Chad Reynolds was manning his video camera at the World Series of Drag Racing at Cordova, Ill., on a platform twice as high as he was used to using, hovering above the eighth-mile mark. (“This thing is so tall that it has a two-level staircase for me to get to the top of it, which scares the hell out of me,” he said.)

“A Pro Mod car loses it at about 500 feet and nails the wall at the eighth-mile and part of this car is coming over and I’m only about 25 feet from the wall.  I’m thinking, ‘Do I ride this whole falling tower to the ground? Do I jump off halfway to the ground? Holy crap - what do I do?!’  Luckily I didn’t need to make that decision,” Reynolds said. “But it certainly scared me.”

He also was an all-too-close witness at another racetrack to a run gone wrong . . . and then some.

Reynolds described a car that “left the starting line, big giant wheelstand, and when it landed, it turned left at about 150 feet, wide open. The throttle is stuck, and it went from the right lane to the left, smacked the wall, bounces off the wall full throttle, and it’s clear that the driver is no longer in control of this vehicle. It went down the race track, spinning around, bouncing off the walls, and ended up trying to come backwards down the racetrack, which scared the dickens out of me. It ended up coming against the wall about 100 feet down the track from me and sat there wide open until it literally burned the tires off of it and started grinding the wheels into the racing surface and ran out of fuel. The safety crew is all around, it but they can’t get to it because it’s still running.

“When they get in,” he said, “the driver is regaining consciousness, which is also funny, because one of the safety crew later told me that it’s a good thing he was wearing a helmet. He reaches in the car and starts to assess the status of the guy driving and preparing to unbelt him, and the guy comes to and is disoriented and doesn’t know why there’s some guy leaning in his race car, so he hauls off and punches the safety crew guy.”

At the Street Car Super Nationals at Las Vegas, he realized nearly all of the hazards of being an outdoorsman, of sorts. The trouble was “literally one day having incredibly hot temperatures and the next day it’s trying to rain. Then it stops raining. And they stop the racing action because it is snowing at the top end of the race track.  I’m standing up on my perch and all of a sudden I’m getting pelted by snow. That one is nuts.”

Ah, the stories Reynolds could tell - “hundreds of them,” by his count – about having such a glamorous but precarious front-row seat [or unprotected “skybox”] for some of drag-racing’s wildest events.

It’s all in a day’s job for Reynolds, the BangShift.com co-owner and co-founder, and live-streaming pioneer Mark Walter, who has logged more than a decade of bringing drag-racing fans variety of non-NHRA action.

 

                                                                                                     WHAT?! YOU DO THIS TOO?!
 

Like a single Cheerio floating around in Lake Michigan, Walter, with collaboration from pal Jimmy Biggs, simply was resourceful back in January 2006, when he broadcasted the National Street Car Association Banquet from Dayton, Ohio. He had to depend only on his own instincts, because, as he said, “There were no manuals – and there still aren’t really any manuals – but nobody knew anything about really doing it.  All the software that we use now were in the very early stages of development. 

“We actually started streaming, using all Windows Media products, and that’s all that we had. We got excited when we learned how to run a file outside of the stream. That was a trip.  It was literally ground-breaking, what we did,” Walter said. “Again, there was no manual and nobody that you could call and ask how to do this.  It really felt like the early days of television.” 

For Walter, he was like those behind-the-scenes innovators who magically, somehow, had brought him “The Howdy Doody Show,” “Sky King,” “The Lone Ranger,” and Saturday morning cartoons around 1958, on his small black-and-white TV in Columbus, Ohio.

To put in perspective Walters’ feat, Reynolds compared him to a classic inventor.

“I would definitely say that Mark Walter is the Thomas Edison” of live streaming of drag racing, Reynolds said. “Who was it Tesla and Edison, right? Tesla was the one that never got any credit because Edison got all of the accolades or whatever. He was the Thomas Edison, and I guess just like back then, we didn’t have the rate of communication across the country, so I didn’t even know he existed. I thought we were the first, but it turns out he was doing it a little before us. And we both just latched on to this and said, ‘This is where drag racing should go. This is what drag racing and the fans, racers, and their families deserve, and it’s the right thing for the sport.’ That’s why we both just kept doing it. I’ll tell you, there are certainly better ways to make money than this, way easier is what I should say. But it’s great for drag racing.”

Walter fashioned and perfected his craft according to what was available at the time. (“The biggest concern, I think, was the quality of the Internet connection, because there was nothing out there,” he said.) He labored mostly in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Meanwhile, Reynolds had enlisted the help of his video sidekick Dustin and had struck out on his own on the West Coast, at the California Hot Rod Reunion at Bakersfield nine years ago this October. The two met when Walter reached out to them via an online chat.

Reynolds said he had chosen the Reunion “because it was in Bakersfield, which is only a few hours from home [at Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.]. We went, ‘OK – we’ve been shooting video there for a couple of years and we know everybody there. At least that way if it didn’t work, we weren’t all the way across the country.”

So there were Reynolds and his partner in grime, at Famoso Raceway, after a flash of an idea turned into a bit of a “Wayne’s World” experiment, then a daring, ‘We’re actually going to do this!’ drive about 110 miles north of Los Angeles into the San Joaquin Valley that promised who-knew-what. 

“It was one of those things that I thought, ‘We all take pictures, and there are a ton of pictures at these races [taken while] wandering around and having a good time. But there are all these people all over the world that may not be able to get out to all of these races. I looked at it and said, “OK. They’re doing live streaming of morning radio shows and all that kind of stuff. I checked out a few of those, and I realize that they’ve got Internet right there in the building. But if we can get the Internet, then we can’t be any dumber than they are. We’ve got to be able to do this,” Reynolds said. 

“I got Dustin, one of my video guys, and I brought the idea up to him, and he said, ‘I’m in, but I don’t have a clue as to how to do any of this.’ I told him I’d figure it out, and we tested it literally at my house. And it worked,” Reynolds said. “It isn’t nearly what it is now, but it worked. And I didn’t know anything about how much you have to have for your bandwidth and all that – I didn’t have a clue. I started doing my research and found out you have to have this much and it all seems real simple when you’re looking at it that way. 

“Blake [Bowser] and all of them that run the racetrack [Auto Club Famoso Raceway] said they were in, and they let us borrow a scissor lift,” Reynolds said. “And I sat on the ground with a laptop, an extension cord, a cable going up to the camera and Dustin was running it. Back then we were really thrilled because this was our first event and we hit 100 people watching and we thought we were the big deal.  I was having to reset the thing every 15 minutes, it seemed like. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was a ton of work. But the response was so cool.”

However, the response wasn’t exactly overwhelming – for the same reason that Reynolds had such a groping-in-the-dark start: the whole concept was so new.

“In the racing community, people didn’t even know what live streaming video was,” he said. “They didn’t have a clue, so we really didn’t even have an audience. We had to educate the audience on what we were doing to even get them. So it was way more than just trying to figure out the technology. The difference between then and now is night and day. I mean, it is insane.”

Aah, but at least one gentleman knew what live streaming video was: Mark Walter.  

Reynolds found out he had a cyber-simpatico through a chat window.

“Since this was so small and there wasn’t anybody else doing this, or so I thought, we’re on our first live broadcast and it’s got the chat window on there and everybody’s chatting. Here comes this guy who put up his username there in the chat – and I can’t even remember what Mark’s username was back then. But he had started streaming church services or whatever, so it was something church-related . . . I can’t even remember,” Reynolds said.

“He gets on the chat window and says, ‘OMG. It’s great that you guys are doing this.’ And he started giving us suggestions in the chat. I’m sitting there chatting with him and Dustin’s running the camera. And Mark started asking, ‘What are you using for this?’ an ‘What are you using for that?’ – for the software and all that. I’m telling him and he’s asking, ‘What’s this setting ?’and I’m looking at it and telling him. And he’s like, ‘Try adjusting to this. It’ll make it better.’ ” 

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Who in the hell is this guy and how would he know’ Within literally the first 15 minutes of ever having any contact with him, he was already trying to help because he’d just started doing it not too long before. That was the start of a relationship that I very freely admit is one that is key to the success of doing live broadcast,” Reynolds said, “Not only did he help us when we first started to make our stuff better, but over the years we have become great friends and colleagues. Even to this day we say, ‘Oh, hey – I tried this out, and it worked really good’ or ‘Don’t do that, because it sucks.’   

“The number of times that we’ve changed where we stream to or host, I don’t even know how many times we’ve been back and forth between the providers because one of them makes an improvement and it’s better and you go with them for a year, then somebody else has something better so you go with them.  We just piggyback on each other’s experiences in what we’ve been testing and what we’ve been doing,” he said.  “Mark Walter is a fine human being, and he has helped us so much and it’s been awesome.”

 

                                                                                    FORGED ALLIANCES KEY TO GROWTH

 

Reynold and Walter easily forged a friendship, Reynolds said, “because he was so forthcoming with information and I’m the kind of guy that’s a real straight shooter and I still believe that a handshake matters. And Mark is that same kind of person.  He and I quickly created this bond where we realized we’re both guys where our word means something. And we wanted to do something that was right, so we started working together whenever possible. I can’t tell you the number of events that we do live today because either Mark talked to somebody who wanted him to do an event and he said, ‘Oh, that’s all the way across the country. You should call Chad.’

“The Spring Fling in Las Vegas is the perfect example.” Reynolds said. “He has been doing the Spring Fling on the East Coast forever, and then it started in Las Vegas. They said that they wanted live streaming. He [Walter] said, “It’d cost a fortune to come all the way across the country. You should call Chad, because he lives in Southern California and he’ll do it.’ So I did. There have been numerous events like that for both of us. If I get a phone call that somebody wants an event live-streamed and it’s somewhere in the country where I just can’t get there because of my schedule or it logistically doesn’t make sense, then I am always pushing them toward Mark or vice versa. We may have separate businesses, but they have the same goal. That’s the good of drag racing, and we both do everything that we can to make sure it works that way.”

Both have partnered with Competition Plus when it comes to networking and content-sharing.

“It’s like television in the sense of affiliates,” Walter said. “We work with CompetitionPlus, BangShift, Drag Race Results, Drag Coverage, and soon [will] be working with Drag Illustrated, where we give them the coverage for our player and they embed it right on their website. They’ve got great viewership, great followers of their e-zine, and that helps get the word out. Facebook is huge and that’s helpful.

“We have a great program with Bobby Bennett and CompPlus with his videos.  We get to help cross between the two groups,” he said. “Maybe we’ve got 15-20 minutes that we need to fill up. I’ll go ahead and look at one of his features, because I love his stuff, especially the Legends. There was one in particular that I really, really enjoyed, and that was one that he did on the nitrous cars. I think most of the stuff was shot at Rockingham. Shannon Jenkins did a lot of the comments, and of course Rickie Smith was in there, too. But it was just educational. That really helps increase your reach, because we have our own group of fans and Comp Plus has its own group of viewers and Drag Race Results does. 

“It’s interesting that you can have people that are part of one group and they spend most of their time on one particular website. And they’ll say, ‘I had no idea that you guys even existed,’ and they’ve been reading CompPlus for nine or 10 years. It’s really helpful, and it helps all of us grow visibility for drag racing, which is why we’re doing this. The big thing is to grow drag racing at that level. We are like a squadron of fighter pilots, sort of like the old Black Sheep Squadron,” Walter said.

“I’m glad [he] said that,” Reynolds said, “because ‘Black Sheep Squadron’ was one of my favorite TV shows growing up as a kid, watching it in the summer at my grandpa’s auto shop. And we are.  We all take off from the same place, which is the drag racing community: we’re racers, we’re fans, we’re all of those things, and off we go. We’ll each go do our own event and handle our own little things, and we all come back to the same place, which is making sure that there’s the greatest content that we can provide.”

Walter expressed his appreciation for all of his affilates. “I just want to say thank-you to CompPlus, BangShift, the guys over at DRR and T.J. Pruitt for all of their help, because we’re all in this deal together and that’s how we see it.  We have worked marvelously together, and I’m just tickled pink. It’s an honor to be involved in this and to have the people that I get to work with. It’s almost like being in a little squadron in the Air Force. It’s pretty cool.”

Walter has staked his operation to bringing viewers events off the beaten path.

“When we look at what we do, we stream everything from bracket races to, well, we did Nitro Funny Car with the IHRA [recently]. And what we want to do is the Nitro Funny Cars and the Pro Stock. We know, it’s just way cooler. But when the little guy looks at that, he goes, ‘I can’t afford to do that.’ 

“When you stream a bracket race and you’ve got a guy up there – we stream some high-end bracket races. When we stream them, here’s a guy with a front wheel drive Cavalier going around and tearing them up. He’s got the slowest car out there and he is just wearing these guys out. On an eighth-mile he got probably 10.50 [-second elapsed time], which in a quarter-mile it’d probably be something like 18 seconds, running these cars that are like eight to nine seconds in the quarter-mile and just wearing them out. What it is is there’s a following to those bracket races, those index races, and those sportsman-level type of events.  They go, ‘Hey – I can do that. I’ve got a Cavalier sitting inside [my garage]. I’ve just got to learn how to drive it, and if I want to I can go and compete in these events with that car and I can be on Motor Mania TV or I get to be on BangShift,” Walter said.

“That’s the thing that’s kind of inspired us,” he said. “I won a championship with the National Street Car Association in 2004. It was an American Muscle in the index class, and I think I got three lines in one magazine and that was it. I sat there thinking, ‘I have chased this thing since 1998, and I won it in 2004 –  and I got two or three lines in a magazine.’

“Our biggest thing,” Walter said, “is to gain them the exposure that they’re never going to see anywhere else. Nobody is going to put that stuff on TV, and they’re certainly not going to put three days, 12-15 hours a day of it on TV, either.  These guys can call their parents, their aunts and uncles, their brother, the guy they grew up with and say, ‘Hey, dude, I’m racing this weekend, and I’m going to be on Motor Mania TV or BangShift, and you can go right here to this website. And you can watch it from start to finish – every pair of cars that goes down the track during eliminations – and you’ll hear them announce it. It’s the next best thing to being there,’ ” he said. “You don’t get the smell of the racing fuel. You don’t get the smell of the tires or the nitro, and you don’t get the pounding in your chest. But you get everything else and the multiple cameras that we use and the other stuff, depending on the series when we’re doing top-end interviews.”

Said Walter, “I think it brings a tremendous amount to the sportsman community, and it allows all the manufacturers out there to see who these people are. There really are a lot of people involved. It also helps the press.

“One of the things that we do when we go in is that we want to make sure we make the promotor, the racers, and the track look good. We don’t put anything up that doesn’t look good,” Walter said. “If the track is maybe a little older and it needs a little work, then we can aim the camera just a little bit differently. Or maybe there isn’t going to be a lot of fans there, so we won’t pan the crowd. Those are the things that we do so that we can help that track, help the promoter, and gain valuable visibility from sportsman racing.”

Together they expanded their reach.

“When Mark and I were doing all of these things on our own, [the] audience is continuing to grow.  Just like CNN or Fox or ABC on TV, you learn that if you want to keep growing and you want to get everywhere, not everyone knows Motor Mania TV or whatever, and all of these great websites are out there and they’re not the same kind of people that we attract on a daily basis on BangShift,”Reynolds said. “Mark and I both talked about it a lot and said that we should share this. We should let other people be involved in this, and we’ve had some really good people that have done stuff.

“CompPlus has been an affiliate that runs our content, which is great because it puts it out there in front of even more eyeballs – great for the sport, great for the sponsors,” he said. 

“We’ve ended up building these relationships with these companies, and their websites are providing content,” Reynolds said. “Competition Plus is providing us with incredibly bitchin’ video that is super-great during an oildown or some delay in the racing action. It’s entertaining. It’s informative. It’s cool. And then at the most basic level – like our March Meet, which is one of our big giant meetings that we’ve done for a long time – Bobby and the group from CompPlus are there, shooting photos and having a great time. And they’re putting up round-by-round information, qualifying sheets, and providing them to us so that we can put them directly on the page where our viewers are watching the live stream. If someone gets in the chat and says, ‘Where did Cory Lee qualify?’ I could say, ‘Just scroll down the page, dude. It’s the last round of qualifying Bobby and those guys put it up.’ ”

Consider that Competition Plus performs a truly valuable public service for the live-streaming gladiators.

“At BangShift, we have a very personal relationship with our viewers. I’m on camera talking to them or if my partner Brian Lohnes happens to be at an event, we’re talking with those people and we are very personal with them. We’re interacting with them and all that,” Reynolds said. “I’m predominately alone at those events.  There are times where I’m sitting there and we’re on a 16-hour-day and we’re eight hours in, and I’m going to pee myself. 

“We’ll have an oildown or a delay or something, and there’s nothing finer than looking down in my system and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh – CompPlus has a video here of Gary Densham talking smack about John Force that’s eight minutes long . . . which is exactly how long I need to get down and go pee and get back up here,” Reynolds said. “It’s not only saving myself from going crazy trying not to pee myself but arguably saving my health so I don’t get kidney stones from standing up there all day.”

He was serious about that, but in a more professional sense, he said, “Those kinds of relationships are the ones that I never really expected. I never expected to have a relationship with another guy who is streaming races like we have with Mark. I never expected that our affiliate network would end up working together to provide content for each other in the way that we have. The end result is the sum of our parts is huge.  We’re reaching millions of people a year with drag-racing events that otherwise would only reach tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, but certainly not millions.”

Walter said he genuinely isn’t surprised such a large group as this can work in unison.

“I think that I’m a pretty decent judge of character. And I know that from my experience in the military – we’d go places trying to get people to work together, depending on their programs involved, and you just knew when you walked in the door that somebody was like, ‘I don’t want you to be here. Please go away.’ I never got that impression from anybody that we worked with so it didn’t surprise me,” he said.

“It was kind of like we’re all doing the same thing and we all kind of have the same mindset that we want to grow drag racing, we want to grow motorsports,” Walter said. “Honestly, I think we all have the same mindset of ‘Look, you help me. I help you. It helps everybody.’ That’s from Bobby [Bennett] at CompPlus to Scott [Lemen] at DRR, T.J. [Pruitt] at Drag Coverage and Brian [Lohnes] over at BangShift there’s never been a concern about, ‘Oh, they’re going to steal my people and do this and do that.’ If anything, our folks call and say they want to talk to you about streaming and then I’d get a phone call and we’d talk about that.  We really work together very, very well.”

 

                                                                                         CONTENT HAS TO REMAIN FREE 

 

Full co-operation of sponsors / marketing partners / advertisers makes Reynolds’ and Walter’s business model work in a medium that evolved into accommodating both free and paid access to content.

Reynolds said, “I don’t believe that you should have to pay for content on the Internet. BangShift.com is free. There is no subscription fee. We have the greatest sponsors in the world who foot the bill so that everybody can watch and everybody can read our stories and check out all of our content each and every day without paying money. As long as I’m doing this, our live streams will always be free.  I don’t care if we continue to evolve and we get more and more cameras and special features – if we can’t do it and provide it as a free service, then I think we’re doing a disservice for the racers and the fans.”

He said he absolutely believes that Internet users shouldn’t have to subscribe to a website to have access to content, especially to his content.

“I love magazines,” Reynolds said, “but I admit that I don’t have time to read them very much anymore because I’m so busy. But I grew up reading car magazines and National Dragster and all of that. I understand that you pay a subscription fee and you get a paper product in your hand. These days the magazines are on such poor quality paper that the photos don’t look as nice. For the Internet we have the cost to host all of this content and all of the stuff that goes along with that, but it is much less overhead than printing a magazine, and because of that, we believe that it should always be free. I don’t care if that’s live streaming video or reading that article about Brittany Force winning her first Top Fuel race. I don’t care what it is – it’s the Internet, and it should be free.” 

Both Walter and Reynolds said the explosive growth of the Internet and the concept of live streaming have astounded them. Walter said he didn’t imagine 11 years ago that either platform would operate at the levels they do today.

“No,” Walter said. “We always thought it could be something really good, but we never [fore]saw the growth in the Internet. You have to understand that when we first started, YouTube.com was small.  They weren’t anywhere close to the size that they are now. So, yeah, I didn’t think that it could grow to the size that it is today. It blew me away.”

Reynolds said his vision for the online streaming format is one only can compare to the late Steve Evans’ work at Diamond P Sports. 

“The ground-breaking work that he did in his time, in drag racing, to me, that is where we aspire to be . . . [that fans/viewers] can come on any given day and watch a race that is archived,” he said. “They can watch circle-track racing, drag racing, motorcycle racing, or whatever it is in the motorsports world, and they get to do that for free.  That’s one of the biggest things that every one of us stands for is that this content has to remain free.

“You can watch pay per view, and I’m sure those people can have some success and make some money. But it does absolutely nothing for the sport.  We’re at a point for drag racing that we need to grow the sport. We need to get new people involved. We need to get that 18-24-year-old age group out here watching the sport or being involved as far as driving or maybe working at a racetrack or whatever, promoting the series. We need to get these young people behind it so they can say, ‘Hey, we were there when it was nothing.’ It’s really one of those things that we can move forward and do great things for this sport,” Reynolds said.

“I think that live streaming will continue to evolve to where it gets to be more and more like television in some way,” he said. “I hope the technology gets better, but there are always going to be some limitations because of the fact that we’re doing this at dragstrips. We’re not in the middle of town in an office building that has the most bad-ass Internet [connections] ever. So we always have those expenses of getting quality Internet and the limitations of the technology. With that said, there are also limitations for the people at home, because unlike a YouTube  video, where half of it loads before it’s even on your screen then it sits there and plays in HD, for us you’re talking about a garden hose of data that is streaming into your computer non-stop.

“There is no preload, none of that. So watching HD footage streaming can be difficult for most of the country. We always have to be aware of that so that we are producing content that can reach the most people. And part of that is making sure that it is always free,” he said.

He can tell you – and Walter (who watched his scaffolding topple over at Gainesville, Fla., at the swampy, windy, rain-soaked National Diesel Hot Rod Association event one year) can back him up – that it also always will be entertaining.