Couch Potato Tuesday: FOX Can’t Fix Boredom

Welcome back, race fans. After the insanity of Memorial Day weekend, last weekend brought a tripleheader at Dover. We saw wrecking, track surface issues and Jimmie Johnson winning again. In other words, it was just like last year. Things never change.

Due to time constraints, Saturday’s running of the Buckle Up 200 will be covered in the Critic’s Annex in the Frontstretch Newsletter later this week. It was most definitely not in the original plan to do this, but the race will be given its due in the Newsletter, along with one other race.

Before we get into the critique proper, Brian Vickers took to Twitter on Monday and announced that he will join NBC Sports Network’s NASCAR America as an analyst on a part-time basis, joining Jeff Burton, Parker Kligerman and others in that role. While it’s a shame that Vickers’s health issues have kept him out of the car repeatedly in recent years, it’s good to see him staying involved with the sport as much as he can. As for a return to the car, who knows when that’s going to happen? Probably not this year unless MWR comes up with a third car or farms him out somewhere (maybe as the fifth man to drive Front Row Motorsports’ No. 34). Monday was his first day, and he will continue on the show today and tomorrow. It’s too early to tell how well Vickers will work in his new role, but I will be watching this week (partially aided by newly reinstated morning repeats) to see how he does.

FedEx 400 benefiting Autism Speaks

Sunday afternoon brought a Dover redux. Just like last year, we saw the track breaking up once again. At least this time, the hole showed up before the race started. Good cripes. FOX didn’t really acknowledge the pre-race patch that was applied in turn 4 a few hours before the race. I personally learned about the patch from a story I saw linked on Twitter an hour before the race started. Regardless, the ongoing patching of holes, plus the concrete in Tony Stewart’s pit coming up during the race is just another sign that Dover Motorsports Inc. needs to look at replacing the 20-plus year-old track surface in the near future. And before you ask, yes, I know that the concrete on pit road is newer than the concrete on the track. It was first put down when the then-Indy Racing League raced at Dover (crazy, isn’t it). I want to say that it was fixed up when pit road was renovated a few years back as well.

Since Sunday’s race was on FOX Sports 1, NASCAR RaceDay counted as the de facto pre-race show as opposed to the pre-pre-race show. When the race itself is on FS1, NASCAR RaceDay has a slight different feel. They’re the only pre-race show of note. As a result, the production seems bigger than normal. There’s more Waltrip sightings and features. Unfortunately, the features simply left me wanting more much of the time.

For example, I really wanted to see the whole interview that Danielle Trotta did with AJ Allmendinger. However, we only got to see a preview of the piece, which is scheduled to air Wednesday night on NASCAR RaceHub. I feel like they should have just showed the whole thing then and there. Why the heck not? Having Cup races on FS1 is supposed to be a showcase, right?

One of the biggest takeaways from Sunday’s race was the general lack of action for much of the race. That’s nothing new at Dover. Sunday was a rather extreme example, though. With very little action going on, it makes the event quite the challenge for FOX, or any other broadcaster for that matter, to cover in such a way that it remains captivating. FOX definitely didn’t make the race all that captivating to watch from what I could see. Much of the first half of the race was spent just waiting for the action to come.

Sadly, almost every formula for competition at Dover in recent years has not necessarily led to thrilling racing. My argument is not even that the cars are to blame (an easy point to make these days), but it’s the track itself. Concrete is simply a tough go. The surface was put down at Dover for the same reason it was introduced to Bristol in 1992. It cuts down on track maintenance costs since repaves were happening way too often at those tracks (especially Bristol). Asphalt paving technology and materials have improved substantially since the mid-1990s. You can more than likely come up with something that can stay together today.

Heck, even pre-concrete races at Dover weren’t exactly the most competitive. They just took forever because of the 500-mile distance (which didn’t bother me despite the fact that even the quickest of them still took four hours) and a crazy number of wrecks that the track itself was partially responsible for (sealer was applied to help keep the track surface from coming up on a yearly basis, making the track slicker than heck when combined with 90-degree weather for one or both races). Dale Earnhardt Jr. openly noted in a montage that aired during the broadcast that he wished that the track would be converted back to asphalt. Will that happen? Probably not. Concrete is Dover’s calling card these days, but Earnhardt Jr.’s words do have some weight in NASCAR.

The first full round of green-flag pit stops ended when Ricky Stenhouse Jr. smacked the wall in turn 1 to bring out a yellow. The crash apparently happened due to a suspension failure. Did we see this crash? No. We did see Stenhouse dragging his No. 17 back to the pits with sparking shooting out from underneath, but there were no replays, no nothing. Weak.

Then, there’s the plight of Josh Wise. I know, it’s Phil Parsons Racing. The team rarely gets coverage these days outside of restrictor-plate races and collaborations with race fans seeking to promote cryptocurrency.

Wise finished 40th Sunday after running into what’s been termed as “electrical issues.” Apparently, it also involved the melting of shoes.

Tough day! 150 laps with broken exhaust, fumes, smoke, melted heat shielding under my feet and set the carbon fiber on fire. Melted shoes.

— Josh Wise (@Josh_Wise) May 31, 2015

There was not a word about any of that on Sunday. It’s sad how much you can miss at times. Even in a race as “boring” as Sunday’s, there’s still a lot going on. The stories don’t always come right to you, like the dust-ups last year during the Chase that you all remember, or the time Bart Scott gave ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio a rather memorable interview following a Jets victory in 2011.

When there was some racing for position up front, FOX covered it, but there just wasn’t that much until late in the race. Didn’t help that the first two on-track passes for the lead occurred during commercial breaks. Mind you, it took 144 laps to get two such changes under green.

Post-race coverage was a little shorter than normal since the race went long. There were only a few interviews and a check of the points. I’m still not a fan of FS1 trying to wedge FOX Sports Live into everything. It makes everything more rushed than it really needs to be.

Overall, Sunday was a tough day for FOX. It’s one thing if a TV partner screws up a perfectly good race with a bad telecast. It’s another when the race itself just isn’t up to snuff and FOX is forced to sugarcoat a rather unexciting race. I’m personally interested in seeing what this driver’s council will pitch over the next few months to NASCAR in order to make the racing better, but I don’t know if anything is really going to change at Dover for the fall race.

Lucas Oil 200

Friday evening brought 140 miles of wrecking to TV screens. Unlike Sunday’s race, the lack of rubber on the track led to a series of tire failures. Frustrating.

During the Setup, Ray Dunlap traveled to Billy Boat Motorsports to take a look at the small operation and their development. It was an interesting piece. Recently, the team has struggled a lot, mostly due to the fact that both of the team’s drivers (Chad Boat and Mason Mingus) are young and are prone to tearing some stuff up. We saw what Billy Boat envisions that the the team is capable of and how they’re building the operation. It’s still a work in progress, to be sure. Mingus got caught up in a wreck with Jesse Little on Friday that got a lot of attention since Little was making his Camping World Truck Series debut. If anything, Little was blameless there. It was a classic Dover squeeze play.

Friday night’s race brought yet another new booth combination. Up until last summer, the Camping World Truck Series had continuity in the booth. Then Rick Allen left to go full-time with NBC Sports. Since then, it’s been a revolving door. Ralph Sheheen, who did the play-by-play for the race, is the fourth man to handle play-by-play duties in the first six races of the season. That simply should not happen. FOX Sports needs to settle on a permanent booth combination for the series so that fans can have familiar voices from week-to-week.

Having said that, Sheheen did a pretty good job in the booth. He was right on task and very enthusiastic, something that seemed to be lacking for much of Sunday’s race. Phil Parsons and Todd Bodine, making a rare booth appearance, were both solid as well.

During the race itself, one of the big stories was Jennifer Jo Cobb blowing her volcano top at eventual race winner Tyler Reddick. FS1 did a great job trying to get the definitive angle to prove whether or not there was contact, but there just wasn’t one available. The ultimate conclusion that the booth drew was that there may have been just a little bit of contact between the two, but that it was not intentional in any way. There was absolutely no support for Cobb’s reaction.

By the time you read this, NASCAR may well have thrown the book at Cobb. Since she broke a behavioral rule (and to a lesser extent, so did Trevor Bayne on Sunday), NASCAR has carte blanche to do whatever they want here. I don’t necessarily agree with NASCAR’s rule here (I personally believe it to be an overreaction to a very unusual sequence of events), but those are the rules and Cobb agreed to them when she paid for her license.

Tires were a big problem on Friday and FS1 provided decent coverage of the issues. Viewers saw some of the tires that were taken off of trucks such as the one driven by Cole Custer. The telltale peeling away of the rubber in strips was starting with roughly 50 laps of hard racing. That’s a serious issue. Thankfully, the problem more or less cured itself before Sunday.

Compared to the Cup race, FS1 did a better job of covering the on-track action on Friday evening.  The fact that people were actually racing each other helped

Post-race coverage was rather limited due to the sheer amount of wrecking that occurred. Much like after the ARCA race at Talladega, FS1 flew through the post-race coverage so that they could get to MLB Whiparound. It’s frustrating for viewers, knowing that the race would have something like four to five times the audience of MLB Whiparound. I know that FS1 wants to build the show up (admittedly, they’ve had serious trouble building any studio show up since the network’s launch in 2013), but it’s early enough in the evening that baseball fans really aren’t missing much by allowing post-race coverage to go on for an extra couple of minutes.

That’s all for this week. Next weekend, the Sprint Cup Series makes their first visit of the year to Pocono Raceway for 400 miles of quirky action with the ARCA Racing Series presented by Menards as the traditional support. Meanwhile, 1,500 miles away, the Verizon IndyCar Series will be back for their annual assault on the 1.5-mile quad-oval known as Texas Motor Speedway with the Camping World Truck Series as support. Here are your listings.

Tuesday, June 2

Wednesday, June 3

Thursday, June 4

Friday, June 5

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Sunday, June 7

Monday, June 8

I will provide critiques of the Sprint Cup and Camping World Truck Series telecasts in next week’s edition of Couch Potato Tuesday here on Frontstretch. The third race covered will either be the Pocono ARCA 200 from Pocono Raceway or the Firestone 600k from Texas Motor Speedway. For the Annex this week, I’ll have the Buckle Up 200 from Dover, plus one of the races from Belle Isle Park last weekend. I have both Verizon IndyCar Series races, the Pirelli World Challenge event, and the 100-minute TUSC race to choose from. One irritated me more than the others. Guess which one that was.

Also of note, I recommend watching the telecast of the Trans-Am Series Next Dimension 100 from Lime Rock Park on CBS Sports Network this weekend (if you can). The series uses the 1.53-mile configuration without the chicane at the Climbing Turn. There’s a reason why the Climbing Turn at Lime Rock is a popular viewing spot for spectators.

If you have a gripe with me, or just want to say something about my critique, feel free to post in the comments below, or contact me through the email address provided on the website in my bio. Also, if you want to “like” me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, please click on the appropriate icons below. Finally, if you would like to contact FOX Sports personally with an issue regarding their TV coverage, please click on the following link:

FOX Sports

At this point, there is still no public contact e-mail for NBC Sports. When they finally get around to creating a new link, I will post it for you.

As always, if you choose to contact the network by email, do so in a courteous manner. Network representatives are far more likely to respond to emails that ask questions politely rather than emails full of rants and vitriol.

Phil Allaway

Phil Allaway has three primary roles at Frontstretch. He's the manager of the site's FREE e-mail newsletter that publishes Monday-Friday and occasionally on weekends. He keeps TV broadcasters honest with weekly editions of Couch Potato Tuesday and serves as the site's Sports Car racing editor.

Outside of Frontstretch, Phil is the press officer for Lebanon Valley Speedway in West Lebanon, N.Y. He covers all the action on the high-banked dirt track from regular DIRTcar Modified racing to occasional visits from touring series such as the Super DIRTcar Series.