Back on Aug. 15, the Xfinity Series had at it for 52 laps on Daytona International Speedway's infield road course...when nature allowed.  This was a dominant affair for Austin Cindric, but also an interesting race in general.

During Countdown to Green, the general idea going into the race is that it would be a big unknown for everyone and that it was going to be fun.  For the most part, it was.

The Hey Rut segment focused upon the preparation that drivers had for the event.  With no live testing or practice, a number of drivers took to iRacing for what they called a Happy Hour segment (I recall that William Byron had the fastest time overall).  Wood talked about Jordan Taylor being brought in to espouse his expertise to a number of drivers as well.  No word on if Rodney Sandstorm made the trip.

The race looked like it was going to start on time.  Not so fast, lollykins.  The dreaded lightning showed up once again right before opening ceremonies were scheduled to take place.  

During that delay, there was some extra coverage that aired.  Wood talked about the experience that Preston Pardus has racing at Daytona in a Spec Miata.  There were a couple of driver interviews (Cindric, Joey Logano, Justin Haley) conducted via Skype.  Eventually, the coverage left Daytona and went to footage of the Pennzoil 150 from Indianapolis back in July and Road America from the previous week.

Discussion at that point changed to whether or not the race would be run in the wet since it poured during the lightning delay.  That ultimately didn't happen since the sun is fierce in Daytona Beach.  That allowed the track to dry quickly once the sun came back out.  It was just damp by the time the green came out.

As you may remember, missing Turn 1 ended up being quite a thing in this race.  Cindric and Chase Briscoe completely screwed up the first turn, which NBCSN missed because of a bad production camera choice (we had to see that via replay).  Also of note, Briscoe was the only driver up front that chose to switch to rain tires for the start.

It did not take long for the field to really stretch out.  By Lap 4, Cindric was more than 25 seconds ahead of Riley Herbst, who was running 10th.

During the stage breaks, viewers got to hear from Cole Custer and Matt DiBendedetto via Zoom in brief interviews with Wood.  Basically, you heard about race preparation, either via watching the race itself (Custer), or prep via iRacing (DiBenedetto).

As I wrote about in last week's edition of Couch Potato Tuesday, Daytona really showed the limitations of NBC Sports' current model of broadcasting races.  Not having the booth on-site really does hurt their effort . They are limited in what they can see.  With the current booth setup in Daytona, you can see almost everything from the broadcast.  I really do wish that NASCAR can come up with something that can get the booth commentators back to the track this year.

NBC Sports also experimented a bit with camera angles during the race.  Most of what you saw on the broadcast wouldn't have been out of place on their coverage of the Rolex 24 at Daytona or the more recent WaetherTech 240 at Daytona.  However, there were more aerial views and a boom camera was installed at the Kink.  There was a camera decided to the new chicane (that I don't like) that was installed prior to pit-in.

Given that the race started two hours late, there wasn't much post-race coverage.  The focus here was the incident with three laps to go that saw Justin Allgaier effectively get taken out by AJ Allmendinger.  Interesting that Allmendinger lost his enthusiasm after the incident.  Viewers got interviews with both parties in addition to Cindric and a check of the points.

Overall, this was probably the best of the three National Series broadcasts from Daytona.  However, at the same time, it was focused on only a few drivers.  Not much air time many of the others.  If you weren't in the top 10, you basically had to wreck to get TV time.

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