and got lucky getting the job. And then I've had a wild ride ever since. I've had some great mentors, great teammates, and I've been able to stay and really see so many great things and so many great people. You referenced earlier the different changes that are occurring this season, like rules changes, the champions or the playoff, how you get into the playoffs. How hard were those to push through? It's a great question. So it goes back to kind of your earlier question about the intruder who you are chasing new fans. So I'll go back to kind of my, just general, we're both sports fans. And so you would think from a NASCAR standpoint, you want new fans and fans understand playoffs and fans understand the concept of maybe that game seven moment. And so if you just put your sports hat on, not necessarily your NASCAR hat on, a one race finale, this is be great. Our fans who have been with us will really believe in this and will attract a whole new fan base who will buy into this. And I think over time what happened was the industry while we presented, while we had some great moments, said, wait a minute, this isn't really who we are and really isn't the essence of NASCAR in terms of a driver having to be more consistent through maybe 10 races. There's so much chance that goes into that one race and anything could happen. And some of the newer fans that were trying to attract didn't even understand the sport yet. And bring them along. So instead of having the industry say, this is great. I really buy into the system. New people would check it out. We started to see that turn. So that was kind of the background coming into this. And I think working with our television partners, working with the industry to get to the model that we were, ended up in a great place. I was someone who initially thought, one race would be great. And the more we got around it, when we had young drivers coming through the system, who maybe won 12, 15 races during the year. And because of something that may have happened in one race didn't win a championship. And if that happened three, four, five years, I'm not sure a younger driver would aspire to be racing in NASCAR. And that became kind of something that we needed to really look at and try to fix, which we did. And the last thing I'd say about it, you know, I'm a New York Giants fan, which I know will get some blues from you. But when the Giants are a wild card, yeah. When the Giants are a wild card and they win the Super Bowl, they win the Super Bowl. And everyone's good with that. In our sport, if someone came into the playoffs, quote unquote, 12th and won, our fans didn't buy it and they said no, that's not a full season. And so we kind of learned that over time and think landed in a really good place where the industry is really buying into it. And our fans have reacted very positively as well. As this moves forward, this is a question kind of like what did you learn from that? I mean, are you going to do you have the flexibility that like if you realize this season that it's not working like next season, you can just make another change or in your mind is this a couple of year process or a couple of year run or is it, you know, we're going to tinker with it until we get it right. My mind is a couple of year run. You know, I just actually had a conversation with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and we were talking about the future of the clash and you know, can we bring the clash back to Daytona and why do we move it? And his viewpoint, which I think is very fair, is when something goes a little bit wrong, we just, we throw it out and we drastically change it versus fixing the problem. And I embrace that. I think we need to focus more on, you know, let's try and really fix something here versus some drastic new shiny penny that may not be really kind of core to who we are. And I think you'll see us do more of that of like embrace kind of, you know, who we are, what we're doing. Be authentic because our fans know when we kind of veer left or right and it's not, it's not that authentic way to do things. They call us out. Yeah, when we do do things that they believe in, you know, a lot of fans will say, all right, NASCAR is doing it the right way. So we just got to be authentic with the moves we make. The, you know, just having talked to Steve Phelps a bit, you know, he had been pushing a lot of things sort of, you know, getting into Chicago, getting, you know, expanding in markets that aren't like core NASCAR markets to try to expand the NASCAR brand, also doing it internationally as well. Is that something that you support right now? I mean, as much as Steve did. I do. That was 1%, but I think you got to make sure that I'll go back a little quick history lesson for us. So when we left the rocking hands of the world and Northwooksboro tracks and North Carolina, and we expanded to Las Vegas in California. It was a great move for the sport, but how we messaged that was really poor and a lot of our fans kind of in the North Carolina, South Carolina felt like NASCAR abandoned them. And we learned a lot of lessons doing that. So I think what you're seeing us do now is if you go to a Chicago or Chicago street race, go to Mexico City, you coupled that with maybe a points race or an exhibition at a short track within the US where we're showcasing kind of our grassroots as well. I think that's the model is mixing and matching both. The race in San Diego this year is going to be incredible. Everyone in the industry is so excited to go out there, but we've got to keep iterating on those things. Our fans are craving for yes, the traditional races that you have, but really love kind of those new events. And we're learning along the way too that when you go somewhere, does it have a one or two or three year life cycle? What's the right model? You know, we're at the Coliseum for a couple years. We're Bowman Gray for a couple years. San Diego, I hope we can go for multiple years, but you've got the Northwest, you've got Canada, you've got Europe who's very interested. We've got racing in Brazil. So there's so many opportunities, but we want to make sure that wherever we go next, we put a lot of thought to it and make sure it's a success. So I want to dub tail off that a little bit, sticking just with the US markets. How do you decide on markets? Is it a non-traditional market that might have a big NASCAR fan base and non-traditional market that doesn't have a big one and you want to grow it? Or what goes into how you decide this? Yeah, another great question. As we look at it now, I would say we're looking at places where number one is bringing the industry together. So we've got here are the sponsors that we have on all the race cars, where they want to go and use an example. If we showed up tomorrow and said, hey, we're going to go race somewhere in Africa next year because we're all going to take a big check. Most of the sponsors on the teams would say, this does absolutely nothing for me. It's not growing my brand. That's not a key market for us. We want to pick where are we not activating? What is the sponsorship group really desire? I think the Northwest would absolutely be something that we want to look at. Our television partners play a big part in this. Where are they seeing some areas where we could grow the sport as well? And then the fan base, certainly. You look at Pennsylvania as one, the race and poke. A ton of our fans come from Pennsylvania to Charlotte, the races, South Carolina, Virginia. So obviously we want to be in that space. But then how can we migrate? If you're aware we haven't had the support that we need, maybe take one of those events to a new market and test it out. So correct me if I'm wrong on this. But why is it that so many are the hardcore fans seem to, I don't know if they rejected it so much as they didn't seem to like this expansion? Is it just not being part of the, you referenced earlier, going back to the grassroots and sort of taking that elsewhere as opposed to just having a race in Chicago or something like that. What can you do differently to sort of bring them on board? Yeah, I think it's, well, you got to show them a great race. First of all, right? As long as we put on a race, usually they're going to like it. But it also depends on what race you put in. They're like, if I can interrupt for a second, that people love to complain. So yeah, that's the number one. Yeah, they love to complain no matter what. But that's okay, right? They're passionate and that's all right. But I think it's what races you potentially move, right? There are traditional races that our fans would say absolutely not. This is a stable. We've race there 50, 60 years and we get that. And there are newer events where we can try some things and move them. So I think that's what we want to do is take maybe some of those newer venues or where they're challenged from an attendance standpoint. We can explain why we're trying something. And it doesn't have to be permanent. We want Chicago Street for a couple of years. We're going back to the Chicago Landspeed Way this year. Maybe we'll be back at the street race the year after. Who knows? So there's a lot of opportunity that we want to keep. You know, not surprising fans, but we always want something to be new where we can have something, especially with the Amazon, so the world, they're very interested in what's the next new idea? We've got to make sure we do it in a way that celebrates the sport. I just go to a new market just because it's got to be meaningful for everyone within the industry and ultimately the fans. Let's talk about international. And I happen to know you're a big supporter of taking things internationally. What makes sense? Like, in a year, how many races, when would those races take place? Because I would think a race in Europe is got to, that would be difficult to do within the scope of the season, I would think, right? Yeah, so it's the million dollar question. And I think we are spending a lot of time looking at this because there's a lot of different avenues we could take. You could run your kind of, your class race, your season preview. You could take that internationally as an exhibition. You could create kind of a two or three week mid season where you have time to go overseas somewhere for race and it's a points race. Or you could create kind of almost, you know, a new series where it's an exhibition with a new type of car that you're running. I do know this that the celebration of kind of Americana around the NASCAR style of racing people love. So if you go to the NASCAR Euro race in Brandtatch in England, smaller kind of series, like one of our touring series, there will be 50,000 people there. And it's an eye opener and they love NASCAR, they love the style of racing. So I think our next move will be somewhere where we can showcase that style of racing, probably on an exhibition side. And then we're going to take a much longer view. We haven't in the past, Sean. We've made some mistakes along the way. We've just shown up with the race rather than seed the marketplace, you know, marketing, social media, shows, you know, in the local bars talking about, you know, the sport. And then you put a race there, you know, three to five years later. That's the things we've got to get way ahead of us. In industry, it's really kind of planning four or five years out. What are the marketplaces? Because there's no shortage of interest in the sport. We're getting a lot of phone calls. It's complicated to do as you've said, but, you know, we want to make the right move. We believe in our racing. We think once people see it, they're hooked. I'd love to personally, I'd love to flop a race in Europe on an oval and showcase our sport. And I think the fans would go crazy like they did for Le Mans with Garage 56. But, you know, we'll see how that goes. One thing that I've enjoyed about getting to know you a little bit is, you know, before we started taping, we were talking about the hated New York Yankees and the beloved Baltimore Oreo. You referenced the giants on this as well. Should Eli be in the Hall of Fame, you think? You know, it's tough, man. Probably, but Ford's looking at me, but it's kind of a fluke pass. I don't know. What the reason I breathe this up is, what can you learn? What can you learn? What are other leagues doing well that you would like to sort of borrow from? So another great question. So I do a lot of reading. I do a lot of studying of other sports. And I think it's a good thing. I try to get to a lot of other events just to experience what's happening. Not necessarily saying, hey, I'm coming. Just go as a fan and see what you experience. So I would say from the UFC, love just what they've done of being brash in terms of, you know, they were small and then what did they do? They promoted the heck out of things. It was awesome. I love what baseball has done in terms of. I grew up a baseball fan, played baseball. The game's got longer. You heard boring. You know, they were in a real struggle and they made some really cool rule changes. Now they've got to, I know they've got some challenges coming up in the future. But in terms of the product on the field, I thought they made some great moves and it's something that we can learn from and we can look at as well. And then, you know, the passion of, you follow English primarily soccer. I don't think we'll ever get to relegation, but the passion of teams moving up and down in the fandom that those folks have when you go to a game. They don't care about concerts. They don't care about anything, put the product on the field and let's go. So there's so many things that we can learn on a daily basis. And then I'd say it's not just sports. You know, I'm getting old, but you know, the celebrity, the podcasters, what you're doing, there's so much to learn from what's entertaining now, right? And utilizing that, going on podcasts, learning from what we can do from a content standpoint. That's been huge as well. Back to the beginning of cable, you know, all the different leagues, you know, the birth of NFL network and MLB network. They decided they wanted to be media companies as much as, you know, being sports leagues. You're seeing a little bit of a trend, you know, you know, you have to go over and become media and things like that. But you're saying that there are, there is sort of the new media that's out there that you can take a look at and pursue. That's 1% and you can, you know, who knows what will stick, right? Some things are always going to work, but you know, Brian Herbs leading our team from a broadcast standpoint and Tim Clark content. We've got a ton of assets. You know, we're trying some things again, experiment a little bit, but there are so many things emerging. YouTube for us is got to be a huge play in the future. I mean, my son and daughter, I don't even watch TV, they're tuning in on YouTube to whatever show it is or gaming. We have got to be better in that space with content. We've learned along the way. We've had long form content with movies, that sort of thing, but, you know, we can put together some quick 15 to 20 minute highlight shows that I think will drive some new viewership and some new interest as well. Yeah, even Netflix is too long for them. I mean, you got to be able to get over from one screen to another pretty quickly. Let me ask you a quick question about the PGA tour, which I've gone through. They're culling a lot of their, not a lot, some of their tournaments. I think that it's better to have fewer tournaments than what they had. You seem to be going kind of a different route in there. I know it's two different audiences and two different sports, but why does this work for you and that work for them? Yeah, I think it, so it has worked for us, right? So I would not say this is where the way we'll always be. We just had a discussion actually two hours ago about, you know, that 2030, 2031. And if you had a clean sheet of paper, what would this sport look like? Is there a number of races that would make more sense? Could it be 30? Could it be more? Could you have midweek races that, you know, you shorten the season? So I would say all that's on the table. The discussions that in the past have been more kind of by individual stakeholder. And I think what you'll see our industry come together on going forward is really talking about, you know, five years from now as an industry, what is the best thing that we can put together for the fans? How many races is that, you know, is it network? Is it cable? Is it, you know, digitally streamed? What is it? What do we want? And ultimately, what will the sponsors be interested in as well to help drive our sport and really showcase our drivers and our future stars? So I would not lock us in for the foreseeable future. We have contracts, obviously, with our existing media partners, which we're excited about. But long term, I think it's something to look at and really deliver what fans want you see, shorter games, longer games. You know, I know this. If it's entertaining, people will tune in. And, you know, it was a four-hour college football game, but it's 45, 45 going in overtime. No one's complaining that it was four hours. So if your product is entertaining, people will stick with it. That was one of my favorite stories I tell everybody is, you know, college football games are too long. Whenever I talk to a media executive, they say, if it could go six hours, we would want it to go six hours. It's like, you have college football on there and people are watching it. Yeah. And I think, you know, for us, just quickly, you know, even looking at how we're presenting races, like, you know, right now we have, you know, stage breaks, cautions. And we're learning a lot too in terms of the time it takes for, you know, a stage break or caution. Can we look to shorten those things up and just make it tighter? Fans love kind of when we drop the green flag. They love restart. You know, we don't love long breaks either. So we're really looking at utilizing technology, getting back to racing as quickly as we can and delivering as much action as we can because ultimately, you know, that's why people are too nervous. The last year was your first of a brand new media deal. You vote, of course, a Fox and ESPN were there, but then T and T sports and you had Amazon Prime as well. What did you learn? What did we learn? So going into it with Fox, and if I was honest with you, which I always am, we had a few of us. Yeah, we had a few less network races. So we thought that we're going to get off to a tough start in terms of less network races overall ratings. We're pleasantly surprised, even despite rain at Daytona, where we kind of ended up with Fox and thought, okay, you know, this is a good start to where we're going. And then it was a big question mark with Amazon. I would tell you that when discussions within the industry were initially talking about Amazon, everyone was like, oh my gosh, what's this going to mean for sponsorship? It's going to happen to the sport. By the end of the Amazon five races, everyone in the industry said, can Amazon do 36 races? That was fantastic. It was unbelievable how they showcased the sport. Like based on what they did, based on their programming, the way they did the programming or based on their marketing. So a lot of time for your race, telling stories, covered the race, extended post-race to tell the stories and almost covered us like a movie versus a race, really telling the stories, developing the personalities. And I think we learned a lot about that as well in terms of, okay, here's something, anytime you have a new partner, they're going to elevate the game. So I'd say awesome, really pleasantly surprised. And then I think as we look towards the latter half of the season, we felt a tail off. And we put so much focus on the beginning of the season and that launch of Amazon. We felt a little bit of the pain when we went TNT, NBC, USA. And I think one of the lessons we learned is that focus kind of second half of the season, we've got to really kind of, let's go. We know we're going to be good fox, we know we're going to be good Amazon. What can we do to refocus fans? All right, make the transition over to Turner and then we're on our way with person. So that's going to be a big focus for us, especially with the new playoff format. One of my worries for that schedule is that you start with a big broadcast network in Fox. You go to a streamer, that Amazon's getting better, but it doesn't provide as many viewers as Fox. Then you go to TNT Sports, which is cable, and we all know what cord cutting is happening. So by the time it comes back to another big broadcast network in NBC, the distribution has gone from tip top, all the way down. Is that a problem or is that something that you can rectify by marketing? Yeah, no, I think that's a fair, fair point. I think that's what we're saying. The same thing you said it more eloquently is is focused as many assets as we can on that timeframe and know that you're coming into that right that you've got this portion of the season where you've got to turn the fans, you've got to tell them exactly where they're at and pound that home every single day and see what happens this year. It's going to be a big focus for us. If you see that fall off, we're going to continue to make efforts because we need to turn it to succeed. We need Matt Hwang and Verson, his team to succeed. They've got a big bet on us and we've got a big bet on them to make sure that we carry this thing through all the way to Miami with the championship. Another consistent gripe that I get is, boy, there are so many races on so many days. It's not, don't know where to find them. You went from two partners to four partners. I guess five if you count the CW. Is that did you find that to be a problem at all? I would not say I did. I'm on kind of inside baseball, right? But I would say this, we benefited a lot as well though. We were in places that we've never been. So when you're showing up on in-car cameras on an HBO Max or you're seeing NASCAR maybe in a place that you hadn't before, I think there's pros and cons. And so that goes back to us doing a great job of letting the fans know where we're at. The flip side of that is you referenced CW, tremendous partner that came in, made a big bet on the O'Reilly series delivered great ratings for us. Fans knew where that was and it was a consistent story throughout. So we've got to learn from that. And we've got to do our job, letting fans know where these races are. And that's up to our entire industry as well. To me this isn't just a NASCAR, yes that's our job. But we need drivers, teams, tracks, everybody focused on these partners who are really putting a lot into this sport and deserve to be promoted and let the fans know where to find it. Yes Steve, that's always been, that's actually a pitpeave of mine. I hear those complaints all the time from people that wind up finding the games or wind up finding the races. And it's something that when I said earlier, people love to complain. I haven't really seen any evidence that that's actually been hurting viewership. But I they come with the complaint there from people in the business, from friends and family that aren't in the business. You hear it all the time, but it's a you there's generally no evidence. It's a challenge, right? And I think it goes back to you know what is that partner delivering, right? So before the season, I mean everybody would have said about that about Amazon. What are you doing? What are you guys thinking? This is a crazy move. And once Amazon got done literally, you know, Jeff Gordon, man, it's awesome. What can we do? You know, let's let's have some more of this. So there's pros and cons, right? I think it's also what is that network, cable network or streaming platform deliver for the sport? How do they present it? That has a lot to do with our fans. They're very particular about you know what's happening on a broadcast and who the personalities are talking about it. So I think we've got a good mix, but you know it's going to be our job. You know we've got a long term partnership to get this right. It's a long term, but it's also short when you look at hey, we're already kind of on display for our next media package. So we got to do it right. There's a there's a lot of noise out there with the NFL right already talking about opening up their their negotiations. So you know it's going to be on us. We've got to be a must have sport. And I think in the past we're probably nice to have. So the mantra that we have as an industry is he must have property in the future. Steve good luck with the with the Daytona 500 good luck with the entire season. Been fun watching the rise and and and of NASCAR over the years and I'm going to certainly be paying attention this year. Well appreciate all you've always done and don't want to be a stranger. So look forward to seeing you out of race and hosting over beer. Yeah count count on it. Thanks a lot. All right. Thanks. Well, I enjoyed that. I think if you listen, he has an open mind. He listens and he's watching other leagues and he's listening to people. I think a lot of the changes that we're going to see coming to NASCAR are going to be a lot of fun to watch over the next several years. So I want to thank Steve O'Donnell for joining the pod this week. I also want to shout out James Hallis also from NASCAR for all the work he put into the getting this done. More importantly though, I want to thank you for listening to the varsity and Odyssey podcast and partnership with Puck. I also want to thank the executive editors from Puck that's Gabby Grossman, Ben Landy, John Kelly, the great team from Odyssey Bob Tabitor and Patrick Antennetti and also our partners at Nesson, Greg Poth and Mark Marlaca. If you like this podcast make sure to sign up for my newsletter also called the varsity. Head over to Puck.News and use a code word diversity all one word for 20 percent discount and I will see you on Wednesday.