Saturday evening had the NASCAR Xfinity Series make their very first visit to Sonoma Raceway for 250 kilometers of action, replacing the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. The start time of 8:20 p.m. ET definitely threw some fans for a loop. Having said that, it's not the only time that Sonoma has hosted later races. When the Trucks raced there from 1995-1998, they had late afternoon races like this one was.

This race was not the most exciting race in the universe, but it did have a standout moment. Late in the race, Alex Labbe and Daniel Suarez stayed out on the final yellow and restarted on the front row. A mini-stackup on the restart allowed Aric Almirola to sneak past Kyle Larson to take the lead as Suarez got busted for jumping the restart and Labbe got swamped. Ultimately, Almirola getting past Labbe from the third row was the pass for the win.

Larson clearly had the best car by an order of magnitude all day and should have made mincemeat of him. Then, he hit the tire bundle in turn 11.

The booth literally couldn't figure out what the deuce happened for what seemed like five minutes. It's not as if they missed it. They caught Larson hitting the bundle live. You could see the bundle move when he did.

The initial thoughts indicated that the booth thought Larson had a power steering failure, or the steering simply locked up. That could happen, but it should have been obvious what happened by the time they showed the second replay. You could see the right front corner of the No. 17 wrinkle up. They need to clean that up.

Like the NASCAR Cup Series, Sonoma marked the final Xfinity Series race of the year with FOX. As a result, there was a certain amount of review work on NASCAR RaceDay - Xfinity Edition. Something that wasn't really talked about much: The shenanigans that marked the Pacific Office Automation 147 at Portland International Raceway. Given how Cup races at Sonoma have been at times over the years, that was fairly surprising.

For the race, Kevin Harvick and Austin Cindric joined Adam Alexander in the booth.  Generally speaking, this is a fairly low key duo. They generally keep to the race itself and don't goof around much. As a result, you got some decent commentary about how the race could play out with long runs, which is exactly what happened both in this race and the Cup race.

I would have likely to see more racing for position, but the field got pretty stretched out, especially in stage two. Larson pulled out to a nine-second lead and the broadcast made it look like there wasn't much going on.

As compared to Sunday, FOX Sports 1 seemed to struggle at times in catching incidents, but I thought it was a little better in that respect. For example, there was a cutaway shot of Josh Williams with a broken control arm. It was never mentioned outside of that shot going to commercial 10 laps after the fact.

Overall coverage-wise, it was very front-centric again, especially once Larson ran off and hid. It's as if once that happened, they just stopped trying to show action and would just show individual drivers.

It came off like they didn't make the moves necessary for this race to look exciting on TV. Effectively, the same issue that they had Sunday with the Cup race.

Despite only two yellows, this broadcast ran quickly up against the end of the timeslot. Viewers only got interviews with Almirola and Larson and a little post-race analysis before leaving Sonoma.

Sadly, this wasn't the best race on Saturday. Had Jeffrey Earnhardt not wrecked, Larson would have won the race by something like 17 seconds.

Harvick and Cindric actually work well together as an analyst pair. While Cindric is not quite as experienced in driving or TV as Harvick, he can analyze well and seems to be quite the team player when he isn't TP'ing Harvick's motorcoach.

Cindric also gave a lot of dap to the aforementioned Labbe. Apparently, he pitched to Team Penske to tap Labbe as a substitute driver when he was full-time in the Xfinity Series if anything happened to him. Knowing how good the No. 22 team was when Cindric was driving for them, that is fairly high praise.

Overall, the race was not too exciting and FOX Sports failed to really make it look exciting. The Larson coverage was somewhat flubbed as well. If you're going to have all of those replays, you have to pay attention to them.

Phil Allaway is the Frontstretch newsletter manager. He can be reached at phil.allaway@frontstretch.com.  Photo is courtesy of Nigel Kinrade Photography.