Phoenix Raceway’s spring weekend for NASCAR is important for a number of reasons. There’s the fact that the championship will be decided there in November, so being good there is imperative. Then, there’s the whole deal with the option tire and how Sunday’s (March 9) race was effectively a test for them.
Regarding TV, Sunday’s race was the first NASCAR Cup Series race of the year on FOX Sports 1 as opposed to over-the-air TV. The new TV deal is designed so that only five races a year will air on FOX. We’ve already had four of them (the Cook Out Clash, plus the first three races of the season). The only one left is Talladega Superspeedway in late April.
The move to FS1 brought some changes. Pre-race coverage was expanded this week as NASCAR RaceDay ran for 90 minutes. However, we also saw that the rules regarding commercials that we’ve seen this season on FOX and The CW don’t apply. After not having any full-screen commercials under green for the first three Cup and NASCAR Xfinity Series races, having five of those breaks on Sunday was a little surprising, to be honest.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. After all, the two NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races on FS1 this year have not played by the rules above.
In the race itself, the option tires being in play was a big story. Teams only got two sets of the reds and had to make good use of them as NASCAR only dictated one rule regarding usage. You had to use a full set of reds at a time, no mixing and matching allowed.
That resulted in teams having to guess when the best time to use them would be. Joey Logano guessed wrong and ran out of fresh red tires late in the race. Ty Dillon might have had the best strategy but had the double whammy of an atrocious final pit stop and a speeding penalty on top of it. He ended up 16th on a day where he could have been much better.
On the broadcast, the booth noted that the option tires were good for about 40-45 laps. After that, those tires dropped off. There were a few drivers who had to do long runs on the reds Sunday, such as Logano and Ryan Preece.
Did viewers get an idea of what worn-down option tires looked like after they came off the car? Not on FS1. I wanted to see a shot of that all day, but the only option tire I recall FS1 showing was off of Ross Chastain’s car. Chastain’s tires only had 20 laps on them and eventually went back on the car.
Was footage of one of those worn-out option tires eventually shown? Yes. NASCAR has a post-race breakdown show on its YouTube page called NASCAR Inside the Race that also airs midday Monday on the NASCAR Channel on Tubi. Here, you have Steve Letarte, Kim Coon and Dillon Welch getting together on what looks like Zoom to break down the race. On the show, they showed a shot of the worn tires off of Preece’s car that Coon got herself. It didn’t look that bad, but they’d been on the car for more than 50 laps.
Why do I need to watch NASCAR’s YouTube channel or Tubi to get that? A shot like that of Preece’s tires should have shown up on FS1 at some point Sunday and it would have given the booth (or at a bare minimum, Larry McReynolds) something to talk about.
I had a couple of issues with the production Sunday as well. Early on, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. spun out after a chain reaction of contact resulted in Todd Gilliland getting into him.
Note that the YouTube clip above is the replay of the incident since the live footage is not currently available online. This wreck occurred on the restart from the first caution of the race. FS1 was showing that restart from the helicopter and had a decent view of the incident, but just as the wreck broke out, the broadcast cut away from it. FS1 didn’t come back to it until the wreck was over. Meanwhile, all viewers knew about the incident was Clint Bowyer saying “I don’t think they came out of it.”
Gotta work on that. Yes, you have to follow your director’s instructions, but at the same time, if something breaks out, you have to trust your judgment if you’ve got the shot.
On a positive note, FOX Sports finally got the pit crew introductions right (those were screwed up the first two weeks, then none at Circuit of the Americas). The broadcast also just so happened to be in the right place to cover the Katherine Legge–Daniel Suarez incident.
Racing-wise, it appeared that the booth was excited about how the option tires were affecting the on-track product. However, NASCAR’s Loop Data suggests that Sunday’s race was less competitive than last year’s Spring race.
Sunday’s race had 33 fewer laps under green compared to last year due to the extra cautions. As a result, there were 519 fewer passes under green. Last year’s race had 10.3 passes per lap under green, while Sunday’s had 9.6. That’s a little less than the Fall race last year. The option tire led to more “comers and goers,” but may not have created a better race. Now, if this option tire is the one and only in November, that would be another story.
The actual racing was pretty good in and around the restarts. Outside of that, there wasn’t much going on when drivers weren’t blasting around on the option tire. NASCAR still has work to do with the Next Gen car on shorter tracks.
The expanded edition of NASCAR RaceDay settled one of the gripes that I’ve had with FOX’s pre-race coverage for much of the past year. FOX Sports gave the pit reporters something to do on-air Sunday before the race.
Ever since pre-race got chopped down, you never saw those reporters. There would still be the typical shenanigans, but they didn’t preview the race. That was not the case on Sunday and I was happy to see it.
There were two other notable things about pre-race. One is that Michael Waltrip wasn’t in Phoenix, so Chris Myers and Jamie McMurray walked around and interviewed a couple of drivers on the grid. I found this setup to be a little more casual, but at the same time, you had the possibility of learning something. Silly stuff is probably not going to be in the cards. I don’t have to worry about either of them dropping pieces of a taco on Denny Hamlin’s car.
Another was a feature where Jamie Little sat down with Christopher Bell. Naturally, he had a lot of momentum going into the race. The discussion here was centered around his change in demeanor this year since he’s normally considered a pretty quiet man. You don’t hear much about him.
The fact that Joe Gibbs finally relented and allowed Bell to race dirt appears to be playing dividends, if for no other reason than he can relax a little bit. While this wasn’t necessarily broached in the interview, it seems like Bell has been tense in the past couple of years and didn’t have an outlet for that tension.
Post-race coverage on Sunday was brief. Viewers got interviews with the top-three finishers (Bell, Hamlin and Kyle Larson) and that was about it before FS1 left Phoenix to get to coverage of the Gatornationals.
Overall, Sunday saw an electric finish, but a skewed version of racing at Phoenix. FOX Sports has some issues with production that it needs to correct and do a better job of getting the necessary footage to properly cover its stories.
If I’m not at the track, I can’t get all the information myself. Ideally, I don’t want to have to go to social media to educate myself about a race that I’m watching live. I want to get as much information as I can from the broadcast.
That’s all for this week. Next week is very busy. NASCAR has a tripleheader at Las Vegas Motor Speedway with the Cup Series as the headliners. Note that Parker Kligerman will not be in the booth on Saturday. That is because he’s going to be at Sebring International Raceway for the 12 Hours of Sebring. Last, but not least, Formula 1 will start its 2025 season in Australia. TV listings can be found here.
We will have a look at Sunday’s Pennzoil 400 presented by Jiffy Lube at Las Vegas in next week’s edition of Couch Potato Tuesday. In the Critic’s Annex this week, we’re going to talk about Saturday’s GOVX 200 and the recent issues with CW affiliates either outright pre-empting races or in the case of Peachtree TV, cutting out on the final lap and not returning.
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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.