The Daytona "Pepsi 400" Race

Sunrise on Saturday morning. This photo was taken from the camera 3 location (which is the one they always use to show the cars leaving the pits.

After a couple of weeks off, I was scheduled to work the Pepsi 400 which is held here in Daytona Beach. With the sad news of Jerry's death on Monday night, when I showed up at work on tuesday morning, I alerted the crew that I'd need to be leaving for 2 days during the work week. We had a long discussion about it and decided that if the days I needed to be gone would turn out to be thursday and friday, then I'd probably not need to bring in a replacement. During the day on tuesday, my brother Buddy called me to tell me the schedule for the services and it turned out to be thursday and friday - the best possible days for my work week.

To explain this further: The first 2 days we are on site (this week was tueday and wednesday) are extremely busy days where we haul tons of equipment out into the field and place it in strategic positions based on the individual track. After setting up all of this equipment which gathers data constantly, we have to work on the method of getting this data back to the our production truck. The paths of this data can take many forms including fiber optics, phone cable (RJ-11), ethernet cable (RJ-45) and combinations of those. We have to bring back the data from our special sensors we have on each of the cameras that we have our sensors on as well as from our telemetry recievers that we have placed all around the track - which are used to receive the info from the cars and send it to us.

Where possible, we try to use fiber because it's very reliable and has almost no limit to how much data we can send on it. Very often, we have to use a combination of RJ11 - which carries information in an analog form and then convert this analog signal to a digital signal and pass it back to the truck via fiber. Anyway, the point of all of this info was to say that we try to get all of this done in the first 2 days and then the remainder of the time before the races is spent trouble shooting the data flow and this part of the job can be done by less people if necessary.

Also, taking all the equipment apart and getting it back into the truck after the main race is another time that we need to have as many 'hands on deck' as possible. So, the days I needed to be gone worked out best for all of the crew and we didn't need to call in a replacement for my position. The guys said they'd cover me and were very helpful and I greatly appreciate it.

Well, Friday night's Busch race was rained out and for some reason, Nascar decided to run it on Saturday morning at 9am - with the scheduled Cup race for 8 pm on Saturday night. What this meant was we would have a 22 hour PLUS workday. It was very exhausting and I spent all day Sunday doing nothing but recovering. I'm glad I didn't have to travel this week.

This is a photo of our control room where we make the "TV Magic". During races where I don't operate the 3D cam, I sit at one of the 2 computer monitors in the far left.


These 2 photos above are from the camera position inside turn 2. On race day, we had to be in at 5 am, so I was out in the field as the sun was coming up.

There were thousands of fireworks mortars set up for the fireworks display after the race. It was funny in a way because a normal TV camera costs about $200,000 including the lense and all of these fireworks were set up around 5 of DirecTV's cameras. Not ideal.


The raceways use trucks with jet engines mounted sideways on the back to dry the track. Here's 4 of them turning around to go back for another pass. When these truck dry by you (at about 3 mph) it's so loud you have to hold your ears - but they do dry the track very efficently.