With another year of Nascar on Fox in the books for the Cup Series, Fox Sports executives were seen completing the arduous annual process of placing color commentator Darrell Waltrip intro cryogenic storage for the rest of the year.
“Yep, its become like clockwork—go to Sonoma, do the road course, then put Ol’ DW in the freezer box”, a Fox employee told an outside media member who inquired as to why liquid nitrogen was being sprayed onto the Nascar Hall of Famer. “This is actually the easier part—the hard part is making sure you have the blocks of dry-ice in just right for when we seal up the container—get it wrong and you wind up spending all of January looking for replacement fingers.”
Despite the process having been repeated after Fox’s portion of the broadcast season every year since 2001, Fox still put out a press release to allay any fears that Waltrip might be frozen against his will.
“We appreciate Darrell Waltrip for his incisive commentary on our Nascar on Fox team, covering drivers from Dale Earnhardt Jr. to Danica Patrick, and we figure that with the use of cryonics, he can continue to be a part of our broadcast team for years to come”, the statement said. “The process is foolproof, his family is more than cooperative, and besides, its not like he has anything else to do, anyways.”
For his part, Waltrip seemed to be preoccupied as his core body temperature was lowered, wondering if his brother Michael really did make a drunk driving joke during the pre-race grid walk.