Hauler Talk: Scott Miller gives inside tour of Remote Race Control center
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With a video wall that's 32 feet tall and 9 feet wide, Scott Miller watches races every week with the informative breadth of an omniscient narrator.
The competition strategist for NASCAR oversees the Remote Race Control center in Concord, North Carolina, that has been fully operational since last year.
The video wall can display 24 quadrants of screens featuring video feeds (including broadcast, in-car and specialty camera), telemetry and team radios. Virtually every area of the race track can be monitored.
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"We have a lot of information at our disposal," Miller said on the latest "Hauler Talk" podcast. "And one of the challenges has been to make that concise enough to where we can view it quickly when we need it. … We've really made a lot of headway there and are now pretty much integrated into every race weekend as a support arm for those in race control at the race track."
As the former vice president of competition at NASCAR, Miller once was a regular in on-site race control.
Shifting to the remote role has required retraining his perspective from the visceral experience at the track to absorbing the action from a windowless room packed with technology.
"At Remote Race Control, you have the luxury of not having to be sort of in the moment," Miller said. "As the race is unfolding, you can kind of go back and continue to look without feeling like the ones that are in the at-track race control have got that covered while you try to help them review an incident or a violation or whatever it may be that you're digging into for them.
"So it's really just a lot of support that everybody in race control has come to rely on. And it's just much easier to do from the Remote Race Control with the resources that we have that they don't have in the tower."
Using technology to aid officiating has become ubiquitous in pro sports. While helping get NASCAR's Remote Race Control up and running, Miller visited the NFL's command center in New York, which reviews every scoring play, turnover and coach's challenge during games.
Though there are similarities, Miller noted that NASCAR is unique because the action on the track doesn't stop when making a call. A 36-race schedule of ovals, road and street courses also means a wide variety of playing surfaces, most of which dwarf a football field.
"The NFL plays on a 100-yard long by 50-yard wide field every single weekend, and I came to understand they have a specific sort of diagram of cameras that are at every single venue," Miller said. "So they can have super consistent views on everything across all the games because the field is the same. Obviously, we race at different venues, and each and every one of them poses its unique challenge to get full camera coverage where you need it."
Miller said the Remote Race Control is positioned as a support system that defers to the officials calling the race at the track.
"We would never get in a situation where it would be sort of disrupting the action or anything like that," Miller said. "Honestly, what we strive to be is kind of invisible and not be the story but get the calls right that need to be made."