Saturday night saw the Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series return to action for 200 miles of racing at Homestead-Miami Speedway.  This was an interesting race in which Kyle Busch and the Fitch barriers came into play.

Much like Saturday afternoon's race, the broadcast started in hurry-up mode with the broadcast starting and immediately flowing into the command to start engines.  Unlike the Xfinity race, this was for a different reason.  The weather forecast for Saturday night was atrocious.  I fully expected a long rain delay.  At one point, there was a 100% chance of rain for Saturday night in the forecast.  Thankfully, that never happened.  There was heavy rain in South Florida Saturday night, but it hung around the Gulf Coast instead, roughly 75 miles away.  

Having been to Florida 20 times now and having spent roughly 98 days in the Sunshine State, I've noticed that precipitation remaining stationary and drenching a place can be a thing in Florida.  It's especially bad in the pine barrens of Volusia County southwest of Daytona Beach.

One of the big stories Saturday night was Kyle Busch flunking pre-race inspection to the point where he had to do a pass-through penalty at the end of the first lap.  Given the general lack of time for pre-race coverage, FOX Sports 1 was unable to go into any real detail on the issue, which was a real downer.  Apparently, Busch's No. 51 was caught with a track bar mount and support that was outside specifications, which resulted in a penalty of 10 owner points.

Once the race started, Busch had to serve his penalty.  Luckily for Busch, he was able to get out of the pits quick enough to keep himself on the lead lap.  The Competition Caution allowed him to catch back up.

Likely the biggest news story of the year in the series was Ray Ciccarelli's statement indicating that he was going to quit over the flag and anthem issues that arose last week.  That resulted in the No. 83 team withdrawing from the race and Ciccarelli himself driving the No. 49 that was originally going to be driven by Bayley Currey (Currey, upon seeing Ciccarelli's Facebook post, chose to resign from the team).  This was basically not mentioned on the broadcast.  It also seemed like the booth didn't even want to mention Ciccarelli when he got in the wall right in front of Sheldon Creed early in the race.  I don't like that.  I know that Ciccarelli has opinions.  As much as you might not want to reference somebody, if they do something that's notable in the race, they must be referenced.

Speaking of Busch, he was clearly better than everyone else, despite having to serve the early penalty.  He still led the most laps and won stage two.  Busch having to come from the rear more than likely made the race a little better than it would have been otherwise.

Creed ended up hitting the Fitch barriers (sand barrels) under caution and caused a red flag.  One of the more bizarre instances in recent memory as usually hits on the barriers come from crashes on the track.  In sim racing, it's most likely to happen either that way, or through someone faking another driver into them under yellow.  There was no faking here.  Creed got the message too late to safely make it onto pit road and smacked them.

During the brief red flag, Michael Waltrip reminisced about the time he hit the water-filled barrels at Rockingham in 1995.  Note that Waltrip's barrel hit actually did not cause a red flag back in 1995.  It just resulted in a 20-lap caution.  

In addition to the booth commentary, there were also a couple of crew chief interviews in the pits and a recap of the race to that point.  Pretty typical for this type of red flag.

Partially due to the aforementioned red flag, the race broadcast ran long.  Busch was...not the happiest after the race due to his team's "issues."  Then again, he put it out during the interview what he expects: To win every time he shows up and for his other trucks (Christian Eckes and Raphael Lessard) to be up there as well.  By those standards, Lessard has probably underperformed to this point, while Eckes has done ok despite being second in points at the moment.

In addition to Busch, FOX Sports 1 brought viewers interviews with Tyler Ankrum and Ross Chastain before leaving Homestead.

Overall, this was a decent race to watch.  The on-track product was good with decent side-by-side action.  Viewers got to see an ok amount of that.  There was a fair amount of focus throughout the field as well, which is something that I consider important.

Phil Allaway is the Frontstretch newsletter manager. He can be reached at phil.allaway@frontstretch.com