The NASCAR news never stops. It was the off-season when we visited NASCAR’s Fan and Media Engagement Center but staff was still engaging with fans via social media and tracking mentions of its many drivers.

Now that Daytona, and the launch of NASCAR’s 2014 racing season, is just days away, we thought you might enjoy a peek inside NASCAR’s social media war room.

Officially, it’s called the “NASCAR Fan and Media Engagement Center,” but whatever you want to call it the goal is the same–to find out what people are thinking about NASCAR racing as soon as they think it.

Built on the eighth floor of the NASCAR Tower in Charlotte, NC, the Engagement Center is a glass box stuffed to the gills with computers and custom software that allows you to track and chart social media mentions practically in real time. On race day the Engagement Center will have a crew of five searching for and monitoring hashtags not only for itself, but for all 43 drivers as well as many of the sponsors involved in the sport.

The idea, we are told, is to have a more accurate understanding of how NASCAR’s fans feel about their sport so that the sanctioning body can provide a better product. That’s the long-term goal, but there is also a short-term benefit. The Engagement Center staff regularly communicate with NASCAR’s fans, making bigtime stock car racing one of the very few sports where the fans have a direct line of communication with the brass. The Engagement Center staff also keeps an eye out for misinterpretation of a rule or even an inaccurate report so that it can get the correct information out quickly.

The Engagement Center has been open for a year now. The 2013 season was likely a learning experience, we expect to see an even greater impact from NASCAR’s Engagement Center in 2014.

The Engagement Center is a high-tech glass room on the eighth floor of the NASCAR Tower in Charlotte, NC.

NASCAR partnered with HP to work out the complicated logistics of making all the hardware and software work together on this ground-breaking project.

In the past NASCAR has been accused of keeping it’s head buried in the sand when it comes to technology. But between the sanctioning body’s embrace of social media for engaging fans and finally accepting fuel injected racing engines, that’s hardly the case any more.