Saturday, June 13, 2015

24 Heures du Mans | 18:43:00

There's good news & there's bad news. A couple weeks hence, a brother Knight said to me, "There's good news & there's bad news," & to his obvious surprise I said, tersely, "Bad news first." As then, so now.

Fox Sports is, much like Mos Eisley, a wretched hive of scum & villainy. Their claim that the entire twenty-four hours of the 24 Heures du Mans would be available through the Fox Sports Go "app" on mobile devices is a damned lie. There is a very little coverage on Fox Sports 1 & very little on Fox Sports 2, a channel no one receives anyway. So, only five hours of the race will be on American television. This is an outrage, nothing less than an outrage. I will not watch any program on the FOX broadcast network until they make amends & restore television coverage of Le Mans. I am especially surprised that they are heaping such abuse & disrespect on the 24 Heures du Mans, given that this year Fox Sports & the A.C.O./F.I.A. have inked a new deal for television coverage of the World Endurance Championship (W.E.C.), of which Le Mans is the centerpiece. All six hours of the 6 Hours of Silverstone were broadcast on Fox Sports 1 & as well as five of the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps (the remaining hour was broadcast on the invisible Fox Sports 2).

Fox Sports Go came alive, suddenly, at 12:30 P.M. E.D.T. (6:30 P.M. French time), three & a half hours into the race. I spent the first three & a half of the twenty-four hours (9:00 A.M.-12:30 P.M. local, 3:00-6:30 P.M. there) listening to the race on Radio Le Mans.com (radio-link) while watching an onboard feed from the № 64 Corvette. This was better than nothing, absolutely better than nothing, but an unacceptable way to revel in the "Grand Prix of Endurance." There is no coverage scheduled for Fox Sports 1—good old-fashioned cable television—'til 7:00 P.M., which is the middle of the night in France, so I suspect that hour-long broadcast will be largely a summary the preceding ten hours' racing. I have no idea how long this will last & I am trying to bear in mind that the online coverage might go away as suddenly as it appeared. I'm trying to be zen; I succeed only so long as everything precedes perfectly in line with my expectations. All's well that ends well, so let us hope current conditions persist.

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