Last weekend, the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series made the first of two visits to Martinsville Speedway for the NFPA 250. This was an interesting race that featured the debut of Lee Pulliam and some rough stuff.

During NASCAR Countdown Live, there was a feature on Taylor Gray, who was a lap away from sweeping both Martinsville races last season. He won in October, but got spun out on the final lap by Sammy Smith. Here, he talked about just how riled up Smith made him and how getting to victory lane in general for him has been an adventure.

I'm still not a fan of the broadcast booth working O'Reilly races remotely.  I don't particularly care how well they work together (which they do). There's just no substitute for them being on-site. You're losing out on the information that you learn and the things that you notice that you wouldn't otherwise being in a studio.

The fact that the broadcast booth wasn't in Martinsville last weekend is likely the main reason why they kept confusing Jeb Burton and Blaine Perkins' cars during the race. Yes, they're both black and red, but they're not identical.

O'Reilly races at Martinsville are generally quite competitive...and have a lot of wrecking. Saturday was no exception. The bumping started before the race even started with Jeremy Clements running into the back of Nick Sanchez on the pace laps.

There was plenty of good racing to go around and The CW broadcast showed viewers a lot of that action. I was very happy with that.

Likely the biggest story of the day was Lee Pulliam making his series debut for JR Motorsports. For a lot of NASCAR fans, they probably weren't all that familiar with him. He's 38 now, but if he were 38 in 1995, he would likely have been in Cup for years.

Basically, he's the traditional short track hot shoe that would have eventually gotten to Cup just on talent in the past. Unfortunately, money and sponsorship made that impossible. Heck, he's mostly been out of the driver's seat in recent years due to lack of funding and has been working on cars.

Pulliam got a lot of coverage on Saturday and deservedly so. He was right up there in the mix late. Unfortunately, he had some issues with restarts. Early on, that just caused a bad restart. Late in the race, it caused a pileup.

I think The CW handled Pulliam's debut well. He did a great job and he's happy to have had the opportunity. Getting drivers like Pulliam in the series will benefit things going forward. Garrett Mitchell might move the ratings, but an experienced driver like Pulliam might put more people in the stands.

Post-race coverage was rather short since the broadcast ran long by more than a half-hour. Viewers still got a good amount of post-race coverage, including the discussion between Jesse Love and Rajah Caruth.

Overall, the booth not being at the track hurt things a bit. That said, the on-track product was good. That's probably the primary reason why ratings were up 18% last weekend. Keep up the good coverage, but please get the booth to the track more often.

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