The Grand National Show is a weekly NASCAR panel show produced by Queen City Garage in Charlotte and published on Grand National Today. Two editions: the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series show and the Craftsman Truck Series show. A panel records on Tuesday, the episode publishes later in the week, and every panelist has their own clips the same day.
This series is the build log of how that gets done with a very small team and a lot of machinery. We wrote it as the show was being made, one post per week where something was built, broke, or got measured. The posts are numbered and read best in order.
The stack, in one paragraph
The panel records on Riverside. Everything else runs on our own platform: a Next.js site and a Supabase database that hold the episode record, the episode pages and the production desk. Graphics are web templates rendered by a headless browser from real photographs and live points data. Cutting, conforming and measuring is ffmpeg. Portraits are face-cropped with Apple's Vision framework. Delivery mail goes through Resend. The finished show is self-hosted and on YouTube. Nothing on screen is generated by an image model.
The series
- The episode is a database row. One record owns the rundown, the documents, the picks, the people, the packages and the page.
- Eight gates between the recording and the upload. The production line, and what each gate refuses.
- Forty files, four manifests, one checksum each. How a package leaves the building with a chain of custody.
- We rendered the graphics in a web browser. No image model. A screenshot is the proof.
- Our backups skipped the show for ten days. The job and its watchdog shared one list.
- Two shows in one week. Truck Series launch week, by the numbers.
- One camera ran two percent slow. Nine overlaps, one cause, one new gate.
- Episode 4 or Episode 5? Let the record count. A count is a guess dressed as a fact.
- The rundown is a PDF the panel can actually use. Built for the person reading it.
- Recording day, by the numbers. Twelve tracks, 8.5 gigabytes, 343 checks.
- Every graphic was in the wrong font. One broken path, and the standard that came out of it.
- The clip sounded worse than the show. Raw camera audio, twelve decibels of noise, and the check that refuses it now.
- Checking our own copy proved nothing. A check is only as good as its reference.
- Could we make this show without AI?. The honest ledger.
Earlier posts on the show
- The show is not done when it publishes. Episode 1 and the first contributor packages.
- Making a Weekly Racing Show With AI. Episode 3, and why there is no hours-saved number.
- We Were Talking About a Driver. Where Was His Picture?. The Clements card.
Every post in this series ends the same way: what a person did, and what the machine did. That is the honest version of the answer to the question in the last one.