Simply a first-rate few have the response to whether the 230 mph fence can be broken during qualifying this weekend for the 97th running of the Indianapolis 500, and if the conditions are correct on Saturday’s run for the pole, the men behind the Chevy and Honda powerplants believe it is certainly possible. Ryan Briscoe’s average pole speed of 226.484 mph from 2012 to something north of 230 might not sound like much of an achievement. Do you think Nicole Briscoe will be featuring this LIVE?
Nicole, a ESPN journalist specializing in NASCAR and newest woman in Pressdog. Nicole Briscoe is frequently a few hundred miles from Ryan on race day. Often she finds herself in the bar of the hotel she always stays at as working at ESPN studios in Bristol, Conn. She has to go to the bar to watch because they have DirecTV and consequently get Versus.
She recalls:
One of the guys who works (at the hotel) in management, he knows when Ryan races so in the bar they make sure I have a table next to the biggest TV in the bar — it’s reserved for me everything — and they make sure the race is on when I get in there and that’s what I do. That’s how I get to watch most of the races. I watch it on TV like everyone else does.
I am actually very quiet and I don’t yell and scream but … ah … I pace. And when things get tight — like when Ryan went wheel-to-wheel at Texas Motor Speedway this year, for example.
The cheering among Nicole and Ryan in fact started about five years ago in Indianapolis, when the then Nicole Manske worked as a sports reporter for WISH TV and pit reporter for IMS Radio Network.
Nicole said:
We met when we both lived in Indy. It did not happen right away. We knew each other for a solid year. And then he had that accident in Chicago in 2005, and I didn’t see him again from September to January. Then I ran into him. I had worked a basketball game for WISH I went out in Broadripple with some of my friends and I ran into him there. That’s kind of how it started and I haven’t been really away from him since.
“Away” is a comparative word for a couple whose jobs often divide them by several states. Thank God for the mobile, which Briscoe works during and after the race.
Briscoe said:
During the Iowa race I was sending him text message during the race. Comments and stuff. Like ‘What were you thinking when this happened?’ and ‘Why did this happen?’ I was like ‘If he starts to respond to these he’s got a massive problem.’ It was just things that happen at the middle of the race that I wanted to make a comment on so I would just send him a text message.
I’m from Wisconsin and grew up in northern Illinois. My family were stick and ball (sports fan) and were big, huge Packer fans. I mean huge; it’s ridiculous. It was so much a part of my childhood. The way I was raised was every Sunday we’d get together to watch the Packers play. It was my mom and my dad and my brother, but also my grandparents and my cousins and my aunts and uncles. It was a family gathering so it’s a sport but it’s also a family thing for me. I think we moved to Illinois and the Bulls were good so we kind of became bandwagon Bulls fans and my first baseball game was at Wrigley Field.
Nicole said she for all time wanted to “know things” still as a kid, so one day her mom suggested she consider a career based on 1) finding things out and 2) telling others: journalism.
Briscoe, by age 11 had her complete vocation plan mapped out. A series of jobs progressed Nicole up the TV news food chain until she got a possibility to make the jump to sports at WISH in Indianapolis in April 2004.
Soon Briscoe had learned enough to get a shot as a pit reporter for the IMS Radio Network. Nicole and Ryan’s high-status jobs also give them hardly any things in common. For one, there’s the delight of a no-second-chances, live performance.
Briscoe said:
It’s really nice to have someone that does understand. Our jobs are very different but there are elements of it that make it familiar, so Ryan does understand it’s in the public eye. There’s pressure, there’s stress that goes with it. It is nice to have someone who understands that so when I’m having a good day or having a bad day he he knows it; he’s been there in one way or another.
The Briscoes take pleasure in improving their house in North Carolina, much of which Nicole tweets about from her @RB_Mrs Twitter account. Nicole said she’s a bit of a “home body,” loves to cook and admits she has a bit of a landscaping fixation, even to the point of driving rented earth-moving equipment. “I dug the pond by myself I put in a 100-some plants by myself and spread all the rock. Me and the pickup became one for a while there. Now there’s talk of a garage extension …”
Nicole Briscoe Bio
Mrs. Briscoe was born July 2, 1980. She is former Miss Illinois teen USA. She became countrywide known in the United States when she assumed the co-host role on The Speed Report as well as the host of the daily news show in ESPN. In December 2009, Nicole married her boyfriend of 4 years, Ryan in an outdoor ceremony in Hawaii.
You can access her Twitter here.
