Last Friday night, the Camping World Truck Series returned to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for 200 miles of action. It was dominated by Kyle Busch Motorsports. How did FOX Sports 1 handle that? Let's check it
out.
This race will probably be best remembered for Marcus Lemonis backing a full quarter of the field himself via Camping World. That got quite a bit of coverage in the days leading up to the event. Some of the teams (most notably Hill Motorsports) were
literally putting the Camping World colors on their trucks wee hours before the race. There were bonuses in play for those teams that did well, but only two claimed them (CR7 Motorsports and Henderson
Motorsports).
The interview of the week had Kaitlyn Vincie going one-on-one with eventual race winner John Hunter Nemechek. Here, the topic of discussion was Nemechek making the move down to the Camping World Truck Series. Basically, Nemechek wants to win.
Sure enough, he did.
FOX Sports 1 has actively decided to not air pre-race ceremonies prior to Xfinity and Camping World Truck Series races over the past year. A number of fans are not happy about this and comment about it from time to time on Couch Potato Tuesday articles at
Frontstretch. They have never officially commented as to why this is the case.
Perhaps it was better than they didn't air the ceremonies before the Bucked Up 200. Here, the track had Benny Scholl, lead singer of the band Avoid, sing the national anthem. It didn't go very well.
This was not a good rendition. Many fans harkened back to when Madison Rising, who bill themselves as "America's Most Patriotic Rock Band," sang prior to the then-Nationwide Series Drive4COPD 300 in 2014. Back then, I did write briefly about that.
Madison Rising's rendition resulted in the invoking of the Deadspin corollary, which quite simply is, "If something involving NASCAR makes Deadspin, it's usually bad." There are other examples of this over the years, most notably the time
ESPN's senior motorsports producer, Neil Goldberg, got caught peeping in on his neighbor in 2010. The comments have been deactivated on Deadspin since then (this occurred prior to the site's relaunch last year after the
entire staff resigned en masse), but believe me when I say that they had a field day with it. Goldberg was effectively done in TV after that.
Earlier this week, our own Davey Segal got a chance to talk to Scholl about his rendition. The interview is available on Segal's own podcast, Victory Lane with Davey Segal. It is available on iTunes and all podcasting
platforms.
For the race, Austin Dillon joined Michael Waltrip and Adam Alexander in the broadcast booth. A couple of things stood out about his appearance. One was that he provided some pretty good analysis. An example would be how he explained radio
chatter from Kyle Busch that indicated that his truck was "saturated." Admittedly, this is a somewhat strange term to use to describe a truck's handling characteristics that has nothing to do with fluids.
The other aspect of Dillon's commentary that I noticed was the fact that he constantly referred to the trucks as cars. At least seven times, by my count. He must have driven Mark Smith (the primary producer of Camping World Truck Series broadcasts
for FOX Sports 1) nuts during this broadcast.
The most controversial part of Friday night's race was when Busch cut his left rear tire on lap 88 and intentionally spun on the apron of turn 2 in order to draw a caution. It seemed pretty obvious in the booth that this was intentional. They backed
this up by showing the replay of when the tire went down exiting turn 4. Busch almost unintentionally binned the truck at full speed.
At a lower speed, the booth assumed (and rightfully so) that Busch could control the truck. Then, he spun out. As you know by now, Busch refused to talk about it after the race. He didn't talk about it during his post-race interview and when
Bob Pockrass asked him about it during the post-race press conference, he simply responded with "Nope."
We know why Busch did this. Had he admitted to intentionally spinning out, NASCAR would have fined him an indeterminate amount of money. We'll have to see what happens going down the line on this issue.
Another problem was the complete lack of rubber on the track, which led to some terrible tire issues. Viewers got shots of teams showing significant cords after only 30 laps of green flag racing. While yes, this got better as the race went on,
it was far from perfect. That said, the dust in Las Vegas was nowhere near as bad as the dust in Bahrain this morning.
There were some other mistakes, though. For instance, the booth mistook Nemechek on lap 86 for the stricken truck of Chandler Smith. Smith had crashed a few laps earlier and was off the pace. Obviously, had that been Nemechek that was
struggling to maintain minimum speed at the time, it would have been a big issue. However, it was not. They are teammates, but you have to be able to tell the trucks apart.
Since the broadcast ran long once again, viewers didn't get much in the way of post-race coverage. We got interviews with Nemechek and Busch before FOX Sports 1 left Las Vegas. Can' t do much about the race running long by 20-25 minutes every dang
week.
Overall, I thought that Dillon did a good job. Just has to remind himself for future Truck broadcasts, if any (none are currently scheduled for him) that he's not talking about cars. The racing was quite furious and contained more than the typical
amount of shenanigans. I felt that FOX Sports 1 did a decent job covering that action, but they still do have some things to work on going forward.
Phil Allaway is the Newsletter Manager for Frontstretch. He can be reached via e-mail at phil.allaway@frontstretch.com. Photo
is courtesy of Nigel Kinrade Photography.
