October can be a decent time of year to go to Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The weather cooperated for a pleasant day at the track for fans. It wasn’t so pleasant for the playoff drivers.
This race will likely be best remembered for the big wreck on lap 89 when Martin Truex Jr. appeared to wash up the track into Chase Elliott. From there, it was on.
The clip above is exactly how viewers saw the wreck break out.
Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for someone to get launched into a roll off of the mini-oval at Las Vegas. It’s been there since the track was reconfigured and we’ve seen some wild incidents. Joey Gase popped a big wheelie there back in 2011.
Unlike Charlotte Motor Speedway, Atlanta Motor Speedway and Texas Motor Speedway, Las Vegas already has a short track on the property (The Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, which pre-dates the tri-oval as it opened in 1985). There was discussion on the broadcast about the grass, but the grass didn’t cause the flip. The banked turn in the infield did.
Most of the replays were focused on Tyler Reddick’s roll, which more or less makes sense. After all, you don’t see a car get upside down at Las Vegas all that often. However, there were additional drivers involved.
It took a while to see that Ryan Blaney was involved as he hit the wall while trying to avoid Brad Keselowski. That resulted in at least one toe link needing to be changed. Additional repairs resulted in Blaney finishing eight laps down.
What we didn’t see at all was what happened to Austin Cindric. He was apparently involved in the incident, but I couldn’t tell you where. All I can tell you for sure is that he was involved and the DVP clock expired on him, ending his day.
It seems like NBC Sports doesn’t have quite as many cameras at the track as in the past. More and more of the incidents (the aforementioned Reddick crash being the exception to the rule) seemingly aren’t covered well with their cameras. As a result, the broadcasters have become much more dependent on the NASCAR Drive cameras to tell what happened.
I’m not going to dispute that it is good to have these cameras available to the broadcasters because it is a good thing. However, we’re getting toward crutch territory here.
Prior to the Reddick crash, Austin Dillon took a nasty hit in turn 3 after contact from Daniel Hemric. NBC’s cameras didn’t get a good view of the contact. I critique races on a 55” screen and it was really small on my screen. A better shot from NBC’s cameras may have allowed the broadcast booth to realize how hard the contact was.
I don’t think the announcers really had an idea of how substantial the original contact was until Dillon’s interview outside the infield care center where he basically accused Hemric of driving through him. Hemric, for his part, told Frontstretch after the race that it shouldn’t have happened.
Racing-wise, Sunday’s race was pretty competitive. There was good racing to be had and NBC did a decent job finding that coverage. The hot action wasn’t necessarily at the front of the field, knowing that Christopher Bell led 155 laps.
According to NASCAR’s Loop Data, passing was up by 0.9 of a pass per lap over last year’s race, but it was down from the spring race.
Likely one of the biggest misses on the broadcast was the fuel mileage coverage late in the race. Ty Gibbs’ spin exiting turn 2 brought out the caution with 73 laps to go. Once the pits opened up, there were about 71 laps to go.
A number of teams pitted here. Most notably, you had Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin stopping here to put themselves on a different strategy.
The booth thought (rightly) that most of the frontrunners were going to be a lot more conservative with their strategy. However, I don’t understand why this was the case. Earlier in the race, we saw a split pit strategy where drivers such as Daniel Suarez topped off at the end of the caution for the Reddick flip and then went the entirety of stage two from there. It seemed like no one paid enough attention to that.
Had teams topped off with fuel with one to go before the final restart, they would have had to run the same number of laps (69) that Suarez did to get to the end of stage two. For a number of teams, I think this was doable.
During the run after the final restart, you got a couple of fuel mileage updates, but not really much. You didn’t hear from Paul Wolfe or Matt Swiderski about their grandmaster plan. Or Chris Gabehart, for that matter. As a result, viewers may not have been as informed as they should have been.
I don’t think that NBC did a good enough job covering the fuel issue since so many of the top teams chose not to bother with it. Its focus was more on Bell trying to run down Suarez and Logano. For a while, it seemed like Bell was going to be able to do it. Then, he got held up.
Bell getting held up effectively killed NBC’s narrative for the final 40 laps of the race. I have no reason to believe that NBC thought Logano was winning that race. But he pulled it off. As a result, we have the 15th-best driver in the NASCAR Cup Series this year locked into the Championship 4.
Post-race coverage was pretty much average. The race ended with enough time remaining before the 6 p.m. news for a few driver interviews and a check of the points before leaving Nevada.
As compared to Charlotte, Las Vegas was an improvement. The playoff focus was nowhere near as heavy, so I could enjoy the race more. You got a better idea of where drivers were running and how they were doing.
It was much different than last year.
Last year’s South Point 400 broadcast made it seem like an eight-car race, which drove me nuts. A lot more was going on Sunday (Oct. 20), even though this race really wasn’t all that much more competitive.
Overall, I was happy with the amount of competitive racing we saw on Sunday on NBC. I just think that it dropped the ball regarding the fuel mileage story.
That’s all for this week. Next weekend, NASCAR will have a tripleheader weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Saturday is a doubleheader for the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and the NASCAR Xfinity Series, while the Cup will race for 400 miles on Sunday. Meanwhile, Formula 1 teams will make the 940-mile drive from Austin to Mexico City for the Grand Prix of Mexico. TV listings can be found here.
We will have a critique of the Cup race from Homestead in next week’s edition of Couch Potato Tuesday here at Frontstretch. The Ambetter Health 302 for the Xfinity Series will be covered in the Frontstretch Newsletter.
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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.
NBC, not sure if Truex caused the wreck. Then watch the dang replay and quit screeching Burton. Everyone can see how high Truex ran both of them up. A blind person can see Truex caused it. You too Phil.
I’m not sure we watched the same coverage.
i think that a lot of times.
It’s amazing how the clowns in the booth rationalize what happens on the track. They really do have a different perspective depending on the drivers. Maybe they try to be more entertaining. Never let the truth get in the way of their interpretation.
Logano is the 15th best driver this year? Huh?
Yeah, not sure about that either, he’s been running up front all year, and I’m not a huge Logano fan.
The chemistry in the NBC booth has never been there, not last year and certainly not this one, as Rick Allen was awful, and now they are trying to fit a square peg, Diffey, into a round hole… NASCAR… he tries really hard, but it doesn’t fit…
I do like Letart, but he talks a bit too much, Burtons voice is just so NOT made for anything public .. last year with him and Junior screeching was unbearable… but this jumbled up mess of TV going forward will be the demise of NASCAR ever expanding its TV/streaming ( barf) content.
And the race was actually pretty boring too boot… too much domination only to be hoodwinked by sandbaggers at the end. What fun.
What the booth needs is a voice like Pat Summerall!
Yes, I now follow NASCAR only in the print media. Television was getting worse and worse, and Diffey was the last straw. The Burton/Earnhardt combination made it bad enough to reduce me to only certain tracks, then the move to Diffey drove me away from television altogether.