Fans will be key ingredient in upcoming radio gig

I am really, really looking forward to Jan. 1.
I hope most of you have heard by now that I am going to be part of the “Morning Drive” show that will air from 7 to 11 a.m. weekdays on Sirius NASCAR Radio channel 128. Our show starts Jan. 1 when NASCAR’s satellite radio rights move from XM to Sirius.
I will be doing the show with Marty Snider, who was a pit reporter for NBC and TNT and will continue to be part of TNT’s team in the new contract. He and I agree on some things and disagree on others, which is about the best you can hope for.
I am going to do that show as well as maintain my job as beat writer for The Charlotte Observer.
It means more work, sure, but I’ve been telling people that I talk about racing all day anyway. I might as well get paid and put some of it on the air.
We want our show every day to be a conversation among ourselves, race fans and the people in the sport. We’re going to talk about whatever the fans want to talk about and about what we think the fans are going to want to know. Some days I hope we’ll get it right, and other days I know we’ll wish we could have done better. But the idea is to have fun and to provide fans with what I think has been missing.
NASCAR chairman Brian France has said repeatedly that he thinks NASCAR is an “undercovered” sport. He has talked about how he wants the sport to be talked about and written about not just on race weekends, but all week long.
Well, that’s where we come in. In some of our meetings leading up to the first show, people have said they just hope we’ll have callers. That doesn’t worry me a bit. I know there are race fans out there with strong opinions they want to express. Read my e-mail or the comments on these blogs and you’ll see that. We want our show to be a home for those fans. If you’re fired up about something that has or hasn’t happened, we want you to know that we’ll be there four hours Monday through Friday talking about it.
We’ve talked about having on guys who work in the sport who fans don’t know yet but who we know work hard and do tremendous jobs. We’ll have drivers on, sure, and I hope any driver in the sport will feel totally comfortable to pick up the phone and call us up if he has something to say about an issue we’re discussing. But we also hope any tire changer or transport driver will do the same thing – as well as any fan.
Marty and I want to try to get to the bottom of things as fast as we can. When we hear a rumor, we’re going to check it out and get the people who’re involved in it on the air as soon as we can.
Of course, that’s not very much different at all from what we do now. It’s just that now we’ll have that four-hour block each morning to get what we find out to the listeners. Maybe we can stop a few bad rumors before they really get started.
One thing I hope fans will know right from the start is that NASCAR does not control what we can and can’t say. Sirius is paying NASCAR for the satellite radio rights, and the name of the channel is Sirius NASCAR Radio. But NASCAR won’t control the content. Like anybody else, they’ll try to spin things their way when news is coming out. But we’re going to call it like we see it. If the listeners think we’re shills for NASCAR, we won’t last on the air long. And I hope to be doing this for a long, long time.