SPEED Handling Friday's Heavy Lifting

The entire SPEED gang will be on-site in Bristol, TN as the network steps-up to the plate for an all-day NASCAR TV marathon. Only two days after televising an exciting Craftsman Truck Series race, SPEED will handle all the on-track NASCAR action on Friday leading-up to the Nationwide Series event.

It will be veteran host John Roberts who lights-up the SPEED Stage at 10AM Eastern Time with an edition of NASCAR Live. Reporting for Roberts from the garage area will be Randy Pemberton and Hermie Sadler. Pemberton has been hosting NASCAR in a Hurry for SPEED and along with Sadler has been handling driver channel duties for DirecTV's Hot Pass.

The action on the track begins at 10:30AM with Nationwide Series practice. The hard-working trio of Steve Byrnes, Jeff Hammond and Larry McReynolds will call the action on the track from upstairs in the announce booth. Reporting for this session from the garage will be Wendy Venturini and Bob Dillner. With all the happenings of the past week, it may be this series where the news is really being made.

Up next at Noon will be Sprint Cup practice. The same entire TV crew, including announcers, will continue for this session. Since many of the drivers will be doing double-duty, somehow it makes sense for the TV crew to do the same. This is a ninety minute practice session that has been known to result in some incidents and some hot tempers.

After a quick lunch, Byrnes, Hammond and McReynolds will put on their Trackside hats and be joined by Elliot Sadler for that program at 2:30PM. This one hour show from the SPEED Stage usually features two guests but with the schedule at Bristol there should be a wide variety of people stopping-by and a diverse group of topics being discussed.

At 3:30PM, the qualifying begins for the Sprint Cup Series and guess who will be handling the action for SPEED? That's right, the same crew from the earlier practice sessions will return including Venturini and Dillner for qualifying. One note is that TV favorite Kenny Schrader has replaced young Brad Coleman in the #96 car for this weekend and Schrader is a pretty crafty veteran at getting around Bristol.

Rather than take a break, NASCAR will roll-out the Nationwide Series cars as the Sprint Cup session is in-progress and crank-up Nationwide qualifying when the "big boys" are done. Once again, the same TV crew will handle the entire session. This should result in some frantic driver-hopping as several Cup drivers are running both races. This Nationwide session should begin around 5PM.

The final order of business for SPEED on this busy Friday is the Happy Hour for the Cup Series. With all of the previous sessions running back-to-back, SPEED has set aside ninety minutes to cover this session whenever it starts. The coverage will begin at 6PM and end a very long day for the same team of announcers in the booth and downstairs in the garage. John Roberts and the NASCAR Live gang will fill any time as needed during the day between on-track sessions.

Friday is going to be another challenging day for all the TV folks from the technical crew to the production folks and all of the engineering gang. SPEED did a great job last week with the same challenge. Bristol should offer another opportunity for NASCAR fans to stay with one channel all day-long for everything leading-up to the Nationwide Series race at 7:30PM over on ESPN.

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