Gentlemen, start your engines. The races are on.

After more than a year of sustained interest, regular inquiries, and – more recently – intense negotiations, NASCAR Winston Cup racing will roar into northern, eastern, and central Maine listening areas this year.

Clear Channel Communications has secured the rights to all NASCAR Winston Cup races and coverage carried on the three major racing radio networks – Motor Racing Network (MRN), Performance Racing Network (PRN) and Indianapolis Motor Speedway Network – for 2002 and 2003.

“It doesn’t really matter where you live. You’ll be able to hear the race,” said Keryn Smith, a Clear Channel vice president and stations general manager. “At least from a promotional standpoint, we wanted to be able to say ‘If you want to hear the races, tune in to 103.9 on Sunday’ or whenever and it’ll be there.

“If we couldn’t have gotten all the races, I don’t know that we would have done it. That’s why it took so long to get everything squared away.”

The races will be aired live on Howland’s WVOM (103.9 FM), a 100,000-watt, all-talk format station. The deal also includes rights to prerace shows produced by MRN (NASCAR USA) and PRN (Racing Country USA). The two-hour shows, which typically air late Sunday mornings, will run on WBFB (104.7 FM), a country music station licensed to Bangor/Belfast.

“We’ve tried to develop a NASCAR ID on the Bear [WBFB] so we think this is a good fit all around,” Smith explained. “We’ll probably run one at 8 a.m. and the other at 10 a.m., but we’re still ironing that out.”

So what about people who worry about sports intruding on formats that are primarily talk or music?

“Some people will holler and say that’s sports and this is a talk station, but truly it’s an interactive thing and the weekend programming has been kind of a problem area for us so we feel this really fills a niche for us in a big way,” Smith said.

Racing action begins with the Budweiser Shootout from Daytona on Sunday, Feb. 10, at 12:30 p.m. The deal secures the rights to 38 races through the 2002 season. The breakdown is as follows: 27 races on MRN, seven on PRN, and four more on the Indianapolis Network.

Smith said the response from advertisers and listeners has been greater and come faster than expected.

“We just started airing promotional spots for racing for potential advertisers this weekend, and we’ve had an unbelievable response just since the early word got out,” said Smith. “We thought it would be big, but I don’t think any of us thought it would be this big. It’s just hugely popular, especially up here.”

That response has largely taken the form of listener e-mails and calls from businesses and listeners. Smith hopes the addition of NASCAR racing will expose WVOM and WBFB to a whole new segment of potential listeners.

“The majority of the people who will listen to the races will be new listeners to WVOM so we think this is an opportunity to showcase some of the shows and the format we have on WVOM,” he said.

Smith said this is the result of process started last year when Clear Channel officials inquired about acquiring racing rights with the various networks, but weren’t able to get anything done in time.

“It’s a hole we really thought we could fill in this area, where people would be able to listen to every major race and know where they could pick them up,” he said.

Hickman switches networks

Fred Hickman and Suzyn Waldman were hired last month to be the new announcers for the New York Yankees’ regional sports YES Network, which begins broadcasting in March.

Longtime cable sports and news viewers will remember Hickman, 45, from his days with Turner Broadcasting System. He was a studio host and sports anchor on CNN and TNT from 1980-1984, and from 1986 until last September.

Waldman, 55, will broadcast 35 YES games and appear on pregame and postgame shows for an additional 115 games. She was with New York’s WFAN radio from 1987 until this year and also worked games on the Madison Square Garden Network, WPIX and WYNY.

Andrew Neff’s On the Air column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at 990-8205 or at aneff@bangordailynews.net.