The NASCAR network: dozens of cars, dizzying speeds, split-second calls; welcome to the toughest gig in TV sports.

Byline: Devin Gordon

There are three notable differences between watching a NASCAR race from the grandstands and watching it in the Fox Sports production truck parked just beyond the speedway. In the truck, it's a crispy 60 degrees Fahrenheit, not surface-of-the-sun hot. In the truck, you can hear yourself think and even, on occasion, speak. And in the truck, thanks to a bank of TV screens carrying feeds from 25 cameras, you can see just about everything. Otherwise, a race feels much the same. It's intense and exhilarating, even if you're not an expert on auto racing. Which brings up another difference: in the truck, someone can explain it to you.

Take this moment from the Neighborhood Excellence 400, run in June at the Monster Mile in Dover, Delaware. Lap 273. A mild collision forces ace driver Jimmie Johnson into the pit. Watching the action from Fox's pre-race-show studio on the speedway infield, Jeff Hammond, a NASCAR crew chief turned TV analyst, notices a member of Johnson's pit crew scrambling around the car with a rubber ring clenched in his teeth. When a car is "loose," or wobbling through turns, a crew member will jam this ring into a wheel's suspension to stiffen it.

A vital detail? Not really, but NASCAR fans lap up this stuff like frothy Budweiser. Hammond radios producer Neil Goldberg, who's stationed 450 meters away in the Fox truck. Goldberg, who left Fox for rival ESPN prior to publication, is tasked with weaving a race's dozen-plus story lines into a broadcast unfolding live at 260kph. He has a sliver of a second to react and make multiple decisions. One: figure out which camera, out of four on pit row, caught the detail. Two: have the replay booth cue up the footage. Three: get the graphics team to pull up a pretaped animation that demonstrates how the rubber ring works. Four: alert Fox's three-man announcing crew, led by NASCAR legend Darrell (D.W.) Waltrip, that Hammond is about to bust into their call with spot analysis. Five: toss all the components over to the guy next to him, director Artie Kempner. Now all Kempner has to do is find 25 seconds of TV time--a full lap of live racing--to slot in each component and pray that nothing exciting happens--a crash, a crucial pass--in the interim. It works. Everyone exhales. Then it's back to racing.

A bunch of cars going around in circles for four hours may not sound like the toughest gig in televised sports, but it is, by a country mile. Other than golf, no sport is more sprawling, more packed with competitors, than auto racing--and golfers move a bit slower than stock cars. Covering a race, says Goldberg, "is like landing 30 planes on the same runway all at once." Team sports like football and basketball have a back-and-forth flow, but a NASCAR race can go haywire anywhere, at any moment. Which is why Kempner, 47, and Goldberg, 48, stash a camera wherever they can, including up to 12 mounted on dashboards and bumpers for a driver's-eye view. The sheer size of Fox's weekly racing operation dwarfs everything on the sports calendar, including a certain Sunday football game. "Dover alone is bigger than the Super Bowl," says Kempner, who's also a top director for Fox's NFL coverage. The production price tag for Dover, according to Kempner: $600,000. Covering the Super Bowl costs half as ...