AVONDALE, AZ – One year, Jenison High School’s baseball team went to Mainland High School in Daytona Beach, Florida for spring training.
A young second baseman, Jeff Striegle — a junior at the time — stood at his position in the infield, looking off to the side, where Turn 4 of Daytona International Speedway towered in the backdrop. He dreamed one day of hearing the roar of the engines inside the historic venue.
Striegle would make it inside the famous track — and many others around North America — becoming a NASCAR radio announcer. However, his time covering NASCAR will come to an end on Sunday, as the NASCAR Cup Series Championship race at Phoenix Raceway will be his last for the Motor Racing Network.
Striegle has been part of the commentating crew for NASCAR’s biggest races for over two decades. But he felt it was time for a change.
“(Over) 27 years, you miss a lot of things,” Striegle said in an exclusive interview with MLive. “I’m not getting any younger. There are still many things that I want to do in my lifetime that I can’t do when I’m on the road 30 weekends a year. Travel becomes more of a challenge every day … the time away from home is always a challenge. So, I just felt like this is the right time to step aside.”
Another part of Striegle’s decision was, he wanted to leave on his own terms.
“I wanted to be able to (broadcast) to the point where I believe I’m still able to do it and do it well. I didn’t want to overextend and have somebody come up to me and say, ‘It’s time for you to go.’”
Striegle was always interested in racing, though not necessarily as a broadcaster. He got his start as a driver, competing at various tracks, including Berlin Raceway in Marne, stationed close to where he grew up. With his connections to people at the track and local radio stations, he had the opportunity to start calling races at the popular short circuit alongside the late George Keen, an experience that took him to heights that he had only dreamed about.
“We wanted to pattern our broadcasts on what we were hearing on the Motor Racing Network. That was important to me. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right … We were doing races every Saturday night and we knew we had a good following. That led to George saying, ‘We have tapes of our broadcasts. Let’s take a tape and send it to MRN to see if they would have an interest in you.’”
Striegle was hesitant at first, as he had a stable job working for Gordon Food Service and enjoyed working at Berlin, but he gave it a shot.
Striegle was hired by MRN in 1998, joining the “B Team” that would travel extensively to single Xfinity Series (then known as the Busch Series) and Craftsman Truck Series events. A few years later, the former Wildcat was promoted to the “A Team.”
Striegle’s position on the team has been up in the booth for the better part of a decade, a spot that was held for a long time by legendary voice Barney Hall. Striegle vividly remembers the conversation that led to the opportunity to be one of the lead announcers for “The Voice of NASCAR.”
“I’ll never forget the day in Darlington when (Hall) asked me to ride with him from the hotel to the track, which he’d never done before. He told me on the way to the track that he wasn’t going to be (broadcasting) for very much longer, and that he would like me to follow him in this position … Getting that acknowledgment from Barney meant the world to me.”
There are many moments Striegle will remember fondly, from calling a wild incident involving the polarizing Kyle Busch in Mexico City to being part of the call for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s first Daytona 500 win in 2004.
However one of the best was his on-air debut at Daytona in 2003, working as a commentator in Turn 4 — the exact spot where he prophesied he’d be, decades before.
And it was for the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500.
“Standing in Turn 4, knowing this is the location that (Dale Earnhardt, Sr.) lost his life … there’s 200,000-plus people in the grandstands,” Striegle said. “They’re doing the national anthem, the flyover comes ripping across the track, realizing I’m at Daytona for the first time ever, and all of sudden, I get hit with the emotion of, ‘This is where I wanted to be.’ … I kind of had to stop and compose myself.”
It is easy to see why Daytona will be the track Striegle misses the most.
“I like that town. That was the place I dreamed of going to as a kid … the Daytona 500 just made it special. Being able to come back to that track twice a year, every year, from that point on, it’s something special about the track, about the people, the prestige. I did a number of Rolex 24 races down there. Along with Speedweeks, which was almost two weeks, it became a home away from home.”
Another memory Striegle will always remember is the day fellow Grand Rapids native Johnny Benson, Jr. clinched the Truck Series championship in 2008.
“I was on pit road that day and covering Johnny’s pit. I was standing there with his mom. Judy didn’t want to look at the scoreboard and didn’t want to know what was happening. The whole race, I felt like she was tugging on my shirt … she kept asking me everything. To be a part of that celebration — obviously growing up with Johnny and following his career at Berlin and knowing the family — it’s something I’ll always remember.”
One of the biggest aspects of the job he will miss is the camaraderie with his MRN team.
“I immensely still enjoy the people I work with,” he said. “They’re like brothers and sisters. I spend more time with them than I do with anyone else. I’m going to miss that part of it more than anything.”
