Saturday at Talladega Superspeedway was more or less the calm before the storm in more ways than one.  There was a doubleheader in the cards.  First, the ARCA Menards Series resumed their 2020 season with a 200-mile race, then the Xfinity Series raced for 300 miles.

Unhinged 300

Late Saturday afternoon, the Xfinity Series took on Talladega for 300 miles of action on the high banks.

For the broadcast, FOX Sports 1 brought in Aric Almirola for his first time in the booth.  He struck me as someone who did a lot of prep work prior to his time in the booth.  He came off as polished and knowledgeable.  He hasn't driven in the series for a couple of years, so he really hasn't experienced who the strongest drivers in the series currently are.  Aside from Justin Allgaier, most of the biggest drivers in the series either outright weren't there a couple of years ago, or were part-time.

Of NASCAR's three National Series, the Xfinity Series has probably changed the least in recent years.  Almirola has won two plate races in the series, most recently at Talladega in 2017, so he more or less knows what it takes to do well.

In addition to Adam Alexander, Jamie McMurray was in the booth as well.  Unlike his partnership with Clint Bowyer, this isn't your traditional setup.  McMurray is your straight man while Bowyer is the off-the-wall bouncy house.  Here, you have two straight men.  Despite that, you have some decent information being parlayed back and forth.  I felt very informed during the race.

The only time that wasn't the case was towards the end of the race when Jeremy Clements spun exiting Turn 4 in the closing laps.  This was all but missed by FOX Sports 1's cameras and was never referenced on-air.  Quite simply, the shot was zoomed in enough that you could only see just a glimpse of Clements' Chevrolet sliding around.  The obvious solution here would be to not zoom in as much.

This is one of those situations where you had to go to Twitter to figure out what happened if you were watching FOX Sports 1.  MRN Radio did catch the incident.  Even better, there's video as seen in this tweet.  Chase Briscoe got in the back of Clements exiting Turn 4 and spun him out.  Since Clements was towards the back of the pack at the time, NASCAR chose not to throw the yellow.

Post-race coverage was relatively brief due to the race running long by a half-hour.  Two red flags will do that.  Viewers got interviews with winner Justin Haley and runner-up/Xfinity Dash 4 Cash winner Ross Chastain before the broadcast ended.  Did get thrown for a moment when Chastain referred to Haley as JJ instead of Justin.  Been a while since I heard that name.

Aside from the aforementioned Clements issue, I generally enjoyed the broadcast.  Almirola did quite well for someone making their booth debut.  I thought he worked well with McMurray and Alexander.  It just goes to show that generally, you're going to get some good insight from darn near everyone in NASCAR if you put them in the booth.  There have been some exceptions to the rule, though.  Danica Patrick, when she was still racing, was one of them.  Allgaier would just take over broadcasts when he would do ARCA broadcasts.  Those are the best examples of drivers that don't work all that well in the booth.  Regardless, we've still got a couple of weeks of Xfinity races left on FOX Sports 1.

General Tire 200

Saturday afternoon saw the ARCA Menards Series return to action at Talladega with their annual visit to the 2.66-mile tri-oval.  In all seriousness, this might have been the most boring race on an oval that I've ever seen.  This is coming from someone who drove to Albany-Saratoga Speedway in 2011 to cover their season opener.  They had 43 cars total in six classes, including three Street Stocks.  That was more satisfying to watch than the General Tire 200.

A small field of 21 cars went out Saturday and a grand total of five were legitimately competitive.  This was tough to watch.

Having said that, FOX Sports 1 got good commentators for the race.  In addition to regular play-by-play commentator Dave Rieff, Todd Bodine and Matt Crafton joined the broadcast.  This was a good booth combination with people that clearly knew what they were talking about.

Unfortunately, the talent might have been wasted on this event in which the best cars were driven by drivers with very little experience at Talladega.  The falloff in quality was stark and it didn't help that a couple of the potential contenders (Gus Dean and Brandon Lynn) lost multiple laps due to mechanical issues.

Effectively, Bodine and Crafton would suggest perfectly legitimate strategies that would work well in this scenario with such a small field.  None of these ideas were seemingly ever broached in the race itself.  With a 25 second lead over sixth-place, no one was willing to get out of line.  Heck, when Ryan Repko effectively got blocked behind a lapped car late in the race, I thought he was done.  He got lucky to get back to the leaders before the race came to an end.

The last couple of laps were just as much of a headscratcher as the rest of the race.  Riley Herbst seemed to be the only driver that wanted to make an aggressive go of it late.  He just went overboard when he all but wrecked Michael Self.

Of note, that was a legitimately great save from Self.  He was beyond 90 degrees sideways and managed to recover.

Drew Dollar, who had all but blown the race a few laps earlier, regained the lead as a result of those shenanigans, but was running alone.  Somehow, he managed to hold off Ryan Repko and Bret Holmes by himself to win.  Normally, that would not have been possible.  The general opinion appears to be that team orders came into play since Repko is not full-time while Dollar is.

The race ended well ahead of schedule (there was only one competition caution in the event).  As a result, viewers had plenty of post-race coverage.  Viewers heard from four of the top five finishers (only Herbst didn't make the broadcast).  There were also checks of the unofficial results and point standings before FOX Sports 1 left Talladega.

There are few broadcasts that have given FOX Sports 1 less to work with than Saturday's General Tire 200.  That said, FOX Sports 1 did their best to give viewers a good broadcast.  The on-track action just wasn't all that exciting.  There was very little passing outside of the first couple of laps after the start of the race and the restart.  It gave off the vibe of just trying to get through the race without something bad happening.  With Pocono only six days after the event, I do believe that was in play for some of the teams present.

FOX Sports 1 did a good job covering this event, but the event itself was depressing in almost every way.  I hope things will get better for the ARCA Menards Series, but I'm not expecting that to happen anytime soon.

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