Last weekend, NASCAR went to Richmond Raceway for a double header of the race, and the spectators had two completely different races.
The NASCAR Cup Series race was relatively clean – it was expected, but it turned out to be even cleaner than I thought.
In the meantime, the truck race on Saturday was a wreck festival in the last two stages.
Toyota owner 400
Sunday brought the cup teams back to Richmond for 400 laps on the tricky D-shaped oval. The race was generally pretty clean, but satisfactory to a certain extent.
The more I watch Cup races at Richmond, the more I remember events on another circuit that have gotten a lot of press in the past few weeks. That, of course, is North Wilkesboro Speedway.
For years, fans have been demanding that Speedway Motorsports Inc. revive the property or sell it to someone who would do so. Personally, I don’t see it right now as it’s practically a good job now.
However, if you’re looking for a track that does races like North Wilkesboro, Richmond is likely the closest you’ll find, although it has an entirely different configuration. The old five-eighths mile oval was no stranger to cleaning short distance racing. The last cautious short-distance race of the Cup series took place there in autumn 1992.
The last nine Cup races at North Wilkesboro averaged three and a third of the cautionary warnings per race. Some of the last few races at Richmond looked like this. Add high tire wear and I think you see where I go with that.
Running races like this will test the broadcasters’ ability to show battles across the field. In the race on Sunday Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano made it into the top 10. The penalties for Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch made it even more of an outlier. Focusing solely on the front of the field will bore your audience to tears no matter the length of the race.
In this regard, FOX did well early on. The spectators have a lot of action on the track for their position on the entire field. As the race continued, the focus narrowed. Fortunately, Hamlin and Logano found each other late in the race. You were rightly in third place half a lap ahead of Christopher Bell. If that hadn’t happened, I’m not sure what the show would have been like.
Despite a generally clean race, the show rose to FOX towards the end of the time window. As a result, post-race coverage was brief. Viewers only got a couple of post-race interviews and a review of the points before leaving Richmond.
The Richmond races in recent years have not been the most exciting. In the run-up to this weekend there were numerous references to the 2008 race in which Busch dropped Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the final laps and Clint Bowyer was able to win. Once, when I went to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, that incident was on an exhibit where you could name your own segment of a race.
Heck, Richmond wasn’t even that competitive back then. Take away the cut tire for Hamlin and it has the most dominant short haul performance in the last 40 years. He had led all but one lap to the point where he cut his tire.
Richmond lived up to the track’s recent reputation on Sunday. FOX took what they got and did it well. Nothing special, but it didn’t actively hurt itself either.
ToyotaCare 250
Unlike the Cup race, you didn’t have to worry about a lack of action on Saturday in Richmond. Forty trucks on a three-quarter mile route offer a lot in themselves.
As FOX Sports 1, of course, there are some strange things. Ryan Truex interviewed Michael Waltrip at his home for his podcast The Hot Seat with Ryan Truex. Since Truex is sponsored by Marquis Spas, the interview was held in a hot tub. Viewers were treated to the Waltrip website in a three size-to-small peeps t-shirt and (I think) swim trunks straight from 1979. That was one thing.
For me, probably the most ridiculous part of the race was the whole mess with Jennifer Jo Cobb and Norm Benning.
Cobb wasn’t having the best day; Her No. 10 was clearly out of step. It was spun off from Howie DiSavino III early in the second tier. She later spun on the back straight after making contact with Benning, who left Turn 2 on a restart.
The coverage of the deliberate crash was a little more forceful on the radio (where I was originally listening) than on TV. There they stated up close that Cobb was slowing down and waiting to drop Benning. This was more or less backed up by the broadcast in which Cobb was lapped a few laps after restarting. It was basically the Richmond version of Boris Said who went to seek repayment for Rich Bickle at Sonoma Raceway in 1997.
Under these circumstances, Bickle Said had gone off course a little earlier. The curly man wasn’t pleased, and neither was Cobb on Saturday.
Waltrip and Welch said on the air they thought Cobb’s actions were directed at Benning. However, they had only repeated the previous spin after the deliberate wreck. As a result, they didn’t know what was causing the mess until afterwards. So, this stuff can’t be ignored because it can (and often does) affect the rest of the race.
NASCAR has officially parked Cobb because the minimum speed was not reached. Based on what she did after the second wreck, I would agree. She drove around 70 mph, which is not a minimum speed in Richmond. The wreck only made it worse. Apparently this did not contribute to NASCAR’s decision not to allow Cobb to race in the GEICO 500 on Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, but I thought when this happened it would not have helped their case in any way.
After receiving the extremely mild order to start engines (where you could hear someone in the background saying this was the worst) we finally got down to the action (but not before Welch tried to defend the Grand Marshal). FS1 didn’t have a guest analyst on the booth for Richmond. As a result, it was only Waltrip and Welch up there.
For some reason, FS1 has had some technical issues over the past few weeks. Not sure what is going on, but I can tell you that there were a number of weird advertising cuts in the first few laps of the race on Saturday that seemed to come out of nowhere.
On lap 10, for example, FS1 showed how Sam Mayer (who drove exquisitely to ninth place after the start on Saturday 40th) battled Danny Bohn for position. Suddenly there was a quick cut to a Safelite commercial, which Welch interrupted in mid-sentence.
Knowing that the channel logo was on the screen at this point tells me that it had something to do with the network. It wasn’t mentioned on the show, so I think something happened in Los Angeles, like someone pushing the button on the main controller or something.
The first wreck with Hailie Deegan was a bit strange in terms of coverage. It seemed that the booth (at least Waltrip) wanted to try and give Deegan the benefit of the doubt after she made contact with Tate Fogleman. This means that an attempt was made to blame Fogleman for the crash. In reality, for some reason, Deegan was drifting up the track, only leaving Fogleman in the back of # 1.
I’m not sure what happened here because the replay picked up the wreck way too late. Due to radio chatter played on the show, Deegan was apparently in the running for Codie Rohrbaugh at the time and didn’t see Fogelman coming.
Deegan later got in touch with Chase Purdy and turned Purdy against the wall. However, I’m not really ready to transfer all of this to Deegan. They were four wide at the time, which rarely works over a short distance.
In and around the Saturday wrecks, FS1 seemed to be doing a decent job of bringing the crowd into the action on the track. There was a lot of races for position. It’s not FS1’s fault that the race actually turned out to be an advantage for Kyle Busch Motorsports and Toyota. Even now, with Toyota number 18 in the Camping World Truck Series, this kind of thing still makes some racing fans angry (I’m neutral).
Since there were 11 warnings in 79 laps, the race ended after the scheduled time window had expired. As a result, viewers were only able to see the winner’s interview with John Hunter Nemechek before FS11 left Richmond to air the Boston Red Sox-Chicago White Sox game at Fenway Park, in which the Red Sox in their new yellow and light blue “City” uniforms debuted. Let’s just say these jerseys weren’t received well.
That’s all for this week. Next week NASCAR is heading to Talladega for some high-speed antics. I think that’s a good way to describe it. The Xfinity Series teams will drive 300 miles on Saturday, while 500 large teams will compete for the cup teams on Sunday. Everything can happen. Meanwhile, the NTT IndyCar series will be back in action on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida. TV offers can be found here.
I’ll be criticizing the Cup and Xfinity races in Talladega for the next edition of Couch Potato Tuesday here at Frontstretch. This week’s appendix of critics will cover Sunday’s Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama from Barber Motorsports Park. Planning this race against the Cup race was a pretty terrible idea. Due to this and the processing obligations mentioned above, I have not yet seen it. I will see the event and post my thoughts in the Frontstretch newsletter on Thursday.
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