Quick Stats: Mike Joy Fox NASCAR Race Announcer
Daily Driver: 2016 BMW i8 (Mike’s rating: 8 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: western New England
Car he learned to drive in: 1966 Rambler Marlin
First car bought: 1971 Chevy Z28 Camaro
For racing enthusiasts, it must seem like Mike Joy has their dream job. Joy has attended 42 Daytona 500s, and next Sunday will be the 38th one where he’s been part of a live TV or radio broadcast.
Joy is the first to admit he’s blessed. But besides being a great liaison for viewers by being up front at auto and motorcycle races, the 47 years he’s had his dream job has afforded Joy another perk: having a well stocked garage filled with a dozen of his favorite rides to drive when he’s not on the road with Fox.
These days, his daily driver is the eye-catching 2016 BMW i8. “I had a Porsche 911 Turbo S, which is a phenomenally capable car,” he says. “But it is so capable. It was lacking in the fun department. I was out in Phoenix, and the general manager of Roger Penske’s BMW dealership Don Hanson corralled me and said, ‘What about an i8?’ I said, ‘It’s a show car, how can that possible be a daily driver?’ He said, ‘It’s a very useful supercar.’ He put me in one for a weekend and convinced me that I could drive this every day. And it’s a blast. It’s very, very much a fun car.”
Joy rates it an 8 out of 10 because there are some things that could be improved. “To be BMW’s cutting edge leading edge car, it should have the most advanced telematics; it should have the best seating of any car in the line,” Joy says. “My son has a 428i, which has better seats, better stereo, and some other amenities that for one reason or another this car seems to lack just a little bit.”
But the i8 has fantastic performance. “Obviously being a hybrid, it’s got great fuel economy, and it’s fun,” Joy says. “Its great party trick is the operation of the doors. They’re not scissor doors, as say a Lamborghini would have. BMW calls them dihedral, in that they open slightly out and then up.”
When the doors are open, they take up less space than a conventional door. “Now because the tub of the car is carbon fiber, there’s a very, very high sill, which makes getting in challenging and getting out nearly impossible,” he says. “So that’s why I give it an 8.”
Wherever Joy drives the i8, it’s always a head-turner. He says there are just a couple of them in his area around town. “It’s a phenomenal car, and it’s cutting edge technology.”
1972 MG Midget
Rating: 9
“That car provides more smiles per mile than anything I’ve ever owned,” Joy says. “For me mainly, but hopefully for everybody. I had them back in the ‘80s, raced them in SCCA, and then I was away from little British cars for a long time But when new, that was the basic sports car – four cylinders, 60 horsepower, four speeds, 13-inch tires. It’s a unibody car, not a full-frame car, so that makes them relatively easy to restore. And through companies like Moss Motors, just about every part of that car is available.”
Joy likens MGs to potato chips—you can’t just have one. He currently has three, ranging from 1967 to 1973.
“Somebody will come up and say, ‘My buddy’s got one in his backyard just sitting there, would you want it?’ ‘My grandfather left me one, would you want it?’ Pretty soon you have a collection of them,” he says. “I think people see these cars and back in the day, their electrics were not terribly reliable and a lot of those cars had terminal breakdown at 60 or so thousand miles, which is one-third of what we expect of a new car to last today.”
There is also an emotional connection to the MG. “Maybe people feel sympathetic and they say, ‘I know where there’s one that needs help or needs saving,’” Joy says. “So what are you going to do with a forlorn MG? You’re going to find somebody who loves MGs and see if you can push it off on them.”
The only thing Joy dislikes about the MG is that it could be a little faster. “0 to 60 comes along in about 16 seconds,” he says. “So one of the other MGs has an engine that’s been enlarged by 150cc’s, has a Datsun five-speed, and is a much quicker car. We’re restoring it for the second time, so it’s in the middle of reassembly.”
Like the i8, Joy’s MG also attracts attention when it’s out and about. “My son, who’s a very impressionable 17 and loves cars, was a little put off that when he’s driving that MG, ten times as many people come up to him to ask him about the car as they do his BMW,” he says. “I think that’s pretty funny. He gets it. That old cars are something to be preserved and cherished and enjoyed and that that love is shared with people who want to come up and learn about them.”
Joy says the most common thing that happens is somebody comes up and asks, “Is that a GM and you’ve got the letters backwards?” “They don’t know,” he says. “MG imported its last car into the United States in 1980, so there’s a whole generation of drivers that have never heard of it. The MGB—which is this car’s bigger brother and I’ve got two of those—was the best selling sports car of all time until the Mazda Miata. So as sports cars go, MGs were fairly common. Not so much anymore.”
As he does when he deftly broadcasts from racetracks or at Barrett Jackson auctions, Joy is professorial in his delivery even when talking about his cars and career trajectory. He often sprinkles trivia facts into the conversation.
“It’s a very eclectic mix,” he says of his car collection. “Obviously I love MGs. I’ve got half a dozen of them, the two BMWs are mine for road cars. We also have two BMW race cars, and then I like El Caminos. Not many people do. They equate it with mullets and things like that. But the El Camino and the Ford Ranchero were terrific vehicles for their time. They rode like cars. They hauled like trucks. They were a great compromise.”
He just sold his 1971 El Camino and is looking for his next one. “The fellow that restored it, it turns out that as I drove the car, I didn’t much agree with the direction he’d taken,” he says. “It was much more efficient to sell that car and start with a different one than it would be to undo everything he did.”
2016 Porsche Macan S
Rating: 10
“We’ve got a Porsche Macan S, which is probably the best all around vehicle that we own,” Joy says. “If I had to sell everything and keep one vehicle, that’s the one I’d keep. I had an Audi Q5, and the Macan when it came out was built on the same platform and shared a lot of attributes with the Audi. My wife wanted the Porsche. She loves it, that’s her daily driver. She thinks it’s fantastic, and I do too, It’s a very, very capable vehicle.”
Joy likes the combination of performance and utility in the Porsche: “It goes, and like an SUV should, it hauls stuff too. That’s the best part about it. I think until the Macan, the Audi Q5 was probably the best single vehicle on the road. The Porsche is in some ways better. The Porsche is more of a driver-focused car. It’ll get a second glance from people, but people don’t swivel their head all the way around like they do with the i8.”
2001 BMW 330ci
Rating: 7
Joy has two of these BMWs, specifically for the sole purpose of racing them with his son. They have both raced separately and worked on each other’s car during races through the years, but they have never been on the track together. That’s something Joy is looking forward to doing this summer.
“We built two cars for a class called Spec E46. E46 is BMW’s internal code name for the 2001 to 2005 3 series,” he says. “There’s now a spec series, racing series, for those cars. So we built one for my son, and now we built a second car. They’re barely street legal—lights, horn, and wipers. But the body, shape, and design, everything is just as it came from the factory. They’re modified passenger cars, so they’re barely street legal.”
It’s street legal so that his son can drive it and make changes for the racetrack. “He drove his to school one day, before he loaded it up with decals on it,” Joy says. “He can drive it on the road. If we make an alignment change or a suspension change, and he wants to check it out, that car is registered. He can drive it.”
Joy rates these cars a 9 when they were new, but today they’re a 7 out of 10.
His son might drive his BMW 330ci, but Joy won’t be putting his own on the road. “It’s a very direct responding car to inputs, of throttle, brake and steering, which are great attributes for a race car,” he says. “It’s an affordable car to race, when in a spec series. You’re not racing against someone else’s wallet or checkbook because the parts that go in the car are very carefully controlled. So all that makes it a great class. The cars are plentiful, and they’re not expensive anymore.”
Car he learned to drive in
Joy grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he learned to drive in a 1966 Rambler Marlin on its suburban streets.
“That was the driving school’s car, provided by the AMC dealer, but I chose that car because it was the only car in the fleet with a standard transmission,” he says. “All the other driver’s ed cars were automatic. I had no interest in an automatic. I wanted to drive a stick. Even though the shifter was three on the tree, a column shifter, still it was a three pedal car. That’s what I wanted to learn on because I wasn’t going to have any automatic transmission cars. I wanted a stick. I wanted to drive.”
Back then he had to complete driver’s ed to get a license. But after he passed the test, his dad bought him a car with an automatic transmission and not a manual: a six-year-old 1960 Chevy Impala convertible, which was Joy’s high school car. “He said, ‘A new driver has enough to do without worrying about shifting. You’re first car is going to be an automatic, after that you can get a stick,’” Joy says.
First car bought
After the Impala wore out and they sold it, his dad did eventually buy him cars with manual transmissions: an Austin Mini Cooper to commute to college in, and then an Alpha Romeo Spyder. In early 1973, while working part time, Joy bought a 1971 Chevy Z28 Camaro.
“I found a very sympathetic banker to loan me $2,400, and I put that with $900, which was all the money I had to buy it,” he says. “I was busting tires at a Firestone store, and I was also doing public address announcing at several racetracks in the area: Riverside Park in Massachusetts and Thompson Speedway in Connecticut. I wanted a Z28 because that was the car that was having great success in the SCCA Trans-Am series.”
The Camaro lasted a while before he replaced it with a brand new one almost just like it in 1978. Joy did graduate to splurge cars, owning a few Porsches, a few Ferraris, and a couple of Rx7s that we highly modified, much like the IMSA racers in the 1980s.
Joy didn’t buy an MG back then because he needed a car that was reliable: “I hop in one of those MGs, and I’m 21 again. It’s just a simple, very basic sports car. And that’s the fun of it. In college, I really lusted after the one that a friend of mine in college had. He had British racing green one. They were great cars, but I could afford one car, and it had to be my year-round transportation. We’d use it for road rallies and autocrosses, but it had to be transportation, and it had to be completely reliable. The MGs are mostly just returning to my sports car roots. I’ve wanted them ever since college.”
In his 30s Joy’s goal was to have a Ferrari. He ended up getting a Ferrari 308 GTS. “I had been working for NASCAR’s radio network and ESPN, and in 1983 I signed with CBS Sports,” he says. “And so the Ferrari was my way of rewarding myself. It was a 1979 model that I bought from Bob Sharp, a champion racer who also happened to be a Ferrari dealer.”
As Joy tried to figure out when he first bought an MG, he fired up a database of all the cars he’s owned over the years. The database is handy when it comes to serial numbers, for example, because he can look up a car that someone mentions on one of the many car forums he frequents.
“The total cars I’ve owned is over 100,” he says. “Hey, I’m old. I’ve been doing this for a while. MGs, Austin-Healeys, and Morris, which is all British Motor Company—had a total of 23 of them. The Morris was the Mini, the Healey and the MGs, they’re kind of synonymous.” He figures he bought this first MG before he turned 40 and after his first Ferrari.
Favorite road trip
One of Joy’s favorite times in a car happened in 2006 at the Lime Rock Historic Festival. It brought him back to his youth and was a full circle moment in his life.
“I had a chance to drive one of Ken Epsman’s cars—his Mark Donohue-Roger Penkse Trans-Am series Javelin,” Joy says. “This car won a lot of races in 1970 and won the championship in ’71. When I came across Big Bend, which is the first big corner at Lime Rock, and looked up at the hillside where I sat 36 years before watching Mark Donohue and just wishing that I could do that some day, my eyes completely filled up. I was completely overcome with emotion, and fortunately I had the rest of that pace lap, which was another mile, to get my thoughts together and get down to the business at hand of racing that car. If I had to pick a moment behind the wheel, that would be it.”
As for a favorite proper road trip, Joy loves driving in his native New England: “I’d rather drive than fly when possible,” he says. “I’ve driven cross-country three times. Put me in a good handling two-seat roadster anywhere in western New England, from Connecticut all the way up to the top of Vermont. Fantastic roads and wonderful scenery.”
Joy does these road trips often. “Every time we go up to Lime Rock, they don’t race there Sunday, so the events are Friday, Saturday and Monday,” he says. “I’ll just take off Sunday and drive on the all the roads that I road rallied on when I was young. Or just go and just enjoy the drive.”
Even though Joy is now based in the South for his job, he is often up there to race, spectate, and color commentate with Historic Trans Am. “We run the vintage events at Lime Rock, at Watkins Glen and Laguna Seca in California,” he says. “That’s for fun.”
He likes that they maintain the exact cars to the specifications they were back in the 1970s. “It’s a very tightly controlled group, and some of those cars are priceless, but the fellows that own them, they race them hard,” Joy says. “It’s a tremendous group of people. They’re wonderful cars, but it’s a great group of people. That’s absolutely for fun. We do the Rolex Monterey Motorsports reunion, which we’ve done on Fox Sports Net, and now it’s on Motor Trend and Automobile. I got to race and commentate, which is pretty fun.”
Joy loves it so much that he does that on a volunteer basis. But of course, there are its perks. “I help them with their promotion, and I also get to drive,” he says. “I get to race, so what can be more fun that that? Last year we did Monterey, Lime Rock, Watkins Glen, and Sebring, and I think we’re going to do Monterey, Road America, probably one or two other events.”
In addition to racing, Joy wants to restore MGs and other cars with his son. “I’m trying to get my son involved in car restoration,” he says. “He’d rather spend his time driving, which I can fully understand, but we’ve got a garage full of tools and equipment from Eastwood, and they are great partners.”
Technology, Barrett-Jackson, and Fox’s 59th Daytona 500
The other job Joy has had for about 12 years when it was on Speed, then Fox, and now Discovery and Velocity, is covering Barrett Jackson auctions. He looks at these cars in great detail and analyzes them for viewers.
“It’s real’ly challenging because every car is different, and every car offers something,” he says. Along with Steve Magnante—Steve is very focused on details and casting numbers and correct parts—I take a broader view and try to explain to the viewer what we thought of these cars back then and why this particular is or isn’t very collectible now. I try to hit that balance.”
He likes that the auction, while known for its high-end cars, offers entry level ones sold for as little as $4,500 and tips to those who want to buy cars at auctions. “Go look at the cars while they’re on display before they come to the block, talk to the owner or consigner, find out about that car, find out it’s history, who restored it, what kind of work they do, what kind of condition the car is in,” he says. “There’s a lot you need to learn about a car before it rolls up onto the block, and you start bidding, to make sure. If a car gets pushed into position, that will affect the bidding.”
Whether at an auction or racetrack for his Fox duties, Joy’s various jobs feel less like work and more like fun most days. “People tell me that I have the most fun career that any car guy could ever want,” he says. “I can’t disagree with that at all. I love it. This job really didn’t really exist when I was in college. There were very few races on television, very little on the radio. But as the sport grew and its media presence grew, I was very fortunate to be able to grow with it.”
He got on this unusual path that he carved out for himself while at Emerson College and started autocrosses and pylon racing, running at tracks such as a little speedway in Massachusetts: Riverside Park. Joy was announcing college sports when the people who ran the sports car club asked him to tell people what was going on via the public address system while he was waiting his turn.
“The fiery Irishman who owned Riverside Park, he couldn’t understand why people were sitting in his grandstand seats watching one car go around cones and not out spending money at his amusement park,” he says, adding the PR guys decided to hire him to announce the stock car races on Saturday nights.
That’s how Joy’s career started. He worked five nights a week across New England and New York, putting a lot of miles in the summertime.
“It was great timing. NASCAR asked me to come and first work part time for their radio network, then full time, and along came cable TV, and ESPN, CBS needed people,” he says. “What’s that old saying, ‘It takes a lot of work to have this much fun?’ I am blessed.”
Fox’s live coverage of the 59th annual Daytona 500 is on Feb. 26 with live pre-race coverage beginning at 1p.m. This year three-time champ Darrell Waltrip and Jeff Gordon are joined by Joy, who is covering his 42nd Daytona 500, and former crew chief Larry Reynolds.
“It’s amazing,” Joys says. “It’s totally unlike any other sport because no other sport starts it’s season with its biggest event. It’s a blast. Every year is different because every year there’s new drivers to learn, new teams to learn, new drivers in old cars. In racing 40 cars, anything can happen at anytime. It’s like playing pinball with 40 balls in play.”
After four decades, Joy gets approached by many fans at races. “There’s regulars at every track,” he says. “The hardest thing is when somebody in their 30s comes up and says, ‘Man, I’ve been watching you since I was little. It’s a great compliment.”
Having had a blessed career, Joy’s new goal is for him and his son to be on same racetrack. That will happen for first time this summer in that BMW Spec E46 series, after Fox coverage of NASCAR finishes.
“My wife, Gaye, she’s great about Scott’s racing,” he says. “She says ‘The only thing I insist upon is that he be in the safest equipment possible.’ He doesn’t get in the car without full faced helmet, gloves, a HANS device, a head and neck support, and a six-point harness. He’s probably got almost $3,000 in safety equipment on before he even climbs in the car.”
Joy has thoughts about the camera-laden era racers are now in. A few years ago, his son got a GoPro for Christmas: “He was so obsessed with getting his video that he wasn’t paying quite enough attention to his racing. So I pulled the thing out of the car, and it hasn’t been back.”
For many amateur racers, the ever-present camera on board is now de rigueur.
“If you type ‘Spec E46’ all these videos will come up because everybody posts their videos,” he says. “People have cameras out the front, the back, they have telemetry from the on-board computer overlaid on the video, for speed and RPM and other different parameters, G forces.”
Joy says there are advantages: “If the stewards have an inquiry as to who pushed who off the track and who did what to whom, people now show up with their video evidence. But as a teaching tool, the video is great because I can look at video of Scott on a road course and say, ‘Hey you missed this apex. Let’s back up and let’s figure out why did you miss this apex. Did you brake too late? Did you turn in too soon? Or did you just miss it?’ Back when, it was all by feel and by stop watch.”
Joy has noticed that due to the technological aides, there are now more qualified racers. “We’re ending up with a lot better group of racers who are much better prepared to go into the pro ranks, so much so, there’s not enough room for them all,” he says. “There’s a lot of really, really good racers that are not getting the opportunities to drive really good cars because there’s a lot more good drivers than there are good cars these days. That’s true in any class.”
When he learned a new track 30 years ago, Joy used a whole practice session to figure it out. “The video is a great developmental tool and then the kids are on iRacing or whatever other computer racing platform” he says. “If you go up to Road America, there’s 20 turns, and four of them all look alike until you get there. Now these kids go on iRacing and when they go to a track for the first time, they know the track. They know where it goes. They know what to do. They have it all sequenced out. Everybody, right up to the top level at NASCAR and Formula 1, is all doing a lot of simulator time, to develop parts and pieces, and the cars and their own driving skills.”
The technology is incredibly realistic now. “The best story about iRacing is that Dale Earnhardt Jr. is on there a lot, and iRacing will not let you use an assumed name,” he says. “You have to go on there and use the name that’s on your credit card. Well, he gets racing with people online and this one kid is really good. They start a conversation offline, and the kid’s name is T.J. Majors. He is now Dale Jr’s spotter. He’s full time in racing as the spotter for the 88 car, all because of what he did on iRacing against Dale Jr. How wild is that?”
Joy says the downside to new technology is that people now have more of a tendency to say “I want what I want and I want it now.” Everything is so accessible.
It still comes down to the human element that can’t be replaced, which Joy teaches his son. “Sometimes we’ll be at a track with Scott with his Legends car, and we’ll make a change,” he says. “We always explain to him, if we make a chassis change, we always explain what the change is and what it should do. That’s the primary tuning tool for us to benefit him. I’ve had him listen to Jimmy Johnson. Go out there, and give us that kind of feedback so we can tune the car so it works best for you.”
Joy has noticed that it used to be the crew chief who called all the shots and that now seems to be changing. “Now more and more in every form of racing, it’s the team engineers that are calling the changes,” he says. “They look at the data, but they’ve also got to listen to the driver, and they’ve got to listen to what he feels and what he needs.”
Another thing technology cannot replace, when it comes to auto racing, is the love of being behind a real wheel at a real track. “There’s two things that don’t change,” Joy says. “They all love to go fast. And they all love to pass cars. That doesn’t change.”
Joy is the play-by-play announcer for all the events at Daytona except the NASCAR XFINITY race Feb. 25. Fox Sports’ Daytona Speedweeks’ coverage kicks off today, Feb. 17 on Fox Sports 1.
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