Things used to be simpler in the olden days, did they not? Way back when, NASCAR ran carburetors in all its cars, you had five lugs, and the cars were dramatically asymmetrical. Oh, and they let you ring a phone number to listen to the radios on the track. Wait, what?
Scanner culture has long been a part of NASCAR. These days, you can listen into team radio on the web, or you can rent a scanner if you’re sitting in the stands. But back in the days of Spongebob and dial-up internet, it worked differently. You used a phone.
Nascarman recently took to Twitter to post an old commercial that advertised the service. In 2001, it was as simple as buying a specially-marked Coke to get access to the FanScan phone line radio feed.
In 2001, you could call a phone number and listen to team radios by phone pic.twitter.com/xyR6XItDqB
— nascarman (@nascarman_rr) September 3, 2024
NASCAR has long mandated that teams use unencrypted analog radios. This is to keep communications transparent and open to all. It’s also a boon for fans, who can use simple analog scanners to listen in. But if you weren’t at the track, the FanScan phone line was a great way to do the same thing while you watched the race on TV.
As covered by Motorsport.com, the promotion advertised above was tied in with the Coca-Cola Racing Family, a group of NASCAR drivers all sponsored by the soft-drink giant. You could use your phone to dial in and listen to live radio between drivers, crew chiefs, spotters and owners—basically, whoever was talking on the channel.
The Coca-Cola promotion was just one way to access the FanScan radio hotline, however. It actually came about far earlier than 2001. As covered by Hot Rod magazine back in 1997, the primary way of using the phone service was to purchase special FanScan calling cards. You’d purchase cards with a set number of credits, dial the number on the back, then scratch off the covering over the PIN to redeem them.
Hot Rod’s writer referred to it as “great entertainment” while noting it was at times difficult to figure out who was talking. Jeff Gordon’s distinctive voice was credited as being “easy to discern.” As for cost? It wasn’t exactly cheap, with $15 getting you 10 minutes worth of credit. That’s $15 in 1997 dollars—equal to roughly $30 today.
The calling cards had famous drivers on them—Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon being top of the tree. Some are still traded online for low dollar amounts as trading cards, though they didn’t really serve that purpose. In any case, you weren’t restricted to listening to the driver depicted on the phone card. According to a contemporary forum post from 2004, it eventually became possible to select the driver you wanted to listen to. This was achieved by entering their racing number on your touch-tone phone, followed by the hash key.
Cards also could be had cheaper at times in other promotions. One True Value-Jeff Gordon card would get you $15 worth of credits for just $3.99 if you bought it with WD-40, ArmorAll, or other participating products. Alternatively, if you didn’t have a calling card, you could pay on the spot using your MasterCard or Visa number instead. It would just cost you $1.49 a minute.
Interestingly, though, visit the old FanScan.com website via the Internet Archive, and you’ll find something strange. It seems to make no mention of the phone line whatsoever. It appears that FanScan.com was run primarily by Racing Radios, which sold frequency lists and radio scanners for fans to use in the real world.
But that’s because the FanScan phone service was run by a different entity entirely. None of the cards or packaging that I’ve seen for sale online list a website. Furthermore, most of the copyright details in the small print seem to be for the sponsor logos featured on the cards. All we know is that the initiative was run by Sportscom Inc. out of Lawrenceville, Georgia, thanks to the Hot Rod article.
But eventually, I found it. SportsCom Inc. didn’t run FanScan.com. It held the Fanscanonline.com domain instead. The archive of this ancient website gives us a little more insight into the service.
Work on the concept began in 1994 as a partnership between Georgia businessmen Jerry Riemer and Chris Foster. Riemer was a 20-year veteran of the advertising industry, while Foster was experienced in telephone direct marketing and had run interactive telephone promotions before.
The basic technical concept was simple enough. Scanner feeds were harvested and fed into a system that let fans dial in to listen. The duo were able to get FanScan up and running as a 900-number by 1995, and it slowly grew from there. Pre-paid cards became available in 1997, while that same year, the Internet version of the service launched on Jeff Gordon’s personal website—jeffgordon.com. Starting out with NASCAR, FanScan would add CART in 1998.
Both the NASCAR and CART series mandated that there was a three-second delay so that particularly fruity language could be censored before it went out to listeners. You could also stream the audio over the web, though you’d experience a longer lag of around 20 seconds due to the limitations of the technology.
The streams also tended to feature 20+ teams. Why? Because team radio is only used when a driver has something to say. Thus, if you just listened to one driver’s feed, you’d be listening to silence a lot of the time. Eventually, a system was implemented that would say the number of the car talking when the scanner feed switched to their channel.
Ultimately, the phone feed was eventually shut down. Based on web archives, it happened sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s. That’s not to say that team radio went away, it’s just delivered differently. These days, you can listen in on the NASCAR Mobile app, which is probably more fitting for modern viewers anyway.
Still, it’s neat to look back at this old-school way of engaging with NASCAR team radio. It’s funny to think of what it would have been like, watching a race on an old 32″ tube while you cradled your home phone in the crook of your shoulder. Immersive? Quite possibly. It’s probably something that really only appealed to the hardcore fans in the first place, but it was undeniably cool.
Image credits: FanScanOnline.com screenshot via the Wayback Machine, eBay
It would been a heck of a day listening to Earnhardt’s crew when he crashed for the last time…
I remember when I think DirecTV made a big deal about having a whole channel feed for this, too.
Waiting for a younger reader to ask what a landline is…
Not to mention that phone services from that period had to remind users that they had to use a touch-tone phone, rather than a rotary phone!
as one of the blighted youfs I’m trying to figure out what would be the dividing line.
Wouldn’t the pulses route to the same switch?
That is true, insofar as it goes. The trouble is that after the call is completed, the FanScan systems would also have to interpret the pulse codes in order to route you to the correct team, and possibly for payment processing unless it’s a 900 number.
Fun fact: On all landline phone systems that I’m aware of that aren’t VOIP, you can still use a rotary phone, or even tap the hook switch the right number of times for each digit! (Zero was represented by ten taps, the other numbers were that number of taps.)
As a “younger” reader, I can tell you that I know what a landline is. Were (well at least”I’m”) not THAT stupid.
Were still stupid, but that’s beside the point.
I love getting this type of historical and esoteric in depth knowledge.
It’s thanks to Autopian that I can be the death of the party.
#(Pound symbol):AutopianLife
Thank you. Pound!
Now I can listen to a team on Discord. What a time to be alive
This was achieved by entering their racing number on your touch-tone phone, followed by the hash key.
As long as you’re talking old school, back then, it was called the pound key!
I still call it that. Also, while # is sometimes called hashtag, I’ve never once heard of it called the “hash key” before this article. That just sounds weird, and vaguely dirty.
It’s a briticism.
Like I said, weird and vaguely dirty.
Nevermind
It feels like a description of a button on a dystopian vending machine for hard drugs.