Brian Lohnes’ First Day as NHRA Play-by-Play Announcer

Outside of the first few times I ever announced racing anywhere, I’ve never pulled into a dragstrip nervous. It’s been 20 years of my life at this point yelling and screaming about racing from coast to coast. When you have a couple of decades under your belt, it never really feels like the first day at school anymore … until it does. And whoa, mama, did it ever for me at the 2019 NHRA Winternationals! That was my first race as the lead play-by-play anchor for the NHRA on Fox TV broadcasts. We were going to be live on national television for three days, and to that point, outside of a couple of hours of rehearsals and preparing my material for the event, I was as green as the Great Plains in the spring.

Thankfully, being surrounded by veterans of producing live sports TV and well-wishers all helped to prop up my sagging confidence levels. There may have been a hot second of “Oh Lord, what have I done?!” when we were just a couple of minutes from going live, but I swallowed it and gave myself one last mental pep talk before the little red light glowed on the front of the camera.

After working with the Fox people over the winter and spending some time in their Charlotte office using what I’ll call a “simulator” studio, I thought I had a clue about the torrent of information and communication that was about to come my way.

I didn’t.

The Charlotte studio time helped me to understand some things, but the environment lacked the excitement, tension, and downright wild nature of an actual live event. The amount of information coming through our headsets—unbeknownst to viewers—is astounding. While we’re there talking about stuff, we (color analyst Tony Pedregon and I) hear most of it … while we’re broadcasting. I have no idea what it’s like to suffer from a mental illness (stop snickering), but doing this job you have voices in your head, literally, at all times. We’re getting counted in and out of segments, told when we are going to break, told what graphic is coming up next, told which camera shot is coming so we know what to speak to, and told other stuff that I literally did not understand because I’m the freaking new guy.

Our Friday show went pretty well in the fact that I did not die, vomit, or begin speaking in tongues. I thought it was kind of rough and maybe it was, but my co-workers did not let me believe it and I came in Saturday with a little more understanding of how this all works. We were live again on Saturday and Sunday, and on tape for Monday. Yes, Monday. Mother Nature stopped us dead in our tracks on Sunday so we had to swap into “rain show” mode and tap dance our way through a time slot that was supposed to contain the elimination rounds of the race.

So the first weekend was great and kind of a radical education as we did three days live, with one being a rain show, and we had to stay until Monday to finish the race on tape for broadcast that night. To me, it felt like I joined the Army in 1944 and my first stop was the front lines in the Battle of the Bulge. In the end, it was really cool, and by the time I flew home on Tuesday the adrenaline that started flowing on Thursday when I got to Pomona was wearing off and I was starting to realize that I may be able to do this after all.

People have asked me if the job is what I thought it would be. In some ways it is like asking an astronaut if space is what they thought it would be. How do you really know until you do it, right? Being a drag racing announcer is one thing, like astronauts that were fighter pilots. You know the plane, you know what it feels like, what it does, and how to operate it. That is how I felt about being a live event announcer, and to be clear, I still am one of those and will be (hopefully) for a long, long time. So is the job what I thought it would be? In many ways, yes, but in some ways, it is way harder than I thought it would be.

Adjusting to the speed of things and the flow of information will be the biggest thing. Ironically, I have talked to enough drag racers that have told me that over time their 330-mph cars “slow down” and they have better and better control over them. That’s where I am. I’ll consider Pomona my first licensing run in a Funny Car. I did not hit the walls, but I was way behind the car and rather than driving, I was surviving.

As I write this, we have completed our second race of the season, the NHRA Arizona Nationals. Things have definitely started to slow down and I was able to enjoy more of what I was doing than playing “mental catch-up” like at the first race.

At the end of the day, I want to be creative, fun, and informative as the lead guy on the show. Those three elements all require comfort to come naturally. As I work toward that, I am going to enjoy every second of the trip.

Well, I gotta go. Someone’s talking in my ear.

Just sayin.

About the Author: Brian Lohnes is the Lead Announcer for NHRA on Fox, host of MotorTrend’s Put Up or Shut Up, and co-owner of Bangshift.com.

 

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