How Fox Sports’ Mike Joy Changed With The Times

There has been a great deal of change in NASCAR since the start of the 21^st Century. New tracks have been added, old ones fell away, drivers, and even entire teams, have come and gone. The way the sport’s champions are determined is far different, stage racing is now a thing, and some things once thought impossible seem now commonplace.

One thing has been constant however: the voice fans hear coming from their TV during a NASCAR Cup series race broadcast on FoxFOXA
Sports.

Since 2001, Chicago-born Mike Joy has been that voice fans hear on Sundays. At least during the first half of the NASCAR season. Joy, who was raised, and still lives in Connecticut, didn’t just show up in the booth one day and start broadcasting, however. It was in fact quite a journey for the man who will start his 23^rd consecutive year calling races on NASCAR biggest stage starting in just few short weeks.

“It was a long road to get there,” Joy said reflecting on his first Daytona 500 broadcast. “But it was an exciting road and some of my favorite times in racing were back at the short tracks in New England of the 1970s and then moving to radio and then on to CBS and then Fox with first with Formula One and then with NASCAR beginning in 2001.

“They have just been great to work with. I’ve been surrounded by really good analysts and reporters, producers and directors, (it) makes my job really easy. And I promise you, it’s still as much fun as it ever was.”

During those over two decades in the NASCAR booth, Joy has seen a great deal of change, not only on the track, but in the booth, and on the broadcast as well.

“I think biggest advance is GPS transmitters in the car to handle all of the scoring. And even the GPS in the car interfaces with our graphics,” he said.

That interface led to better information that could appear on the broadcast.

“Fox pioneered scrolling a ticker of the running positions across the screen in 2001,” Joy said. “And we looked at it eight ways to Sunday: Down the right side of the screen, down the left side of the screen, across the top, across the bottom. And what we finally settled on was what people were used to seeing: a stock ticker across the bottom of the screen on financial channels.”

At first the viewers couldn’t quite figure it out.

“We start doing races, we’re getting crazy mail,” Joy said laughing. “People go, ‘the cars are going this way, the ticker’s going that way, ‘I have to put a piece of tape across the top of my screen, otherwise I get so confused.’”

It didn’t take long however, for the viewers to get used to the ticker.

“Like the Fox Box in the NFL with the constant display of score and time remaining, I can’t imagine watching a race, whether it’s on TV, on cable or streaming without a scoring ticker and without the constant update of positions,” he said. “And then the default second line is the interval to the leader. So just by watching that ticker go across the screen, if I’m watching for one particular driver by looking to see if the interval is shrinking or growing, I can tell if he’s gaining on the leader, losing time to the leader and where he is in the race.”

Perhaps the biggest technical development in the sport came before Mike Joy worked for Fox.

“CBS pioneered the onboard camera,” he said. “There had been cameras before, but not cameras that would tilt and pan and cover the action in different ways. That’s something that a couple of fellows in Australia pioneered. Peter Larson and John Porter, they brought it to CBS in the states. And Peter still is in charge of BSI that handles onboard cameras for auto racing, a multitude of remote and moving cameras for golf and, and other sports.

“We’re real proud of some of the things that we’ve had a hand in pioneering that people now maybe just take for granted as part of the coverage but are very important.”

Another thing that has developed this century is social media. Joy said he can’t pay too much attention to social media during a race but does remember when it became relevant in NASCAR.

“Social media first came about in racing when Brad Keselowski tweeted a picture of the Juan Pablo Montoya into the jet dryer blaze at Daytona to put the race under the red flag (in 2012),” he said. “That got everybody’s attention. And it got everybody in racing on Twitter.”

These days drivers regularly engage with fans on social media and teams are always updating fans during an event. And Fox constantly monitors social media including during a race. It’s become another element that goes into a race broadcast.

“We do have a person. Our stage manager, Andy Jeffers, monitors social media during the race,” Joy said. “And a lot of time those discussions will lead us into interesting directions in the conversation that we might not have gone there on our own.”

Away from the race, social media has been a good conduit from the fans to those in the broadcast space. In the old days Joy said a single letter might represent the opinion of 500 viewers.

“That was kind of the benchmark,” Joy said.

“With social media, the viewer has a direct connection to people who are involved in the telecast. And it’s a powerful tool.”

Joy added that while social media can sometimes be abusive, they do get a lot of good ideas from the viewers.

“We’re not watching the telecast, we’re doing the telecast,” he said. “So, I have a whole lot more information, camera angles and inputs than the people see at home. So occasionally there’s a story we’re not telling, there’s a driver we’re not covering. We might miss somebody zooming his way up through the field. Somebody might have had a problem on a pit stop that we did not disclose that’s going to happen.

“I think it’s very good that the fans have a chance to weigh in and we welcome any cons and all constructive criticism. And a lot of times it leads to interesting developments.”

Social media, and the internet, have also changed the way broadcasters like Mike Joy prepare for a race.

“Well one good thing is I no longer have to open a single envelope with a press release in it and read it and highlight it and note it and that sort of thing,” he said laughing. “It all comes now through email or through teams making their own announcements on social media.

“So the preparing job is easier than ever before. On the other hand, a lot of the fans have access to that same information if it’s already been put out there on social media…there are some storylines that kind of break on Tuesday, live and die in discussion Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and by Sunday maybe they’re not even relevant anymore. Maybe they are.”

The constant steady stream of information allows access to all kinds of pre-race news and keeps Joy busy.

“I can promise you I’m on the computer every day doing social media, whether I’m traveling or not, and looking at things that either we need to take a closer look at when we get to the racetrack or storylines that we need to develop further,” he said. “I’m not the only one doing that. I think all of our commentators and our producer kind of have an ear to the ground for those kind of stories as they develop. Then we get to the track and you have PR people pitching stories… it’s just all part of a collaborative process. But the great thing is, it’s easier than it ever was when I started in this business.”

When he started in the business it was definitely a collaborative process. In those days developing storylines meant a trip to a track’s media center.

“You’d talk to some of the writers you knew, and you’d share story ideas and share tips,” Joy fondly remembers. “Tom Higgins from the Charlotte paper might yell over to Steve Wade with the Roanoke paper and say, ‘Hey, did you talk to Cale (Yarborough) this week? Anybody talk to Cale?’” adding with a chuckle. “Some other writer would chime in, ‘Yeah. I talked to him, and he told me, blah, blah, blah’. And that’s how stories were developed back then, pretty much by word of mouth. It’s just not the case anymore.”

Since the start of the 21^st Century, NASCAR’s popularity has grown quite a bit. And with that growth comes a great deal of change with the media, and the way storylines are developed.

“Back in the day you’d wander through the garage area, and somebody’d invite you up onto the back end of a hauler to share a baloney sandwich at lunch,” Joy said. “And you’d have 15, 20 minutes with a driver and a crew chief and a car owner just shooting the breeze talking about stuff.

“Those opportunities just don’t exist anymore. The driver’s times are tighter due to the other obligations for being exposed to the media and the fans that are in the garage area. There’s just a lot more demands on their time. Media availability is more structured.”

Continued in Part 2: What the Future Holds for Car Guy Mike Joy