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How TV Changed Racing Forever: The Thrill, the Tragedy, and the Transformation · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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Brake Fix's History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part
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by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
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Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
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Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
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Television turns its gaze on motorsports by Preston Lerner.
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Preston Lerner is a freelance writer who has covered racing
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for the past four decades.
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For many years, he was a regular contributor to Automobile
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Magazine, as well as Road Track.
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Lerner is also the author and co author of six books, most recently Shelby
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American, The Renegades Who Built the Cars, Won the Races, and Lived the Legend.
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The material used in Television Turns Its Gaze on Motorsports is drawn
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from his upcoming book, The Deadliest Decade, which examines the safety, which
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examines the safety and the commercial and technological developments that
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transformed racing from 1964 to 1973.
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Lerner's presentation covers the early and often controversial
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efforts of TV to bring automobile racing into American living rooms.
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In 1961, a segment from the Indianapolis 500 time trials was broadcast as a part
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of ABC's new Wild World of Sports program.
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During the first few years, racing coverage was expanded to include
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Formula One, Le Mans, NASCAR, and even the USAC dirt track races.
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Television dramatically expanded the reach of the sport, which in turn
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attracted major commercial sponsors.
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By the 1970s, racing had been transformed into the global
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commercial engine we know today.
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Yet from the beginning, enthusiasts had a love hate relationship with ABC.
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On one hand, TV coverage confirmed that racing was a legitimate sport
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rather than a tawdry carnival sideshow.
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On the other, serious fans found the broadcasts puerile and sensationalistic.
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The camera work was shaky, the commentary insipid, and the focus
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on accidents infamously morbid.
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Coverage of the fatal wrecks of Lorenzo Bendini and Roger Williamson
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inspired widespread disgust that led to improvements in safety.
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This was an unintended consequence, but it was a product largely
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of television's unblinking eye.
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Preston Lerner is going to be talking about his television
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turns its gaze on motorsports.
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So I will be speaking today about a subject drawn from research I'm doing for
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a book about racing from 1964 to 1973.
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If you discount the tragedy at Le Mans in 1955, this was the deadliest 10
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year stretch of racing history, and I'll want to explore why that was the
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case and what the ramifications were.
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So I'll be looking at subjects ranging from the growth of the safety
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industry, sponsorship, technological developments, and television.
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And in fact, I plan to devote two chapters to television.
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The second one will look at the later years and get to
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the financial nitty gritty.
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The first one, and that's the one I'll be focusing on here today, is
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about the early years and looking specifically at the United States.
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In one of those delicious ironies that makes the study of history so
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delightful, television was invented in 1927 by a young man who'd grown up
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in a log cabin with no electricity.
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For a quarter century after that, radio was still king.
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In 1943, there were only 6, 000 television sets in the entire country.
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But by the end of the 1950s, 90 percent of all American households
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had at least one television set.
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From the beginning sports was a major part of broadcast programming.
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Baseball was the biggie back then.
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It was the national pastime.
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It was relatively easy to cover from a technical standpoint.
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But television also made major sports out of boxing and professional wrestling.
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And football fans will tell you that the 1958 sudden death playoff game
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between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants is what put the NFL on the map.
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By the late 50s, there were three major networks left standing,
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same ones we have today.
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So that would be NBC was the oldest, the most powerful, and the most profitable.
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CBS was second, but it enjoyed tremendous influence and prestige thanks to the
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news department headed up by Edward R.
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Murrow.
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ABC was a distant and dismal third.
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So far behind the other two, the NBC executives joked that ABC stood
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for the almost broadcasting company.
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So in the late 1950s, ABC hired a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa turned
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TV executive by the name of Edgar Sherrick to run its sports programming.
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Sherrick was whip smart, excitable, and inscrutable.
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Colleagues described him as a high strung, mad hatter.
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One of his first hires was an equally bright, dapper, politically savvy
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young exec by the name of Rune Arledge.
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You know, Arledge and Sherrick couldn't have been much different
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in terms of personality, but they shared a common ambition, and that
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was to raise ABC to a level of being a legitimate rival to CBS and NBC.
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Problem was, they didn't have the clout or the money to compete
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with NBC and CBS for major sports.
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So they embarked on a program of business jujitsu and making a
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strength out of their weakness.
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So what they did was, Instead of chasing after top tier sports, they went after the
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second and third tier events, ones that Americans knew little or nothing about.
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Two advantages to this approach.
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First of all, the broadcasting rights were peanuts, so that fit into their budget.
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Second one was since so few Americans knew about the sport, or knew much
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about these sports, they wouldn't know how the games had turned
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out before they got to see them.
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And this was critically important because Sherrick and Arledge didn't
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have the resources, nor, frankly, did they have the inclination to
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televise any of these events live.
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The idea was to cover them as they occurred, and they were doing film in
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those days, this is before videotape.
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The film would go back to New York, where it would be edited into
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dramatic and digestible segments.
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They could then broadcast on a sports omnibus show that they planned
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to launch on Saturday afternoons.
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So Arledge ran this concept past Curt Gowdy, veteran announcer of the day.
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And Gowdy told him, that's the craziest idea I ever heard of.
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It'll never work.
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The Y World of Sports debuted on April 29th, 1961, and it
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ran continuously until 1998.
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Jim McKay's famous intro, Thrill of Victory and Agony of Defeat, became one
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of the best known catchphrases in America.
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From the beginning, programming ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.
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Anybody here remember barrel jumping?
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How about Acapulco cliff diving?
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Personal favorite.
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Automobile racing fit perfectly into the eclectic mix that
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Arledge and Sherrick had in mind.
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So on May 27th, 1961, the fifth weekly installment of Waterworld of
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Sports featured the Indianapolis 500.
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Time trials, that is, not the race.
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The race had been broadcast on local Indianapolis television in 1949 and 50.
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But after that, Speedway president Wilbur Shaw, a three time 500 winner,
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decided that the broadcast was cutting into ticket receipts at the gate,
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so he banned coverage of the race.
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And in 1961, ABC was reduced to covering time trials.
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instead of the 500 itself.
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Still, it went over pretty well, and Sherrick decided to dispatch Arledge to
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Paris to see if he could line something up for the upcoming 24 Hours of Le Mans.
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Arledge recalled, I spoke almost no French, and in fact
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had almost no money to spend.
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No matter, I believe I was the first American ever to make a
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pitch for television rights.
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In other words, American Broadcasting Company, in this instance, worked wonders.
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Arledge secured the rights to French film of the race for a mere 10, 000.
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He hires a color commentator, Sterling Moss, who was actually racing in a Ferrari
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250 short wheelbase with Graham Hill.
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And Jimmy Kaye came over from the States to do the play by play.
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The Brockhouse was a success, so much so that Arledge and Sherrick now
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decided to turn their attention to NASCAR and the upcoming Firecracker
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250 at Daytona International Speedway.
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But here they ran into a little problem in the person of Big Bill France, the
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not so benevolent dictator of NASCAR.
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What had happened was the previous year, CBS had taken a flyer on a covering speed
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week, and that's the orgy of races that precede and include the Daytona 500.
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The network sent 50 technicians and two of their biggest guns to
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Florida, anchorman Walter Cronkite and director of programming Art Peck.
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They were serious car guys, actually.
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Tech was a founder of the Madison Avenue Sports Car Driving and
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Chowder Society, which, believe it or not, was a big deal back then.
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And Cronkite had raced Elantria at Sebring in the 12 hour in 1960.
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So they knew a lot about car racing.
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Unfortunately, they didn't know anything about stock car racing,
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and the broadcast was a disaster.
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As Chrissy Kahnemacki recalled, the reviews were devastating,
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just criminally bad.
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But it got worse for NASCAR.
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Two weeks later, NBC cajoled France into putting on a special made for TV event
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at Daytona called the Autolite Challenge.
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And after France put it together, he was unhappy to discover that NBC
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was not going to cover the race in its entirety, but just give it fewer
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than five minutes on the Today Show.
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So he was pretty peeved after that.
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And after getting burned by the two bigger networks, he wasn't inclined to
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work with the smaller network at ABC.
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That's it.
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So to placate him, Marla and Sherrick agreed to hire Konamaki
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to provide expert commentary.
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Much to everybody's surprise, this shotgun wedding turned into an enduring
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and mutually profitable marriage.
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Ikanoumaki was the owner and editor in chief of National Speed
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Sport News, which was the bible of American circle track racing.
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He brought with him a granular understanding of the racing
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world and access to all levels of the racing fraternity.
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Also, his ability and personality and willingness to ask tough
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questions made him a natural for TV.
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So he gave ABC instant credibility with racers, giving it Katamaki
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that is, a platform in front of millions of television viewers, ABC
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transformed him into the face of motorsports for the general public.
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During this year in the 1960s, racing was largely ignored by what
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we now call the mainstream media.
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Other than the Indy 500 and the Monaco Grand Prix, the only races to merit
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column inches in daily newspapers were ones where somebody was killed, and
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preferably as spectacularly as possible.
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Now, the car magazines did a wonderful job covering racing in this era.
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Much better than they do today, to be honest.
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Problem was that the race reports didn't appear on newsstands or arrive
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in subscribers mailboxes until a month, two months, sometimes three
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months after the races had been run.
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So it was really hard to stay abreast of what was going on in the racing
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world on a daily or weekly basis, even.
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And if you wanted to actually see the action, you had to
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attend a race in person.
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Dick Wallen was one of the first people to figuratively
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bring The Mountain to Muhammad.
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Most of you may know him for his fabulous books, but during the 1960s, he made a
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living shooting, editing, and selling movies about USAC open wheel racing, from
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Sprint Cars in the Dirt of Du Quoin to Roadsters on the Bricks at Indianapolis.
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In the 60s, he recalled, People were starved for any kind of films
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that showed real racing cars.
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We used to put on shows in the summer during the racing season.
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I'd go into a town, make arrangements to rent a hall, do the promotion, sell
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tickets to one or two thousand people, then split the gate 50 50 with the
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driver who worked the show with me.
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Wallen's projects went off so well that a company called the Music
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Corporation of America, or MCA, unveiled closed circuit television
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coverage of the Indy 500 in 1964.
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What happened was they beamed black and white footage to 161 venues all over the
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country, talking about movie theaters, sports arenas, convention centers,
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wherever they could really get a hall big enough to justify the broadcast.
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MCA would continue to offer full circuit coverage until 1970.
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Frankly, they were never a big hit.
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They were just marginal in terms of attendance and mediocre in
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terms of production values.
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Problem was, people didn't really want to see racing in movie theaters.
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They wanted to see it in the comfort of their living rooms.
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And this was an itch that only television could scratch.
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In the three years after it launched, Y World of Sports showcased a dozen races.
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IndyCar races, NASCAR races, Formula 1 races, Le Mans.
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In 65, they went all in on motorsports with four NASCAR races, two Grand Prixs
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from Monaco and the Nürburgring, a champ car race on the dirt in Sacramento,
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and, for the first time ever, a national broadcast of the Indy 500.
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No, it wasn't live.
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And when the footage was aired the week after the fact, the race had been
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edited down to a 45 minute segment that shared the time slot with the
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World Pocket Billiards Championship.
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Even so, it was a big deal, and ABC would continue to broadcast
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the NBC 500 every year until 2019, when it lost the contract to NBC.
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In 1967, ABC decided to raise the ante by broadcasting a race in glorious color.
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Ooh!
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Now this was a big deal back then.
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Again, hard to believe.
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Sort of ancient history.
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For this grand experiment, they decided to showcase the most glamorous race
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on the schedule, Monaco Grand Prix.
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Now students of Formula 1 history already know that the 67 edition
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of Monaco was one of the darkest in the long history of the race.
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On lap 82 of 100, Lorenzo Bandini was running second in his Ferrari three 12.
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He came out of the tunnel, the top of fifth gear, bent his car into the chicane,
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which was much faster than it is now.
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His left side tires clipped the curb.
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This sent him Caram into a wooden barrier on the right, and he bounced back pinball
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style to the left towards the quay overlooking the harbor, and hit at the
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precise spot where Alberto Ascari had lost control of his launch of D 50 in 1955.
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Ascari, you may recall, his car actually flew over the quay, into the harbor,
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and he had to be rescued by Frogman, who had been stationed in the water below.
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Had there been a guardrail at this spot, Bandini's Ferrari would have glanced off
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and he probably wouldn't have been hurt.
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But there was no guardrail, because in 1967, no one paid
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serious attention to safety.
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Not safety of the drivers, not safety of race officials, not safety of the fans.
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So instead of the guardrail, there was a wall, and I use that term
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euphemistically, a wall of hay bales.
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Bandini's Ferrari sheared right through this wall of hay bales and
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clobbered a large iron bollard.
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This sheared a wheel off the car, the Ferrari flipped over a caught
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fire, Bandini was trapped in the cockpit underneath while it burned.
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The rescue operation that followed reached a level of ineptitude that
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verged on criminal negligence.
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As David Phipps wrote acidly in his year end review in Autocourse, Lorenzo
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Bandini was allowed to die at Monaco.
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Firefighters didn't arrive at the scene for a minute after the accident occurred.
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They weren't wearing any protective gear, so they couldn't get
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close enough for their puny fire extinguishers to have any effect.
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Meanwhile, a helicopter, shooting footage of the event, was hovering overhead,
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and its blades were fanning the flames.
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Four minutes passed before they were able to right the car and
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yank Bandini out of the cockpit.
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He was dumped on the pavement like a sack of potatoes, whereupon the
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fuel tank exploded, and the car, and Bandini, caught fire for a second time.
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Why World of Sports caught it all on film, in grisly color.
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The coverage was so egregious that it captured the attention of New York
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Times television critic Jack Gould, who eviscerated the network in his column.
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As he wrote, The manner of the reportage, particularly since there
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was time to do whatever editing might be dictated by the requirements of
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good taste, left much to be desired.
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To replay the scene in the stop action technique common to televised sports
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was quite unnecessary, and the scenes of Bandini's body being dragged down
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the street and then being covered by flames for a second time bordered on the
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macabre, especially in vivid color TV.
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I should acknowledge, detailed coverage of wrecks is still a
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big part of racing coverage.
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Frankly, if you're not involved, everyone loves a wreck, except
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somebody gets seriously hurt.
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In that case, all bets are off.
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Protocol these days is for television directors to cut away from the
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action as soon as they think somebody has been seriously injured.
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They would never think of showing emergency crews cutting somebody
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out of a cockpit or administering CPR or something like that.
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But that wasn't the way things were done in the 1960s and 1970s.
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So what you have to understand is that sensationalism
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wasn't a bug in the program.
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It was the program.
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Why World of Sports was in the business of electrifying its audience, which is
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why Evel Knievel was such a regular guest.
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The lurid spectacle was fundamental to racing's appeal to ABC.
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The daunting consequences of failure also make racing seem like
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a more serious endeavor than other Why World of Sports staples like
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wrist wrestling and log rolling.
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Bandini's death was the first automotive fatality to be broadcast on the
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program, but it wouldn't be the last.
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A year later, while covering the Rex Mays 300 IndyCar race at Riverside,
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ABC demonstrated just how blithely it had ignored Gould's condemnation.
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Lew Sell, a local dentist and a very fine driver, was coming down the back straight,
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fastest part of the track in his Eagle, lost control under braking for turn 9, and
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then in a Gould ish reprise of Bandini's accident, His car turned over, caught
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fire, and he was trapped in the cockpit.
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Once again, it took firefighters far too long to get the fire out.
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The camera lingered lovingly on the scene, then zoomed in for a
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close up on the cockpit as the mangled car was turned over.
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I'm certainly afraid of what we're going to see now, he said in a
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hushed tone on the broadcast.
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Miraculously, Sel was still alive, and he laboriously levered himself out of the
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cockpit to reveal a badly charred uniform.
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Well, that's a pleasant surprise, isn't it, Ikonomaki said cheerfully?
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Was it?
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In the production booth, I can imagine the director gnashing his teeth because
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the shot hadn't been more gruesome.
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Ironically, ABC's most scathing critics weren't people like
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Jack Gould's New York Times.
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You know the type, people who hate everything about racing.
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No, the people who complain the most bitterly were the fans who
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love the sport, like the late, great columnist Brock Yates.
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Car and driver in the wake of Sell's accident, he wrote sarcastically.
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Thanks Mr.
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Arledge, for another triumph and good taste and our best wishes to you and
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your crew, and your eager search to find violence and bloodshed in sport.
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Perhaps on some quiet week in the future, you could bring back
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your wondrous footage of the 1967 Lorenzo Bandini Crash at Monaco.
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Sort of a golden oldie for all the sickies out there who missed it the first time.
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While it's easy, and I think fair, to criticize the network for its morbid
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coverage, it's worth noting that the attitudes about death were much
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different then than they are now.
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The 1960s were only a generation away from World War II, and we were
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still fighting in Southeast Asia.
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In fact, combat footage from Vietnam was routinely being
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broadcast on the nightly news.
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What rankled racing fans even more than the fixation on death was the
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perceived incompetence of the broadcasts.
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From cameras that always seem to be in the wrong place, to
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broadcasters who always seem to be commenting about the wrong thing.
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And there's also a sense that the broadcasts were being dumbed down for
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viewers who didn't know much about racing.
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You know, you think about baseball games, nobody bothers to explain
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what a relief pitcher is or how the infield fly rule works.
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And in football games, they don't tell you what a pass interference and
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penalty is or how you get a first down.
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But at ABC, the producers behaved as though the audience consisted
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mostly of aliens from outer space.
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Every broadcast seemed to feature a breakdown of how a pit stop
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worked, or an explanation, with graphics no less, of drafting.
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The audience was treated like third graders rather than adults,
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and that was really annoying.
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By the end of the decade, ABC faced competition in the racing space.
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Again, back then they weren't covering an entire series the way they do now.
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They were just cherry picking the races that they thought would sell
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well or that fit their schedule.
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This meant that there were a lot of races that weren't covered at all.
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And promoters of these races and the sanctioning bodies of series
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that weren't covered, you know, they wanted a piece of the television pie.
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So they began contracting with small production companies who put together
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racing broadcasts of their own and sold them to independent TV stations.
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The good news was this meant more television coverage.
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Bad news was, since these companies had fewer resources and less
17:38
experience than ABC, their coverage was, if anything, even worse.
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Here's AutoWeek after watching a particularly pathetic IndyCar broadcast.
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Nickel Dime operations being anchored by announcers who are woefully
17:49
ignorant about either racing or television production or both have
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resulted in a string of real dozers.
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Shows that rightly end up behind reruns of Tarzan and the Enraged
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Springboks in audience surveys and could send racing to the same limbo
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as roller derby unless somebody takes the time to learn what it's all about.
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The recent Trenton 200 is a case in point.
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Two hours of spoon players on the Ted Mack show wouldn't have approached
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it for sheer boring inefficacy.
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Ouch.
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There was even a fear in some circles that too much television was a bad thing.
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The fear was that television would suck the magic out of racing and homogenize
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it and turn it into a dull, predictable, made for the boob tube spectacle like
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bowling or professional wrestling.
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Yates, for example, used his bully pulpit at Car and Driver to
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rail repeatedly about the dangers posed by promoters and sanctioning
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bodies who were, in his opinion, selling their souls for television.
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He thought it was better for fans to attend races rather than
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subsisting on the pre digested morsels sold out on the airways.
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As he wrote, we may be disorganized and confused, and we may lack status with the
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so called sports establishment, but at least we in motor racing don't have the
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leeches from television on our backs, and for that we can be abundantly grateful.
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Uh, yes and no.
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I would characterize the relationship between TV and the
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racing community as can't live with them, can't live without them.
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After decades of being marginalized as the boorish devotees of a de classe
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blood sport, racing fans couldn't help but feel validated by the attention
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suddenly being paid to motorsports.
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And speaking personally, I've got to say that even though I would complain
19:13
all the time about how bad the coverage was, I watched every race I could see,
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because that was the only game in town.
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Watching races on television was better than not watching them at all.
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Eventually, even Yates came around, and he was seduced by the
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siren song of network television.
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So after years of relentlessly slamming ABC and print for a wide variety of
19:29
sins, he embarked on a second career of his own, doing on air TV commentary
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for CBS, and later SpeedVision.
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And why not?
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During the 1960s and 70s, television broadened the reach of the sport
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to an extent that would have been unfathomable a generation earlier.
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This period marked the dawn of an age when television viewers,
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rather than paying spectators, were the sport's principal drivers.
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TV brought racing to millions of fans who had never seen it before
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and weren't likely to travel to Indy, much less Watkins Glen or
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the Terre Haute action track.
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These new eyeballs suddenly made racing more attractive
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to sponsors large and small.
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Two of the major advertisers on wide world of sports were R.
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J.
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Reynolds and Brandon Williamson.
20:04
In years to come, money from these and other tobacco companies will become
20:08
the lifeblood of the racing industry.
20:10
And that was progress, wasn't it?
20:11
More fans meant more advertisers.
20:13
More advertisers meant more money.
20:15
More money meant more professionalism and R& D, which translated into
20:18
more speed, which led to more excitement and more competition.
20:21
But with all these shiny benefits came one sinister consequence.
20:25
Put all the ingredients together and you had a recipe for more danger, more
20:28
accidents, more death and destruction.
20:30
According to a wonderful website, Motorsports Memorial, every year between
20:34
1964 and 69 there was on average more than 150 deaths at racetracks around the world.
20:40
150.
20:40
It's a staggering number and it's sort of inconceivable, I think, to fans now
20:44
who've grown up with a no tolerance attitude towards fatalities in racing.
20:48
It was easy to blame television for spotlighting the carnage with such
20:51
apparent glee, but ABC wasn't the reason that the drivers and track
20:54
officials and fans were being killed at rates never seen before or since.
20:58
Its coverage was a symptom, not a cause.
21:00
The first step in any addiction recovery program is to admit
21:03
that you have a problem.
21:04
Nothing was going to change in racing until the leaders of the motorsports
21:07
world, sanctioning bodies, promoters, race officials, spectators, and
21:11
yes, even the racers themselves, admitted that something was wrong.
21:14
Then, after acknowledging the enormity of the problem, they would have to
21:17
look inward and ask some awkward questions about their seemingly
21:21
endless tolerance for tragedy.
21:22
Until then, public outrage would continue to grow as the plots in the motorsports
21:27
graveyard continued to multiply.
21:29
If anybody has any questions, I'll do my best to answer them.
21:38
How did you get all those archival material?
21:40
I'm doing a lot of research.
21:41
At this point, I've been doing book and uh, magazine research from the era.
21:46
Done a couple interviews.
21:47
I'm actually finishing up doing Motorsport Magazine, the British publication.
21:50
Hoping to start doing real interviews next couple of weeks.
21:53
You were mentioning the failed ABC broadcast of the 1961 Firecracker 400.
22:02
If I'm not mistaken, NASCAR just released the footage of that
22:06
on YouTube not too long ago.
22:08
So you can actually see just how clunky and awkward and horrible the footage was.
22:13
I believe it was, I think Keith Jackson was the host, but that
22:17
material is now out there.
22:18
And actually, I haven't seen that particular broadcast.
22:20
The funny thing is, is I try to avoid watching crash videos on YouTube.
22:24
And that's been one of the unfortunate things about this project.
22:26
I sort of, I'm required.
22:28
You know, I had to watch the Bandini footage, watch the Lucille footage.
22:31
I mean, it's, it's just dreadful.
22:32
It's hard to believe that that was standard practice 50, 60 years ago.
22:36
If you haven't read his book that came out very recently on Shelby
22:40
American, the renegades behind it.
22:42
That's a great book.
22:43
Very interesting.
22:44
He's got another one coming out.
22:45
He's been working on for a while that I think will be an
22:47
interesting read, The Deadly Years.
22:49
Thank you so much, Preston.
22:50
I'm so happy that you're one of our presenters this year.
22:54
Thank you.
23:00
This episode is brought to you in part by the International
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Motor Racing Research Center.
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Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the
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The center's collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie
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The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of
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To learn more about the Center, visit www.
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The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers.
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org.
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