On Location: QVC and Dale Earnhardt Jr. sell at Whisky River

Photo gallery: On location with Dale Earnhardt Jr.

On the Friday before the Coca-Cola 600, Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s bar, Whisky River, was packed.

That it was so busy was no surprise. Junior’s sprawling bar in uptown Charlotte draws hordes of revelers throughout the year. On almost any night, a queue dozens deep forms outside the front door.

But that night, instead of packing in its usual crowd of young professionals dressed to the nines, the bar was wall-to-wall race fans looking to pay their respects to the 88 — and catch a live two-hour broadcast of QVC’s NASCAR-themed show “For Race Fans Only.”

There was a lot to be excited about for both the fans and the 35-person QVC road crew. With Junior himself scheduled to appear for an hour, the bar had sold out its allotment of 650 tickets at $20 a head weeks before the show went live and the atmosphere was electric.

For QVC, that night’s broadcast marked the 17th anniversary of “For Race Fans Only.”

What started in 1992 as a one-off show to promote a handful of licensed Richard Petty products has grown into the longest-running NASCAR-themed television program in history.

“We didn’t even have a show when we pitched that first idea,” says Tim Bertoni, senior executive VP for TSI, the firm that produces the show for QVC. “We had just one Richard Petty product and when we pitched it, the QVC folks kind of dared us to expand it. They said if we could get 10 more products to sell and get Richard Petty, then we’d have a show.

“We did it and now here we are.”

During its 17-year run, Bertoni’s show has grown into a merchandising monster that has hosted more than 50 different drivers and dozens of other NASCAR dignitaries.

Junior’s appearance at Whisky River marked the 16th time on the show and tied his father for second-most appearances by a NASCAR driver on QVC. (Jeff Gordon holds a commanding lead with 23 appearances.)

FRFO traditionally broadcasts live every other Friday from QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pa. But over the years, Bertoni and his crew have expanded their repertoire, filming live on location at all but three tracks on the schedule (Watkins Glen, Sonoma and Darlington).

While the show has matured, the product line has grown as well. It sells a lot more than just die-cast cars.

During the Whisky River show, viewers could purchase products that ranged from the nearly trivial, a $35 Dale Jr. MistyMate personal mister (a water bottle with a fine-misting spray nozzle), to the hope-that’s-not-an-impulse-buy framed collection of memorabilia from Junior’s 2008 Bud Shootout win that went for $451.

But the bulk of the show was still devoted to die-cast cars. After all, FRFO owes much of its success to a single car: Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s Silver Select paint scheme from the 1995 All-Star race.

“That car changed my life,” Bertoni says. “Before then, at the midpoint of every season, we’d be looking at each other saying, ‘Well, I guess we can keep selling the same old black Earnhardt Sr. car.’ That paint scheme really allowed us to thrive.”

Today, of course, the die-cast boom is a distant memory and anyone selling licensed NASCAR merchandise has to work harder to cut through the noise and attract customers. The show is no exception.

FRFO’s primary hook is simple: scarcity. The show works closely with drivers and merchandisers to produce items that are only available on the network.

That can mean any number of things. At Whisky River, host Dan Hughes (opposite page with Junior) unveiled a new line of Jeff Gordon and Earnhardt Jr. Cabbage Patch Dolls.

The catch? QVC would be the exclusive retailer of the dolls until the holiday season. If you wanted one of those Xavier Roberts-signed Junior dolls, QVC was your only option.

The pitch worked: QVC booked 3,000 sales in just under 20 minutes.

Of course, not every item packs the cachet of an exclusive product launch. One of Bertoni’s jobs is to produce new, compelling products in limited editions. Tonight, he would push Dale Jr. cars in a panoply of paint schemes. A Whisky River-branded scheme with a special “shifting shades” paint that changed hues in the light opened

Junior’s segment. Of course, the No. 88 Chevy was also available in every official paint scheme from the plain-Jane version that races every week to the camouflage National Guard livery that ran at Daytona. And even those could be gussied up with gold plating or other special finishes.

Drivers’ autographs are another essential method of creating one-of-a-kind products. At the Whisky River taping, the first guest, Talladega winner Brad Keselowski, committed to signing every die-cast of his winning car that QVC sold. For a driver with a relatively low profile, that’s a big but not outrageous commitment. For Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart, it’s entirely different.

“We did a show with Tony at the Stewart-Haas shop at the beginning of the year and he agreed to sign as many of his cars as we could sell,” Bertoni says. “I had told him that if we wound up selling 2,000 that would be great.

“We sold 800 in just the first few minutes and eventually ended somewhere around 5,500. But he kept his word and signed them all.”

Aside from dealing with the strain of signing thousands of cars, being a guest on the show looks relatively simple.

Their time in front of the camera is not that much different than any other interview. They’re there to answer questions and tell stories.

The real work falls to Hughes. A former stand-up comic, Hughes is a longtime QVC personality — he co-hosts the network’s daily “The Morning Show” — with the profound gift of gab that a QVC host has to have. For two straight hours — he only gets a brief break on the half-hour — Hughes talked almost without interruption, maintaining his amiable tone the entire time.

According to Hughes, however, FRFO is an easy assignment because he’s a former racer himself. Hughes competed on the USAC circuit as a young man before moving into television. So, when the opportunity to combine his two loves arose, he jumped at it.

“I love this stuff,” he says. “I keep up with NASCAR already, so talking to these guys comes naturally. Doing my research for these shows is just fun for me.”

Although he makes it look easy, Hughes does spend hours prepping for each show. He and the QVC team go over each product in advance, highlighting its features and ironing out the details of the pitch. All of his prep gets boiled down to a single blue notecard for each product that Hughes can glance at on camera.

But despite his nearly two decades of experience and hours of study, he still gets the willies.

“I can’t look at the crowd,” he says just before going live. “I’ll be fine once we’re going but I still get nervous.”

No wonder. He is a master multitasker, processing information from several different sources at once and making it all look easy. Through his headset, he received constant updates — and occasional corrections — from the show’s production staff all while he chatted with Junior, Keselowski or a call-in viewer. At the foot of the stage, Hughes kept his eye on two monitors, one provided a live look at the QVC broadcast and the other gave Hughes valuable information like caller info when Hughes also had to talk to a fan calling from home. (Sometimes, of course, Hughes slips up — he cites one of his favorites as asking “Judy from Arizona” where she was from.)

When Junior took the stage, Hughes deftly steered the conversation from racing to the product at hand and then back to more general ground. He has a quick wit and clearly knows his stuff (he even got in a few Jimmy Spencer fat jokes).

Then, as soon as Hughes had wrapped up the broadcast and Junior had slipped out the back, the QVC staff set to tearing the stage down. What took them nearly two days to assemble could be undone in a matter of hours. They would be on the road before sunrise.

After the show, Bertoni called the broadcast a huge success. Not only had they filled the bar, the Whisky River broadcast was a nice test run for 2010. Next year, the NASCAR Hall of Fame, just a few blocks from Whisky River, will be inducting its first class and Bertoni fully expects they’ll be back for another shoot.

This story originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of NASCAR Illustrated.