Fireball Focus

road rally TV series will come to Eau Claire next fall

Tom Giffey |

THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE. A competitor in a past season of Fireball Run gets his instructions for one leg of the road rally TV series. The show, which airs on Amazon Prime, will film in Eau Claire next fall.
THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE. A competitor in a past season of Fireball Run gets his instructions for one leg of the road rally TV series. The show, which airs on Amazon Prime, will film in Eau Claire next fall.

A TV adventure series in which participants race from city to city across the American landscape in a “2,000-mile, life-sized trivia game” will begin its next season by highlighting the city of Eau Claire.

The rubber will meet the road for Season 11 of Fireball Run – an Amazon Prime series that is also broadcast internationally – next September in Eau Claire, producers announced recently. Forty participating teams will explore the Upper Midwest along a route that will wind between Eau Claire and Rapid City, South Dakota.

“This really is a chance for us to celebrate our community and highlight what makes us great.” – Christina Wasson, Eau Claire area Economic Development Corp., on
bringing
Fireball Run to Eau Claire

While comparisons to the CBS reality series Amazing Race are perhaps inevitable, executive producer JJ Sanchez prefers to call Fireball Run “factual entertainment” instead of reality TV. Rather than focusing on artificial events and manufactured conflicts between participants, Fireball Run features contestants going to places that can be experienced by members of the traveling public, Sanchez said.

“In this project, you get the tangibility,” Sanchez said during a recent visit to Eau Claire. “That’s the essence of the show – it’s real.”

Sanchez said Fireball Run was originally conceived of a “light spin-off” of the Cannonball Run film franchise, which began with the 1981 film of the same name starring Burt Reynolds. Unlike Cannonball Run and its sequels – and the real road races that inspired them – participants in Fireball Run obey the speed limit. And instead of merely racing from Point A to Point B, participants compete by tracking down clues and engaging in what amounts to a scavenger hunt or trivia game that brings them in contact with real historic sites and objects.

The program also has a unique economic development component: The producers not only work with local business agencies to bring the program to communities – in this case, they’re partnering with the Eau Claire Area Economic Development Corp. – but many participants are also entrepreneurs and executives, leading to future business connections in the communities they visit.

“The Eau Claire Area EDC has always been very involved in business recruiting, and one of the ways to recruit businesses is to have top-level executives and business owners be in our area,” explains Christina Wasson, EDC marketing manager. The Fireball Run producers reached out to the EDC, which replied with proposal about the strengths of Eau Claire as a destination.

“They were incredibly impressed with the redevelopment and the enthusiasm and kindness of our community,” Wasson said. The producers were not only intrigued by Eau Claire’s history and burgeoning downtown, she said, but also by its unique traits, such as the popularity of kubb.

“This really is a chance for us to celebrate our community and highlight what makes us great,” Wasson said.

One of the people who’ll be involved in planning the show’s visit to Eau Claire will be Elaine Coughlin, marketing director of the Eau Claire Regional Arts Center. And she probably knows more about Fireball Run than anyone else in town: Earlier this fall, she was a competitor in the program’s 10th season, which will be broadcast in 2017. (Having a competitor from Eau Claire was a precondition of getting the series to come to town.)

As a competitor, Coughlin enjoyed both exploring Eastern states such as New York and Massachusetts and promoting one of the program’s other missions – bringing attention to missing children. Each team is assigned a missing child from their region, whose face is shown on their vehicle and in handouts they distribute along the way.

Coughlin said she isn’t sure how much screen time she and her teammate will receive when Season 10 is broadcast next year. “I will just say this: We won an award called ‘Wrong Way,’ if that gives you indication of how we did,” she said. “We did, however, win Rookie of the Year, which was pretty cool.”

She added that Fireball Run will be a “huge event” for Eau Claire when it comes to town next September. “Not only will we get amazing exposure, but we will be host to a big group of amazing people,” she said. “We need to make sure we show up and give them the time of their lives and really show this community – that we are so proud of – off. Also, expect a lot of people running around looking for things and asking for help for clues.”

Learn more about the show at fireballrun.com.