For better or for worse, to have and to hold, from this day forward, the NHRA and FOX Network officially exchanged “Wow!”s this Valentine’s Day weekend with the marriage of the world’s most extreme motorsport and arguably television’s most forward-thinking sports network.

The honeymoon will continue as both sides learn to co-exist and become comfortable with each other’s newly discovered habits. So far it’s wedded bliss as Tony Pedregon joined the family with experienced show host Dave Rieff and pit reporters Bruno Massel, Jamie Howe, and John Kernan.

They conducted their dress rehearsal last week while NHRA pro racers tested their new set-ups at Nitro Spring Training at Phoenix. And aside from a minor glitch with graphics, NHRA President Peter Clifford’s and Executive Producer Ken Adelson’s matchmaking went as planned. And Friday, with the start of the season-opening Winternationals at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona, Calif., the new era in NHRA broadcasting began.

Terry Blount, NHRA vice-president of public relations & communications, said all the off-season preparation is starting to pay off, especially in the case of new analyst Tony Pedregon.

"We hired a consultant to help Tony with the transition, and he was overjoyed [with Pedregon’s aptitude for the position]. He said he’s done this dozens of times with someone the first time out and he’d never seen anybody do better in a dress rehearsal than Tony did. So they were overjoyed. The broadcasting part of it was great,” Blount said.

“The one little area where they had a kink was some of the graphics were incorrect or maybe there was a misspelling. Those are all things that can easily be fixed. So that’s what they’ve been working on, making sure all the graphics were going to be right for the telecast,” he said. “In the dress rehearsal, that was the only thing there were some glitches in, graphics.”

Blount said a more extensive use of graphics will be noticeable this season.

“There are so many more graphics now. We have these virtual graphics through Sportvision. That’s the same company that does the NFL first-down lines and all that. Now we’re going to have a virtual finish line, a virtual starting line, things in the lanes,” he said. “We may not have all those things in for the first race, but all of them will be in soon. It’ll make a huge difference to people, because it’ll be much easier to identify which driver is in which lane.

“All the graphics is where we did the work this week after the rehearsal. As far as the broadcast part of it with Tony [Pedregon] and Dave [Rieff] and Bruno [Massel] and Jamie [Howe] and John Kernan, they hit it out of the park. Everyone has done this before, except Tony, and Tony’s been in the booth several times,” Blount said.

“I can’t tell you how much work Tony has put in in the off-season. He has taken this so seriously. He has taken notes at NFL telecasts, NBA telecasts, watched how things are done. He sat down with our consultant, who said, ‘Notice this,’ ‘You might want to say this,’ ‘You might do it this way.’ Tony is bringing some new ideas of his own,” he said.

“You’ll probably notice that he won’t use as many technical terms that all the real drag racers understand. Were concerned that we have so many new viewers we’re afraid people will not know what that means. So he’s going to explain things: for example, maybe ‘dropping a cylinder.’ We all know what that means, but he’s going to explain it more. We’ll have so many new people watching – we want them to know what that means. We want them to know what a holeshot is, all these things that we take for granted,” he said. “Tony realizes we have new people watching and we need to explain these things to them, not that we dumb it down so much that we make it boring for the gearhead but to the point that ‘Look, we’ve got a lot of new eyes, people who haven’t seen this before, and we want them to be comfortable and understand what we’re talking about.’

“So I think they’re really happy about that on the broadcast. If we get our graphics where we want them to be this weekend, and I think they have, we’re thrilled. Obviously there’s a lot of consternation about the very first telecast this weekend,” Blount said. “But there has been so much work put in. Everyone’s really excited but also a little anxious. We think people are going to watch it and go, ‘Wow.’ ”

One element desperately missing from the previous TV network partner was cross-promotion, but already FOX has delivered more in one month than the other network did in years.

“They’ve really helped us a lot. FOX is really big on cross-promotion,” Blount said. “After this event, Robert Hight is going to Daytona, and I think FOX is going to have him on [TV] during Daytona Week.

Hight said he would be accompanying Chevrolet personnel there. “I’m going to take my video camera,” he said excitedly.

Said Blount, “By the same token, they want to have some drivers from other series and other sports on our event. Great – sure – we’re good with that – no problem. For them, Supercross is big. MMA is a big thing for them.”

He chuckled at the idea of Ronda Rousey (someone Pro Stock Motorcycle racer Angie Smith has said she especially admires) being at the drag races. It leaped to Blount’s mind that maybe Rousey could have a mock stare-down “with Alexis DeJoria, our own Ronda Rousey!”

FOX has used striking commercials, trendy graphics, website content, additional cameras, and Olympic-style filler features to educate and excite viewers.

“They have a lot of commercials that are really cool. Their graphics package to start the telecast is really cool. It’s kind of similar to what you see at the start of the NFL telecast. It’s really hip and trendy graphics. It’s really loud and cool. You’ll love it when you see it,” Blount said. “They’ve done everything that we hoped they would do in terms of promoting it. They run a lot of stuff on their website that we send to them.

“We have additional cameras. We’re going to have a camera at mid-track at every event that’s going to show that angle. In other words, it’ll be pointed at the starting line and it will follow the car all the way down the track. We’ll have a lot different camera angles. We’ve gone back to hand-held cameras at the starting line. ESPN had gotten away from that. Everyone has agreed to have a hand-held camera out there to get a closer view. There are going to be a lot more cameras, too, in the staging lanes, talking to drivers before they get in the cars,” he said.

The first concern generally is how to fill inevitable gaps in the action, thanks to oildowns and accidents. But the FOX team has solutions.

“Between rounds we have time to fill on a live telecast. So we have a lot of features we’re going to show between rounds that hopefully make the drivers better known, kind of up-close-and-personal things like the Olympics coverage. We’ll show what’s going on in the pits a lot more,” Blount said.

“We’re thrilled with what they’ve done,” he said of the FOX network. “They’ve been just a great partner, and we’d like to keep it that way.”