Before we get to what came out last year — or what might come out this year — let’s check out the most relevant racing-themed production to this coming season: Ram: Race for the Seat.
My colleague Anthony Damcott wrote a breakdown of the show earlier this week, and I agree with pretty much all of his takeaways, but I’ll try to offer a slightly different perspective since we’re both reviewing this thing.
One of the more interesting teams in the garage, Kaulig Racing has kind of had a bell-curve arc over the last near-decade. Blake Koch and Ryan Truex turned in some respectable outings in the No. 11 car in the then-Xfinity Series, followed by Justin Haley and AJ Allmendinger really bringing the team to the forefront. Since the turn of the decade, besides Allmendinger’s consistency in his Xfinity years, the team has kind of regressed.
Now they’re expanding into the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series … with five trucks. A lot of rumors kicked around the idea of Toni Breidinger joining the team, which I think would’ve been a solid pick — to let her continue improving and honing her Truck Series skills — but Kaulig went the route of dramatizing their last full-time driver with 15 contenders.
First off, I think the series is fine overall. It’s extremely cool that Ram is returning to NASCAR and the idea to do a driver contest to earn one of the rides is a neat idea. Documenting it in a movie or miniseries is also something that I can’t say has been done in NASCAR since Roush Racing: Driver X. It’s kind of like Hard Knocks or something for motorsports.
But quantity as a whole is my main issue with the series. I think documenting the process and opening the ride up to a variety of drivers with a variety of skills is cool, but quantity does not equal quality.
Eight 45-ish-minute episodes — 360 minutes — and 15 drivers vying for one seat is a bit much. I would’ve cut this down to a four- or five-episode miniseries, or even a 90-to-120-minute documentary, and 10 drivers at most. Maybe even five. There’s just a lot going on with the race setups and formats to where I feel like things could’ve been simplified a bit more.
There are some moments of drama — whether real or manufactured — that add a little bit of conflict to things.
In the first episode, Tanner Reif speaks up to tell Chris Rice and company that a couple of the cars are clearly better than the others. Rice fires back at him for trying to tell them how to do their job; but, as Anthony said in his column, isn’t that the driver’s job and the point of the driver-team dynamic?
Reif also gets into it with Trevor Ward and proceeds to isolate himself and sulk. Seeing the drivers mature is a good off-track element of the series, but I’m not sure he does, and Reif’s attitude throughout the series probably tanked his status with the viewers.
As it goes on, we lock in on Mini Tyrrell and Carson Ferguson, and they’re the two the race for said seat comes down between. But other guys definitely stood out, specifically Landon Huffman, as talented racers themselves. This show will make them more household names than they might have been otherwise.
So there are definitely positives! I don’t think the presentation is awful, but it’s a little stilted at times.
Replaying highlights of the races after those events just happened, with Rice narrating what we just saw happen (with clips replayed again) was a little tiresome. I also don’t really need to see every single lap of each race, and I would’ve preferred a single commentator to the Kaulig guys shouting over each other.
Some of the extraneous stuff was distracting, too. Sure, we gotta have the bumpers for breaks when these episodes get aired on TV, but the constant overlays of “Follow on Instagram!” and all this stuff got old pretty fast. So did the obvious sponsor placement. It’s NASCAR. I get it. Sponsors are everything! But natural shots of a driver drinking a Phorm energy drink instead of random cuts to cans of it on the table would’ve been so much better.
This issue was primarily in the first episode, but one of my bigger complaints is the painfully obvious ADR (automated dialogue replacement, typically used in movies to edit/change audio after the fact).
I’m sure the leaders at Kaulig maybe wanted to fix some things in post-production, but we can’t show Rice talking if his mouth doesn’t match the words. There are times where the audio sounds like it’s coming from a completely different microphone — and we’re just cutting to shots of the drivers nodding while he explains something in a post-production retake.
It’s insanely noticeable if you’ve seen a ton of movies or have worked with audio. Hell, I’ve recorded podcasts and things on my iPhone’s voice memos app where two things, recorded minutes apart and held similarly away from my mouth to each other, and they sound completely different.
I thought shooting the commercial was a fun little challenge, though Michael Christopher Jr. losing points for his backwards hat felt a bit unfair. On a real commercial set, that’s something he’d be told to fix by the crew — you can’t know what you don’t know. I could see him landing some starts this year (in addition to his start for HFR last year), especially with his family racing history.
The late models were definitely the best barometer of skill, but the go-karts and Legends cars felt a little off-target. Put these guys in trucks to determine who gets the truck seat!
Certain guys definitely had their strengths and weaknesses. Tyrrell is pretty likable and I think he makes a good contest winner and representative for the series and team. Ferguson came out of nowhere as things went on and damn near won the seat (and landed the Martinsville Speedway ride), and he was a very cool underdog story. Also, a very likable guy.
Overall, again, I agree with Anthony. It’s … fine. But some changes could be made if there’s a season two (we’re committed to the miniseries format, so not that, I guess) like lowering the number of drivers. There are too many guys to keep up with. The show referenced someone and I briefly went “who?” before saying “oh yeah” several times.
Above all else, excited to see how Tyrrell fares in the No. 14 truck this year, and really can’t wait to see what Ferguson does in his Martinsville start.
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.