Live Blogging Nationwide Series From Road America (ESPN - 5PM ET)

The Nationwide Series is sharing the stage at Road America with the Grand-Am Rolex sports car series. That group raced earlier in the day and featured a big accident and an exciting finish. Road America works well for sports cars.

The Nationwide Series coverage will feature Allen Bestwick with Rusty Wallace and Andy Petree in the TV booth. Down on pit road will be Vince Welch, Dave Burns, Jamie Little and Shannon Spake. Since there is no Infield Pit Studio for this stand-alone race, it will probably be Dave Burns hosting the pre-race show from pit road.

The field is wide open as the Sprint Cup Series guys are in Sonoma, CA doing some road racing of their own. Road America is a fast and wide-open road course that features a big front straight and plenty of passing zones.

Road course coverage is a battle to show the leaders, but also keep the stories in the back of the field updated. This is a very different challenge than working on a big oval track. It should be interesting to see just how ESPN approaches this task.

This post will serve to host your comments on the ESPN coverage of the Nationwide Series from Road America. To add your TV-related opinion, just click on the comments button below. Thanks for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.

It's Auction Time On SPEED!

Friday features a clash of timeslots that will leave NASCAR fans talking. TV executives get put in tough spots sometimes and when push came to shove, this time NASCAR lost.

SPEED comes on the air at 2:30PM with a preview edition of NASCAR Live. John Roberts hosts with Randy Pemberton. Wendy Venturini and Hermie Sadler are the reporters.

Sprint Cup Series practice is next on SPEED at 3PM. Adam Alexander hosts with Darrell Waltrip and Jeff Hammond in the TV booth. Matt Yocum and Ralph Sheheen are the reporters.

At 4:30PM, SPEED closes out the NASCAR coverage with a final edition of NASCAR Live. Roberts, Pemberton and Venturini return this time joined by reporter Bob Dillner.

What follows at 5PM has been the subject of much discussion. SPEED has opted to tape delay the Sprint Cup Series road course qualifying from Infineon Raceway in favor of six live hours of another Barrett-Jackson auto auction.

This one is from Orange County, California. You can click here to see the cars that will be crossing the auction block. Less than spectacular is a nice way to sum it up.

The Cup Series qualifying begins at 6:30PM ET and it will be tape-delayed by SPEED until 11PM ET. That pushes NASCAR out of East Coast primetime and ends a long streak of SPEED presenting the best NASCAR practice and qualifying coverage on TV.

It will be Adam Alexander, Kyle Petty and Larry McReynolds calling the road course qualifying for SPEED. Handling the reporting duties will be Chris Neville and Marty Snider. There should be several interesting aspects to this delayed coverage.

Today, social media makes tape-delaying any kind of live sports programming meaningless. This will be the situation for SPEED. Across Facebook and Twitter, the qualifying results will be passed along by the teams, the sponsors and even NASCAR live as it happens.

None of the major NASCAR Internet websites will hold the information until the TV coverage hits the air. In today's world, the only thing that SPEED will have at 11PM on Saturday is upset fans. They have a reason to be, because there were options.

One would be to utilize the NASCAR.com website and stream live coverage of qualifying through the RaceBuddy application. Just like TNT will do for the race on Sunday, this simple Internet application is effective and can be seen on iPads, iPhones and on the Sprint Mobile app.

SPEED could certainly air the entire show at 11PM on delay as planned, but at least the live qualifying would have been made available online to fans as it happened. In the current scenario, trying to shut the TV door and pretend fans will tune-in late at night to see what they can easily find out happened hours earlier is ridiculous.

This TV scenario is made even more ironic because PRN radio will have live coverage of qualifying as well. With many of the PRN stations streaming online, it's not hard to find this coverage. Many veteran NASCAR fans already use the "I Heart Radio" app for cell phones to hear the local MRN and PRN affiliates.

Sure, it's just qualifying. Sure, there is a top 35 rule. Sure, there are all kinds of excuses and reasons to use for justifying the Barrett-Jackson coverage. It's the right of the network executives to make decisions they believe are in the best interest of SPEED.

Perhaps, FOX and SPEED executive David Hill picked a bad week to tell the national media that he wants six of the Sprint Cup Series races currently on FOX to move to SPEED eventually. His reasoning was simple. After all, SPEED is the home of NASCAR coverage. Right?

We welcome your comments on this topic. To add your opinion, just click on the comments button below. Thank you for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.

Thursday TV/Media Notes

Here are some items of interest as we head to a split weekend with the Sprint Cup Series in Sonoma, CA and the Nationwide gang in Elkhart Lake, WI.

Wednesday it was announced by NBC4 in Washington, DC that Lindsay Czarniak was going to be leaving that local station where she had worked since 2005. Her new destination is ESPN. Czarniak is currently working at her part-time summer job hosting the six TNT Sprint Cup Series races. She will wait until July for the ESPN move.

Czarniak started her TV career as a production assistant at CNN after graduating from James Madison University. She has already worked two Olympics for NBC Sports in Turino and Beijing. Czarniak is a versatile on-air personality in the Krista Voda mode. That is someone who is at home in the studio, working as a reporter or hosting in the field. No doubt she will be a good addition to ESPN's on-air team.

Sticking with the ladies, SPEED's Danielle Trotta has been working as a field reporter for the RaceHub series. This weekend, she gets an interesting opportunity to try something new. With Voda hosting Trackside and Adam Alexander working for TNT, Trotta will take a turn anchoring the SPEED Center shows.

She will be handling the cut-ins and the Sunday morning preview show, but the big challenge will come Sunday night at 7PM. That one-hour version of SPEED Center is the most diverse motorsports show on the network. It will pull Trotta far outside the comforts of NASCAR.

Speaking of outside the comfort zone, four NASCAR drivers will appear in Sunday night's 10PM ET version of The Glades on A&E. Carl Edwards, Joey Logano, Tony Stewart and Brian Vickers filmed the episode earlier this year at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

"Shooting The Glades was a really cool experience," Logano said. "To see Homestead-Miami Speedway turned into a Hollywood movie set was certainly interesting. I can promise you this, I won’t be quitting my day job anytime soon. The show did an amazing job making the set and garage area look authentic. I know we had The Home Depot Toyota there, the extras were in our crew shirts and we even had our tool box in the garage stall. They did their best to make it look as real as possible and I think the NASCAR fans will appreciate that."

This weekend TNT will again have RaceBuddy at Sonoma. There will be a different look to it since Infineon Raceway is a road course. The free online service will continue to offer ten video streams, including four in-car cameras. TNT reports that RaceBuddy delivered over 700 thousand live video streams last weekend.

For you NASCAR history buffs, TNT's Pride of NASCAR feature shown in the pre-race will feature former driver Rex White. Now 81 years old, White competed for the original Chevrolet racing team and accumulated 28 wins and over 150 top ten finishes. He is in several halls of fame and was named one of NASCAR's top 50 drivers.

No Marty Reid this weekend for ESPN. Allen Bestwick gets the call to handle the Road America coverage with Rusty Wallace and Andy Petree. Once again, no coverage of practice or qualifying is offered by the ESPN networks. The actual race telecast is Saturday at 5PM on ESPN.

Speaking of no live coverage, on Friday SPEED is time-shifting the Sprint Cup Series qualifying from Sonoma to 11PM ET. The network instead is carrying six live hours of the Barrett-Jackson auction from Orange County beginning at 5PM.

This also means that the popular Friday night Trackside program on SPEED is out of luck. Krista Voda will host the show airing on tape delay Saturday at 11AM ET.

Speaking of Saturday, SPEED will also time-shift the two Sprint Cup practices to air beginning at 2:30PM ET. The network will instead carry the Rolex Sports Car Series race from Road America live beginning at noon ET.

So, to sum it up there is no coverage of practice or qualifying for the Nationwide Series at Road America by ESPN. Also, three Sprint Cup Series on-track sessions, including qualifying, will be delayed by SPEED from Infineon Raceway for an auction and a sports car race.

We want your comments on these topics. To add your opinion, just click on the comments button below. Thank you for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.