'Home Turn,' my new TV show, drops Tuesday. Watch it!

No fancy headlines, folks, just check out the damn thing. It's really good!

Feb 08, 2025

[UPDATE: The show is live! Here it is! Click right here! Now!]

There are times in this newsletter where I’ll get cutesy with the intro, winding around a topic for a few paragraphs with some flowery verbiage before circling in and getting to the damn point. This is not one of those times.

Friends, I have a new show coming out on Tuesday, and I hope you’ll watch it. Called “Home Turn,” it’s a half-hour travel/history/food documentary show done in connection with NASCAR Studios, focusing on Daytona Beach. Here’s the first trailer:

“Home Turn” will premiere on NASCAR’s YouTube channel on Tuesday at 7 p.m. ET, and will run on The NASCAR Channel on Tubi after that. Beyond that, who knows?

The background: There’s a damn fine show called “TrueSouth” that runs over on the SEC Network, focusing on restaurants in the footprint of SEC football. (It’s so good.) Some folks at NASCAR decided they’d like to tell some similar stories about the world around NASCAR tracks. They reached out to the “TrueSouth” cats, who happen to be friends of mine, and they brought me on board to serve as host/writer/interviewer.

I’ve always loved Daytona, both as a location and as a state of mind. There’s its history as the Birthplace of Speed, there’s its legendary status as the home of MTV’s Spring Break and Bike Week, and then there’s the track — Daytona International Speedway, the World Center of Racing. It’s Americana at its purest, a distillation of drive, ambition, willpower, thrillseeking and escape, all beside the ocean, on some of the most remarkable sand on the planet. How can you not love a place like that?

Right around Thanksgiving last year, we made several runs to Daytona, scouting, interviewing and filming. We met some fascinating people, heard some mesmerizing stories, and chowed down on some fantastic seafood. There are a million tales to tell about the track and the world around it, and we’ve tried to encompass as many as we could in this show. (Related: I see now why every Netflix documentary bloats to 10 hours. There are so many stories we had to leave on the cutting-room floor.)

The great John T. Edge, author extraordinaire and host of “TrueSouth,” walked me through the basics of interviewing someone on camera, writing for the screen, and finding the narrative through-line in a set of wildly disparate threads. The production crew at Bluefoot Entertainment, the cats responsible for “TrueSouth” and all those fancy, evocative intros you see before college football games and major golf tournaments on ESPN, captured Daytona on camera. And the magnificent Tim Horgan, director and head of Bluefoot, whipped the whole damn thing together, mixing words, music and pictures into something that ranks among my most favorite work of my life.

I mean, check out these shots, like this sunrise:

Or this drone shot over the Halifax River:

Or this evocative beauty:

The show is a half-hour long, and I guarantee it’ll take your breath away with the beauty of its imagery. Plus, you’ll hear some kickass music and learn a little history, too. What could be better than that?

If you want to get the vibe of the show beforehand, check out the playlist of songs we used in “Home Turn”:

This is a one-off deal for now, but we would really, REALLY love for this to become a series. So give it a watch on Tuesday evening, forward the link to everyone you know and maybe even some you don’t. Put the link (which I’ll re-post here and in every newsletter for the foreseeable future) out on your social media, text it to everyone in your phone, holler it at your Starbucks barista. Spread the word!

Say, when is “Home Turn” airing again?