NASCAR’s spotters: Drivers’ eyes in the sky and so much more – Nascar

Night races compound the problem. Majors said he once lost his car in the Rolex 24 sports-car race at Daytona. Joey Meier, Brad Keselowski‘s spotter, walks around the garage every Friday morning to verify what sponsor each driver’s car has, including his own, and he does that in part because of what happened during a NASCAR XFINITY Series practice years ago.

 

As cars hit the track, Meier waited and waited and waited for his car to appear. It never did … or so he thought. After a wreck, the cars stopped on the frontstretch. Meier looked down and saw a car with his number but a different sponsor and paint scheme.

 

“Hey, did we get a new sponsor?” Meier asked over the radio.

 

“Oh, I guess I should have told you that,” the crew chief replied.

 

Meier’s car had been on the track the whole time, only he didn’t know it.

 

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Everything happens at hyper speed in NASCAR, even conversations. Radio conversations between spotters and drivers are a fascinating two-step of safety and speed, competition and cooperation, information and invective, where the smallest slip (or delay) of the tongue can be the difference between winning and losing. To be a great spotter requires a precise combination of timing, language and inflection, of knowing not just when to say something but how, when and whether to say it.

 

Spotters use a shorthand vernacular that makes sense if you already speak NASCAR. But if you don’t, a spotter’s conversation with a driver sounds like gibberish. “Check up,” for example, means slow down or stop, but only in NASCAR.

 

Radio chatter gets even harder to understand when drivers and spotters create their own mini-vocabularies. When Osborne worked at the Talladega spotters’ stand — 130 feet high, 12 feet wide, 30 feet long and 3,000 feet from the backstretch — he will watch Kenseth’s car, the cars in front of Kenseth’s car and the cars behind Kenseth’s car, all at once, for 500 miles, which is draining enough on its own. On top of that, Osborne needs to talk for 80 to 90 percent of the time. Osborne must balance the need for precision with the need for brevity, and the two often conflict.

 

For example, when Kenseth is in a pack of cars, he can’t see past the car in front of him. But he wants to know how close the second car ahead of him is to the car immediately ahead of him. That information allows Kenseth to decide how much throttle and brake he needs.

 

Think about that for a second. Think about how complicated that is, and the fact it is happening at 200 miles per hour and that Osborne will often be more than half a mile away while the conversation is going on. A full explanation would go like this. “Hey, Matt, the car two ahead of you is ahead of the car immediately in front of you by approximately a quarter of a car-length.”

 

But it would take Osborne so long to say it that way that by the time he got done saying it, it would no longer be true. Instead, he sums up that incredibly complex situation in simple words: “Tight” means there is no space between the two cars, “quarter,” means there is one-fourth of a car length between them, “half,” means half, etc.

 

If the verbiage sounds like gibberish to an outsider, sometimes it does to an insider, too. Mike Calinoff spotted for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s first Cup race (Coke 600, 1999). Calinoff was a late replacement, and he says Dale Earnhardt Sr., who owned Junior’s Dale Earnhardt Inc. team, gave him succinct instructions: “Don’t wreck.” The first conversation Calinoff and Junior ever had was brief and took place moments before the race started.

 

They had to learn to work together on the fly. At the first caution, Calinoff keyed his microphone to ask Junior for feedback on the information he was giving. Too much? Not enough? Junior told Calinoff that he seemed to be doing fine … but Junior, a North Carolina native, also said he was having a hard time understanding Calinoff because Calinoff, a New Yorker, spoke “Yankee.”

 

Sometimes the conversation on the radio sounds like gibberish because it is, in point of fact, gibberish. Sometimes conversations take place in code so as not to give away strategic decisions. (NASCAR has rules against eavesdropping, which team members only break if they are by themselves or with somebody.)

 

Before every race, Brad Keselowski‘s No. 2 team randomly generates its code words based on either beer products or playing cards. The team changes the code every week so that even if other teams decipher their clandestine calls, that information is useless the following week. The code words are taped to Keselowski’s steering wheel, but not until he gets buckled into the car, so nobody can peek in during pre-race festivities. Even Meier doesn’t find out what the code words are until someone uses one.

 

 

Here’s something else the spotters love … the view.

 

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As the trucks pull onto the track at Michigan for the race, the banter among spotters stops. It’s time for them to pay attention, and it’s almost impossible to hear, anyway.

 

Each spotter stands in the same place each time he goes to a particular track, an informal seating assignment based on seniority. They stand in the same place for multiple reasons. One is that having the same vantage point helps them be consistent. Another is that because they’ve all been doing this for so long, each knows where every other spotter is. So if Majors needs to relay a message to Meier, he doesn’t have to waste time looking for him.

 

Which is not to say those messages always get relayed.

 

“Any time a guy says, ‘Go tell that guy I’m going to wreck him,’ maybe 20 percent of the time, you do,” Majors says. “In our world, up there, don’t talk about it. If you’re going to do it, do it. Because if you’re saying it, you’re probably not going to do it.”

 

There are other reasons spotters don’t pass on such threats. Safety, for one. A spotter walking across the spotters’ stand to yell at another spotter can’t simultaneously watch the race. And discerning spotters know their drivers only kind of mean it, anyway. So much happens in every race that most anger dissipates within a few laps .. even if it is replaced by anger at somebody else.

 

One spotter hit on what seems like an ingenious, if less than totally honest, solution. After being told, “Go tell that guy’s spotter that he’s in trouble,” he waited a minute or so. Then he keyed the mic, said the message had been delivered and that the offending driver had apologized. But he never delivered the message and therefore never received an apology. But relaying the fake apology calmed his driver down, so that justified a little white lie.

 

According to the spotter, at least.

 

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Calinoff, who spotted at the Cup level from the late 1990s through the 2013 season, was one of the NASCAR’s first celebrity spotters. He turned his fame from winning the Sprint Cup in 2003 and two Daytona 500s with Matt Kenseth into speaking appearances and TV and radio gigs, and he used it to help fuel his PR and social media business, which he has owned since 2005.

 

“I always say I was the luckiest guy on the roof,” he says. “I have a great relationship with the driver and with the team and the team owner. It was fun.”

 

Calinoff returned to the spotters’ stand this summer with Kenseth in the Slinger Speedway Nationals in Wisconsin, one of the premier late model races in the Midwest. He decided that morning it would be the last race he ever spotted. The duo won the race, and Kenseth gave Calinoff the trophy. That prompted Calinoff to write an utterly charming column at PopularSpeed.com (which Calinoff owns) about working with Kenseth.

 

He wrote that he could count his close friends on five fingers, and Kenseth is one of them … the one right in the middle. “He sent me a text after that of laughing with the tears emoji … and the gesture associated with the reference,” Calinoff says.

 

There aren’t a lot of spotters who could publicly tease their driver like that. Relationships as close as the one between Calinoff and Kenseth are uncommon. And there is no doubt that their friendship helped them succeed over the seasons they raced together at Roush Fenway Racing.

 

As a writer and owner of PopularSpeed.com, Calinoff decides which stories to tell and how to tell them, and in a way, he did the same thing as a spotter. Once at Richmond, Ryan Newman‘s spotter tapped Calinoff on the shoulder, expressed Newman’s displeasure at Kenseth for some incidental contact and asked Calinoff to relay that message. “I gave him the thumbs up. No problem, bud, I’ll tell him right now. I’d make-believe I’m pushing that button. Hey, Newman’s not thrilled that you got into him. Just so you know,” Calinoff says. “Newman’s spotter patted pat me on the back, walked away and his driver was satisfied. I never came close to pushing the button.”

 

This was not the first or last time Calinoff pretended to deliver a message. “I’m not going to distract the driver with information that won’t have any future significance, unless it was someone you’d expect would retaliate. Plus, trust me, he’s already figured out that the guy wasn’t happy. That emoji reference likely came into play. You’ve got to assess the situation. How important is that bump in the fender going to be later in the race? The whole thing is about giving relevant information at the right time. And if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”

 

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