Symphony of moving parts each weekend on MRN

Anyone who's ever listened to even a few minutes of a NASCAR race broadcast on an affiliate of the Motor Racing Network -- better known as MRN Radio -- no doubt has marveled at the smoothness, fellowship and sheer fluidity of what they're hearing.

So it should come as no surprise that the end product -- whether it's a few minutes or a full racing event lasting several hours -- is the result of a lot of behind the scenes work by a lot of people.

And just as the seamless production of a racing event is the result of intense, yet equally fluid organizational skills by the race teams, sanctioning bodies and race tracks -- usually under-appreciated by everyone who witnesses it -- the same phenomenon is in effect at MRN.

The fact that 2009 is the 40th anniversary season for the network makes its efficiency somewhat understood, or taken for granted. But it's no less impressive when considering its achievements.

MRN started in humble quarters at the NASCAR and International Speedway Corporation headquarters in Daytona Beach, Fla., and gradually grew to a sizeable production facility there before relocating to its most diverse home to date, in Concord, N.C.

Organization starts at the top

If you tune into the MRN broadcast of this weekend's race at Kansas, be aware that its planning process began almost at the time the 2009 NASCAR national touring division schedules were released, in the summer of 2008.

A color-coded spreadsheet is created indicating what events must be staffed, by how much staff and in what disciplines.

David Hyatt, the president of MRN Radio, likens his entire operation to a finely-tuned set of gears, where everything meshes in perfect sync and results in a high-quality product, whether it's a race broadcast or regularly scheduled daily or weekly show.

MRN is part of a media alliance, or conglomerate that includes the Sprint Vision video displays that are seen each Cup weekend. MRN veteran Fred Armstrong heads that division.

Steve Post isn't an employee of MRN, he is contracted by the company to cover the race.

Hyatt explained that MRN, on the radio side, is almost like a two-headed entity. It has its home base in Concord, but also fields a fleet of vehicles that enables it to operate with the same capacity in any "remote" location.

MRN's full-time staff numbers a little more than 40 people, who are involved in administrative and technical roles. When it comes to the "talent" -- a misleading term since this entire bunch is pretty talented, but in this case referring to the persons heard on-the-air -- they are contract labor.

"Full-time is a relative term," Hyatt said. "We now have a number of guys that make their full-time living through us, but as a physical, full-time employee, as announcers-only we only have one, and that's Kyle Rickey. You could probably say that Woody Cain, who hosts our NASCAR Today show, is also a full-time employee.

"But as far as our normal, on-the-air race team, they're all contractors. But we have enough work and enough programming that a number of them make their primary living working with us."

The Vermonter who works as a turn announcer on MRN broadcasts and also hosts the Monday-Friday Sirius Speedway show on Sirius (satellite) NASCAR Radio is a prime example.

"Dave Moody is contracted to work with us, and we then have a contract with Sirius to produce the Sirius Speedway program," Hyatt said. "So we provide that program turn-key to them. The whole thing comes through our facilities and they basically just air it.

"So when a Dave Moody or a Mike Bagley or a Steve Post comes to the track on a weekend, they're coming to work for MRN first, but part of their responsibility for MRN may be to provide Sirius [content]."

MRN

Darrell Smith keeps the operation running from the 53-foot truck at the track.

Logistics rule

Hyatt's ringmaster in this grand circus -- very little of which is actually seen or heard -- is director of operations Frank Beers. The title hardly does him justice, as he oversees many of the company's technical, personnel and business elements.

"It's a big challenge to attempt to eliminate every possible organizational wrinkle that might come up," Beers said. "It's one of those things like the race teams, but unlike the tracks, in that for us it happens every single week."

Beers' right-hand operator is operations assistant Nicole Clark. From a listener's standpoint, probably the most critical thing Clark does, once the event spreadsheet is available, is juggle airplane and hotel reservations, as well as ground transportation. She attempts, as much as she can, to match up itineraries for people coming from widely divergent locations.

And as Beers said, MRN does every Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series event, so that only magnifies the challenge.

For a Cup event, the engineer typically arrives a day early, while the rest of the production and the talent begin to arrive between Thursday evening and Friday morning.

Dave Moody high above the track calling the action.

"Delayed flights are another thing that chips a gear, if you will," Hyatt said. "When we fly folks commercially, we have to account for their arrival, so we try to avoid flying people in the evening. As a general rule, morning flights have a better record of being on-time, or not being cancelled, and if they are you have more options to make connections down the road."

For Clark, weather is probably the biggest aggravation, but Hyatt can cite some rarer, but equally fraught instances of "hiccups" in the process.

"We once had a truck en route to a broadcast that crashed, and it was unable to continue," Hyatt said, laughing despite the ill memory. "It was damaged enough that we had to go to a plan B, dispatch another trailer and get it on site.

"Certainly we've had issues, at the last minute, where announcers couldn't be available, and we had to arrange to get somebody else on the broadcast. A rain delay, while we plan for it, [is a problem].

"When you think about the fact that almost all of our [talent] are independent contractors and have to go back and do their real jobs -- it's like this is their golf game and on Monday they have to go back and do their real jobs. It isn't like they can use a 'sick day,' because if they call in sick and their boss hear them calling a race, probably not a good thing."

For the staff coming out of Concord, Hyatt said MRN shares Express Jet charter flights with a number of race teams, which ensures -- barring bad weather -- that their people will get where they need to be on schedule.

And for someone like Moody, who has a Friday Sirius Speedway to knock out each week, every element of MRN's logistical arm is brought into play.

"We have to factor Dave's availability against his travel when we decide where to produce the show from," Hyatt said. "For example, he may travel early on a Friday morning, and Nicole has to keep this in mind. Dave has to travel out of Burlington, Vt., and make a double connection to arrive at the track, and the production trailer by 3.

"Then, he does Sirius Speedway until qualifying starts, and when qualifying ends he goes back to Sirius."

It makes just doing a race seem flat easy.

"Again, it's a number of different people working to make those gears mesh together," Hyatt said, "between travel, operations, logistics and production and figuring all those components out."

MRN

The MRN stable of trucks have the capability of running the MRN signal remotely.

Driving that train

Although you could argue that every aspect of Beers' job is critical to the overall picture, his role as "fleet supervisor" is maybe most critical to what listeners hear each weekend.

The fleet has to be diverse enough to cover the two weekends this season in which the Cup, Nationwide and Truck series operate events at three different venues.

For Cup events, the key individuals are Frank Curci, who wheels the 53-foot "production trailer," a 53-foot piece custom-built by Featherlite Trailers, and Mike Weaver, who drives and operates the 40-foot mobile satellite truck.

The 53-foot unit serves in conjunction as an office, production studio, gathering place, kitchen and rest room facility.

Beers also has a 40-foot Featherlite-built trailer that, in addition to being slightly smaller, is slightly less-appointed as the larger unit, but no less capable of getting the job done. On the odd occasions of tripleheader weekends at different places, a Ford F-350 pickup and an 18-foot production trailer are used.

Balancing the need for triple-plays of equipment and personnel is the nirvana-like state that exists when three events are run at the same venue, as they are seven times this season.

Depending on the schedule and where their vehicles need to be, Curci and Weaver sometimes spend several weeks at a time on the road, without getting back to MRN's home base in Concord.

"In many cases the guys do go race track to race track," Hyatt said, citing the turnaround from Richmond, the Chase cutoff event to New Hampshire, the opening event in the Chase. "The production truck would go directly from Richmond to New Hampshire, because there's no point in it going back to Concord, because it's self-contained for everything it needs to do.

"At the events, the production trailer and satellite truck are there on a turnkey basis, so there's nothing that we can't or won't do, from right here [at a track] and make it work.

"In terms of the programs that we produce during the week, we don't use the [remote] facilities to do it, unless we're doing a special broadcast from on-site, like a special program we'll be doing in a few weeks from Tom Johnson's Camping Center [in conjunction with the races at Lowe's Motor Speedway]."

Hyatt said Curci and Weaver dedicate a day to setting up their "compound," which includes the locations of the production trailer and satellite truck, the trailer it pulls and their support vehicles.

MRN

Amanda Trautman keeps things running smoothly from inside the booth.

Preparation aches

Brian Nelson, an MRN associate producer, along with live event producer Amanda Trautman are the key members of MRN's production team at the track, week-in and week-out with very little variation.

From walking the garage and pit road, observing and then returning to the 53-footer to do assembly work, it's virtually non-stop from arrival through race time.

"Amanda and Brian physically produce the production components," Hyatt said. "There are a lot of little pre-recorded components that go into our broadcast that you don't think about having to do as a program producer, or a content producer, if you will.

"You always think about the cost of production, but when you do something live, it's the cheapest kind of production you can do, because you spend one second to produce one second.

"But there are components in our live broadcasts, like commercials, or promos or advertiser billboards and features -- all of which have elements that aren't done 'live,' but they're done to make this live show sound better. And all those things have to be done as prep during the week.

"So, for example, Amanda, leading into a race will have sat down and made sure she's seen who all the advertisers are going to be, assembled a script for what we call our billboards -- promotional items -- and she makes sure they're recorded and, along with all the other various and sundry components, making sure they're edited and they're going to fit into the broadcast to enhance what the listeners are hearing."

Trautman and Nelson are primarily responsible for Cup events, but when the various series are at different venues, a "mirror crew" is in place there to carry out the same functions.

"Most of the guys do their prep work on their own time," Hyatt said. "They'll start at home and get stats and prep stuff done at home during the week, and when they get to the track they'll hone that down and go walk through the garage and talk to the competitors and come back to the production trailer and start putting things together."

MRN

Chief engineer Doug Watson ensures everything is taken care of on the technological side.

Proof is in the production

For a sports fan, to listen to an MRN Radio broadcast could be likened to a symphony -- smoothly melding together numerous elements to comprise a cogent totality.

The talent lineup works smoothly with Trautman and control board operator Mike Doncheff to keep the broadcast flowing. Trautman's worst nightmare, which came early in her career, came when Bagley's microphone failed, and she had to momentarily scramble to figure out how to let the other team members know that one of "the gang" was temporarily down.

But she came through it and ultimately put it into her experience bank to more easily work through anything like it that might occur.

MRN's overall success hinges on several other elements that fall under Beers' guidance, such as sales, traffic and affiliate relations.

Alex Hayden gets the latest from Brian Vickers.

"The traffic department's job is to make sure that we have all the right advertisers who are scheduled to be in the broadcast," Hyatt said. "And then they physically assign which break the advertiser needs to go in. At the end of the day they reconcile that it ran, that a log was kept to show it, then they issue an affidavit to the advertiser and do the billing for it."

Five people are in the affiliate relations group.

"What they do all year long is work with our radio stations to make sure the stations are carrying the broadcasts," Hyatt said. "And then they're recruiting into markets where we might have light coverage or need better coverage. Again, they're integral for the back room.

"I always describe our business as a three-legged stool," Hyatt said. "And if all three legs aren't there, the business doesn't sit. Those three elements are our affiliates, our advertisers and our audience, and without all three it doesn't work.

"All this other stuff is -- yeah, we've got to produce races and we've got to be credible and make it sound good and we've got to deliver good content. But if we don't have an audience to listen to it, and the audience will listen to it by virtue of having the affiliates on the air.

"And the affiliates on the air, couple with the audience it's going to generate, creates the interest for the advertisers to come buy our commercials, which is where we ultimately make the money. And without that revenue stream coming in, we're not going to be in business."

Judging by the number of people on message boards and in e-mails who say they opt for MRN over television audio that might not be an issue.