On Sunday, the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship returned to action at Road America for a sprint race.  Unlike many of these events, this one was aired live on NBC.  The audience for the race was nothing spectacular (616,000 viewers), but those who tuned in saw a competitive race that turned crazy in the final hour.

With INDYCAR being off last weekend, Leigh Diffey was back on play-by-play for an IMSA race for the first time since January.  He was joined by Calvin Fish and AJ Allmendinger.  This is the regular booth for IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.  They called the race remotely from Stamford, Conn., I believe.  Unlike situations in NASCAR, this is actually pretty normal for IMSA broadcasts over the past few years.  Doesn't mean I'm not a fan, but IMSA has somewhat similar protocols to NASCAR these days.

Typically, an IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race broadcast for a track like Road America has coverage split between the four classes on-track.  This has been the case since back in the American Le Mans Series days and Sunday was no different.  The rub here is that the coverage is uneven between the classes.

Traditionally, there has been a bias towards whatever the top class is (now Daytona Prototype International, or DPi).  That was the case on Sunday, but for good reason.  Much of the race Sunday was a duel between the No. 7 Acura and both of the Mazdas.  The No. 6 of Dane Cameron was in the mix as well until he tried to block Mazda Motorsports' Harry Tincknell and damaged his car.  That led to a cut left rear tire and a blocking penalty that took Cameron and Juan Pablo Montoya out of contention.

In the other classes, the coverage was significantly less.  LMP2 got next to no coverage.  Then again, the class wasn't competitive at all.  PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports led flag-to-flag until the rains came.  Then, Simon Trummer ran in the back of Montoya and put himself out of the race.

GT Daytona coverage, despite having the most cars, was lacking as well.  You only really saw a fair amount of the two AVS Vasser Sullivan Lexus RCF GT3s that dominated the race.  GT Le Mans coverage was more than GT Daytona, but still not all that much knowing that it was quite competitive for much of the race.

In the final hour, the rain came and it did not take long for it to become an issue.  There was an excellent camera shot of Earl Bamber's crash from the GT Le Mans class lead.  Basically, you saw him wrecking five seconds before he did.  That's rare,

The aforementioned crash that eliminated Trummer from the race was only caught from Montoya's in-car camera.  He was just driving down the frontstretch and gets clouted from behind.  You see Trummer's No. 52 going past, but that's it.  Based on the coverage, you'd think that Trummer going off and hitting a WeatherTech placard was the primary reason his car was damaged.

There was lightning during the red flag that may or may not have affected the coverage once the race went back green.  NBC saw Mario Farnbacher take the lead from Townsend Bell with an excellent pass, but they ended up missing the pass for the class victory when Bell got him back.  My understanding is that Farnbacher slid off-course in the Carousel, allowing Bell to pass.

We also never got a good view at what actually happened to bring out the final caution.  That was an incident in the Kink involving BMW Team RLL's John Edwards and Porsche GT Team's Nick Tandy.  We just know that both cars spun and Tandy got stuck in the mud and couldn't continue.

Post-race coverage was non-existent.  Due to IMSA stopping the clock during the red flag, the race ran up against the three-hour time slot.  NBC's coverage ended before the cool down lap was half complete.  The version of the race broadcast available on TrackPass ends even earlier, before Townsend Bell finishes the race.  You would have never known that he binned the car before getting back around to victory lane.

I did some preliminary searching prior to the race and couldn't find any NBC affiliates that outright pre-empted the race broadcast.  However, a number of affiliates did cut away during the race.  Some of them did it to cover Tropical Storm/Hurricane Isaias.  I'm ok with that because that's important.  I'm not going to be that guy that rants about weather coverage pre-empting a  show.  My understanding is that it happened in Miami and viewers on WESH 2 in Orlando missed the entire first hour due to weather coverage.  Can't do much about weather.  Now, if they were pre-empting for something else because they felt like it, that's a whole 'nother thing.

Overall, the coverage was very DPi-centric, but brought viewers a lot of good racing.  I wouldn't be surprised if they had to cover the final stint of the race with limited cameras due to the storm.  That really affected the final laps and not for the better.

Phil Allaway is the Newsletter Manager for Frontstretch.  He can be reached via e-mail at phil.allaway@frontstretch.com.  Photo is courtesy of IMSA.