Last weekend saw the NASCAR Cup Series return to broadcast television for the first time since the Circuit of the Americas back at the beginning of March. Enhanced visibility is always a good thing.
On Wednesday, April 15, Awful Announcing wrote about the current viewership issues for NASCAR. The Food City 500 ended up with the lowest viewership for a non-delayed FOX Sports race since they entered the sport in 2001. The takeaway there is that the cable-heavy schedule is something of a headscratcher, especially knowing how the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series is showing growth since moving to The CW.
In the case of Sunday, airing on FOX was good, but it was clear there were ulterior motives at play. One is that FOX wanted a doubleheader, pairing the AdventHealth 400 with the NTT IndyCar Series Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach. I like the idea of an entire afternoon of racing. I put my TV on FOX at 1 p.m. ET and didn’t leave it until after sunset.
Another is promotion. There was a lot of promotion of the aforementioned IndyCar race, which is for a series that FOX co-owns and a race that FOX co-owns (the race was purchased by Penske Entertainment in late 2024, then FOX bought a one-third share of Penske Entertainment). I get that to a degree, but I’ve never seen so much IndyCar promotion during a Cup race.
Another aspect is the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which will be jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico starting in June with FOX as the primary broadcaster. The mascot characters (Maple, Zayu and Clutch) came out to play. The fact that Arrowhead Stadium will host World Cup games was broached. Michael Waltrip tried to interview Clutch, but Clutch is a silent mascot. You can imagine how that went.
Basically, this broadcast was a promotional blitz at times. It seemed like the race itself was secondary. It was a bit much.
Prior to the race, Kevin Harvick sat down with Ty Gibbs to talk about his first career victory at Bristol Motor Speedway. Here, we learn that Gibbs is aware of what a lot of people think about him but doesn’t particularly care. I’m not really surprised about that. The idea of Ty being close to his family, and particularly his grandfather, also doesn’t surprise me.
Gibbs did show more emotion in Bristol than when William Sawalich scored his first O’Reilly Series win at Rockingham Speedway. That was like a Tuesday to him.
Sunday’s race was very clean. Aside from the end of the race, there weren’t really any mishaps.
That said, Cody Ware spun out coming to the white flag to set up a green-white-checker restart. There were quite a few people upset about that afterward. Denny Hamlin was definitely pretty upset, calling Ware out post-race.
There was seemingly no effort taken to figure out why this happened. It was just accepted that Ware wiped it out all on his own. Also, no one came to defend him afterward.
What happened? According to Ware on the radio, his right-rear tire blew after approximately 63 laps on it, leading to the spin. Wall contact didn’t help things.
Since Sunday, Hamlin has absolved Ware of blame on his podcast, Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin. Rick Ware Racing’s Tommy Baldwin Jr. blamed himself on Door Bumper Clear, stating that he shouldn’t have left Ware out on the tires as long as he did.
Ware was running 37th at the time. The broadcast could have at least sent either one of the pit reporters to Ware’s pit to figure out what was up and relay that to the booth prior to the stops under yellow.
The restart saw Christopher Bell get into the wall exiting turn 2 after Tyler Reddick bounced off of Hamlin and made contact with him. The contact apparently broke a toe link in the process and led to a spin exiting turn 4. He eventually finished 20th.
During the race, tires were a pretty big story. Not just with the apparent failure (once again, not broached) that resulted in the GWC. Drivers were dealing with unwinding tires during the race. We saw a couple of bad-looking tires come off cars.
A lot of the discussion surrounding tires on NASCAR RaceDay was about tire pressure and the idea of teams intentionally putting in less air than Goodyear’s recommendations to increase grip. The idea behind that is yes, you increase grip with less air pressure, but potentially damage the tire early on, which could lead to blowouts.
Is that what happened with Ware’s right rear tire? Possibly. I’m unclear on whether low air pressure at the start of a run would contribute to the unwinding, or if that’s just wear.
Racing-wise, the long runs under green spread the field out. I’m personally fine with that, but the way FOX often broadcasts races makes such a race look boring at times. You got a decent amount of racing for position around the restarts, but that is to be expected. Outside of that time period, it was a little staid.
It is arguably true that there wasn’t as much on-track action for position to show on Sunday. According to NASCAR’s Loop Data, last year’s race had 230 laps under green and averaged 15.4 passes per lap. This year’s race had 254 laps under green and averaged 11.1 passes per lap. That includes multiple pit sequences under green that boosted those numbers. Basically, FOX wasn’t getting a free lunch Sunday.
When you get a race like this, you have to dig into the book of sports broadcasting to make the race exciting to viewers at home who cannot see everything that is going on.
At this point, I’m not sure if FOX Sports really knows how to do that anymore since they’re so used to the stage breaks and regular cautions that you don’t have a 200-mile run under green anymore.
What do you do in that case? You expand your coverage and work on more stories. While I do not doubt that Mike Joy could adjust, I’m not sure if FOX Sports could make the necessary adjustments to make those broadcasts enjoyable.
That’s the problem with coverage of a race like Kansas on Sunday. They’re so locked in on their regular stories that probably work best when you don’t have long green-flag runs that they can’t adjust and the viewers are worse off.
Post-race coverage was actually a little below average. Once again, FOX was happy that this race ended on time. There were interviews with the top-four finishers and the winning car owner before leaving for Long Beach.
That’s all for this week. Next week is Talladega Superspeedway. Chaos is likely. The Cup Series will headline, with NOAPS and the ARCA Menards Series on the undercard.
We’ll critique Sunday’s Jack Link’s 500 from Talladega in next week’s edition of Couch Potato Tuesday here at Frontstretch. The Critic’s Annex will cover Saturday’s Tide 150.
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Phil Allaway has three primary roles at Frontstretch. He's the manager of the Frontstretch email 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 Frontstretch 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.
Off topic, but who is the genius that decided to put adds with sound in these articles? I don’t play on the internet all day, but I do take breaks & read an article occasionally. I will not visit Frontstretch if I have to worry about an add blaring for everyone to hear.
Try turning off Autoplay for videos.
I have been finding it very unsatisfactory for a long time with NASCAR on Fox, but this weekend took it to a disgusting level for NASCAR and its fans. I’m speaking about the starting lineup, where, in every race, we get only an abbreviated introduction to the drivers. In contrast to the INDY broadcast (everyone), where we’re treated to spoken “I’m…from” introductions for ALL of the drivers. It helps with identification during the race and more. I’m actually a little shocked that NASCAR drivers and sponsors, many of whom are “always” in the bottom half, have not formally protested this!
I watched the last 22 laps. Saw everything I needed to see. Those Toyotas (JGR and 23XI) are making fools out of the Chevy and Ford teams.
Cody Ware, again. Really? Let’s see what he does next weekend.
Phil, have you heard any stories about Gary Balough driving the Batmobile at Syracuse? He put on a show that showed how REALLY good he was.