Well, I watched the inaugural broadcast of the new AMA show. Let's see if I can keep this somewhat constructive... What works? Heading into the studio for a very quick comment by Sheheen actually worked. "Tommy Hayden just moved into second place behind his teammate Mat Mladin. Let's watch and see if he can take over the lead." That sort of thing. Not drawn out, just a quick lead in to the upcoming segment. What was sort of...meh? The interview with Ben Bostrom at the end. I'll reserve judgement at this point but I only had two issues with it. 1) We didn't really hear anything from Ben during the interview that we hadn't already read from him on the internet two weeks earlier. 2) Can we please get over this notion that Daytona is such a special race? "Ben this was arguably the biggest victory of your career!" Well, at least he said arguably. Future interviews might work, or they might not. It depends on avoiding pitfall #1 above. What doesn't work? These guys are striving to bring motorcycle racing to the masses, so I put myself in the mindset of a new viewer as I watched the show. From that standpoint it was clear there were problems... This was the first broadcast of the new regime and they completely failed to explain the class structure or even what race I was watching. They didn't point out what displacement these bikes were. They didn't mention any of the modification rules. They didn't even explain what was different from the old classes. They did show a list of changes on-screen but the list disappeared before Spencer could even read the first item. The race ended 46 minutes into the broadcast. They could have shifted 3 or 4 minutes to the front-end for some exposition about AMA Pro Racing. The race would have been difficult to follow if I hadn't already known the players. The cameras would focus in on a couple guys and the announcers would say, "There's Ben Bostrom racing with Blake Young!" But they wouldn't say "Ben is the number 2 bike while Blake is number (whatever he is)", or, "Ben is the blue bike in the lead", or whatever would help the viewer distinguish the two. I like Leigh Diffee (sp?) as an announcer, but Spencer just needs to go. At one point they were spotlighting BBoz on the Yamaha. Freddie says, "You might notice the Yamaha R1 sounds different. I sounds a lot like the M1 that Valentino Rossi rides." That was it. That's it? No mention that it's a new model? No mention of cross-plane? No mention of big bang? Nothing? I sometimes wonder if his association with Honda compromises his ability to report on other makes. Does he not know what the details of the other models are (not likely)? You'll probably never hear Freddie say something like, "after the last race I had the opportunity to ride the Yamaha and the Ducati on track..." Compare that to Steve Martin or James Whitham who actually race the current models in other series' and have the ability to relay to us the characteristics of the bikes. I don't like the revisionist history the DMG folks are using. They say things like Mat Mladin won the American Superbike race last year. Ben Spies is the reigning American Superbike champion. In the D200 press releases they said that Miguel Duhamel was a former American Superbike champion. That kind of crap. Given that the new classes are a distinct step down from the old, it's something of an insult to the riders too. Finally, and most significantly, there's the schedule. This makes the entire show a complete non-starter. Showing the races one to two weeks after the fact is the kiss of death and I can't understand how they think this is a good thing. If the AMA were the only series I followed then perhaps I could deal with it, but since I like to follow MotoGP and WSBK too there's just no way I can avoid the AMA results before seeing the races. Here's the crazy part... the show will be repeated 3-4 times, including on Tuesday morning. If the Tuesday slot was open for repeats why didn't they make the Tuesday after the race weekend the first-run slot and then repeat the following weekend. I could live with avoiding spoilers until Tuesday. I can't avoid them all the way to the following weekend especially if there's another series running that weekend. My last item is only sort-of related to the show. Superpole. DMG has completely missed the boat on this one. Apparently we aren't even going to get highlights on the show. Really though, how good would Superpole highlights be anyway? Combine the fact that nobody gets to see it with the races being broadcast long after everyone knows the outcome and the Superpole is a complete waste. This was hammered home to me when I saw the pictures on Soup of this weekend's Superpole. They ran it on Friday. Nobody is there on Friday (relatively speaking). The pictures show Mat crossing the line and a couple other riders waiting at the gate. There are absolutely no spectators anywhere in sight! DMG must be kicking themselves for implementing Superpole just before WSBK eliminated it. But beyond that, they should be embarrassed for implementing it in such an ineffective fashion.
