Bob Pockrass: New NASCAR TV series, diversity drivers involved show promise
NASCAR Drive for Diveristy driver Darrell Wallace, Jr. will star in the new NASCAR reality TV show on BET. // SAM CRANSTON, SAM CRANSTON
COMMENTARY
CHARLOTTE – NASCAR’s newest television show debuted Wednesday night on BET as “Changing Lanes” chronicles the Drive for Diversity tryouts and development program.
The good thing about this series is that it shows promise. What’s even better is that at least some of the drivers eventually selected have shown promise as well since taping concluded in January.
Putting NASCAR on BET (Black Entertainment Television) should be good for the sport. This show likely will inform BET’s core audience about NASCAR, its struggles and efforts as far as diversity and the hurdles all drivers face in breaking into the sport. There will be parts of the show that talk about NASCAR pioneer Wendell Scott and his challenges in being an African-American driver. Current diversity drivers will talk about racial and sexist incidents in their careers.
The first two episodes will show the October selection process of the group from about 30 drivers vying for spots at Revolution Racing, which conducts the diversity program and fields cars for drivers in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East division and Late Models at North Carolina short tracks. The next six episodes will show the 10 drivers vying for a spot in the Toyota All-Star Challenge last January.
Max Siegel, the former Dale Earnhardt Inc. president who now runs Revolution Racing, believes because the show needed content, the evaluation process included more on-track and off-track tryout time than past diversity programs. After the field was cut to 10, the 10 drivers lived in Siegel’s house.
“Just being in the car almost every day for over a month was just awesome,” said Ryan Gifford, an African-American who earned one of the four spots to compete in NASCAR’s K&N Pro Series regional circuit. “It was awesome seat time. We went from Legends to Late Model cars to K&N Pro Series cars. We did everything from pit stops to one-on-one battles to everything you could think of.”
Gifford, a Richard Childress Racing development driver who showed promise with a second-place finish in the East race at Dover last year but then had his Shell sponsorship go away, is fifth in the East series standings and became the first African-American to win a pole on that circuit. Revoloution Racing’s Darrell Wallace has two wins and is second in the East standings while Paulie Harraka, a member of the diversity program but who remained with Bill McAnally Racing in the West series, has a victory and is second in his division.
Two drivers – Michael Cherry and Megan Reitenour – have won Late Model events in North Carolina.
“The on-track performance really validates … the initiative, it validates the model and it gives credibility to the show,” Siegel says. “Anytime I talk about entertainment, people go, ‘Oh, this is racing.’ Racing is entertaining, but it has to be good racing. No matter how you look at it, people come to be entertained by the sport.
“I was extremely sensitive that this production had racing integrity. I would call it a reality competition series.”
NASCAR Media Group, which helped produce the series, did its typical first-rate production job. And the guy who runs it, Jay Abraham, also made sure the series didn’t go too far into the world of reality shows. NASCAR already had made that mistake once after it produced and then canceled a NASCAR wives show for the TLC network.
“One thing we didn’t want to do was fabricate situations like most reality shows do,” Abraham says. “That was one of the issues we had with ‘NASCAR Wives’ was that we were asked to do certain things that just weren’t natural in the due course of our sport or people’s wives. We didn’t have that with this was because this was all about what the kids were doing.”
This reality show might not have too many scripted parts, but it certainly has gone for dramatic moments and has “cast” certain drivers in roles. Apparently Harraka is going to be the evil, cocky driver. Harraka has done a great job networking, keeping people informed, responding to interview requests and marketing himself. He goes to Duke University, races on the West Coast and has spent two years driving Late Models and two years in a regional series, so that makes him the guy to beat in this show.
Harraka, a driver of Syrian descent, might not deserve to be cast that way, but hopefully the exposure will be beneficial to the racers who did make the diversity program and those who didn’t.
Both “Changing Lanes” and the diversity drivers are showing promise. And while there’s still more to come – seven weeks of the television show and about another month of racing for the drivers – it appears that the initial steps of the program show progress over previous efforts.
More results, as far as ratings for BET and wins for the drivers, will tell the story. Challenges will remain. Both Siegel as well as partner NASCAR Media Group want to do the show again next year, but will BET want it? And will any of these drivers, hopefully with the help of this exposure, get sponsors to move up to the next level in the next year or two?
Siegel says the program should announce new sponsors from major brands in the next four to six weeks.
“People are definitely going to take on to the show and really take notice of what’s going on,” Gifford says. “Even in the African-American community, I haven’t met many people that don’t like racing once they know what it’s all about. I think the show will be a great opportunity to give people that sense of what it’s about.”
