The ESPN/ABC NASCAR TV team is on a roll. This weekend, Dale Jarrett returns while Rusty Wallace and Dr. Jerry Punch have the weekend off.
It will be 2PM ET when Allen Bestwick brings ABC on-air with the NASCAR Countdown pre-race show. Jarrett and Brad Daugherty will join Bestwick. The pre-race show this week is thirty minutes long.
Jarrett moves up to the TV booth and joins Marty Reid and Andy Petree for the call of the race. Reid has been having fun this season and his style had allowed Jarrett and Petree to come alive. Dover is a grind and it will be a good test of this trio. These are the three guys ESPN has picked to take the Sprint Cup Series through the final seventeen races of the season, including the Chase for the Championship.
On pit road are Vince Welch, Jamie Little and Dave Burns. Shannon Spake is off and super-sub Mike Massaro is back in Bristol, CT to host the Sunday NASCAR Now program. The Dover pits are one of the loudest on the circuit and it should be a challenge for those three to keep the field updated in terms of pit strategy.
ESPN has really turned a corner in terms of announcing. The remaining challenge is the camera selections while the race is under green. In-car cameras and tight shots remain the temptation for the director. It is vitally important at Dover to keep the turns in the camera shots even as the leaders run down the straights. As veteran TDP fans remember, Dover has bridge obstructions that the TV director must cut around on every single lap.
ABC has scheduled the broadcast to run until 5PM ET with an hour of additional sports programming behind the event. There should be no problem in terms of scheduling. As in the past, the Seattle, WA local ABC station is not carrying the pre-race show. Instead, a four-year old episode of Hannah Montana is on the air. This has been an issue on Saturday races for four seasons now in Seattle.
This post will serve to host your comments about the ABC coverage of the Nationwide Series race from Dover, DE. To add your TV-related opinion, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind when posting. Thanks for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.
78 comments:
Hey folks, this should be interesting. Good weather.
As a side note I really liked the discussion in the booth minus DW on practice today. What a difference that made!
Was pretty different wasn't it? This will be a topic tomorrow on the FOX race coverage for sure.
DW was nervous, kept Tweeting about Hammond and SPEED while he was away. I would be nervous too!
Did I mention that I hate having to switch back & forth between SPEED and the Deuce??
It'd be great (& quite advantageous) if SPEED aired all of the practice & qualifying sessions ... That equates to fewer frustrated fans who've given up because they have to keep hunting to find "where" the tv coverage ...
You have to wonder if SPEED will take over all the support programming in the next TV contract. It would make things so much easier. ESPN and FOX have no interest in doing any of that.
JD - "I Can't Make You Love Hannah if You Don't" ... (First Aired: April 14, 2006) LOL ;-)
All of the practice sessions, and qualifying are a much better fit for a specialty network like SPEED.
SPEED can flex with the schedules and the rain and other delays. I agree.
The last year of the previous contract worked with SPEED airing the supplemental stuff ... They used both the FOX guys and the TNT/NBC guys ...
I really think the channel hopping was misinterpreted by TPTB and that's what led to the "same start times" bit ...
It's gonna get worse in a few weeks ... when some stuff is on SPEED, some on ESPN, some on TNT, some on ESPN2, some on ABC ... IF I didn't purposely hunt down the tv schedule, I'd never know "where" to find the pratices/qualifying ...
That is actually the reason I started to put the composite NASCAR TV sched on the TDP mainpage. I was tired of trying to hop around. I always missed something!
I can only hope ESPN uses the FOX style of using their pit reporters today.
Daly Planet Editor said...
That is actually the reason I started to put the composite NASCAR TV sched on the TDP mainpage. I was tired of trying to hop around. I always missed something!
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Which I appreciate more than you know. It's so nice to be able to find out in one place exactly what time and station everything is on. Thank you so much!
Did I mention....welcome back Dale Jarrett?
Yep, JD you did.
Pre-show really ok today.
What is cool is MLB.com will stream live baseball games right to your Playstation 3.
Its really sad how far back in the dark ages NASCAR.com is.
Little more of that flyover would have been nice. Those are the planes based in Dover.
C-17 Globemasters....
It was more coverage of the flyover than a week or so ago ... when FOX hardly showed any & switched fast to Jimmie/Chandra kissing ...
Pre-race show was good. Nice shoutouts to Jason Keller and Colin Braun. Let's see if the cup guys cause problems today!
I will trade the in car driver reporter and pit crew cam guy for more wide camera shots.
I wish ESPN would cut out the cheesey piped-in, fake audience cheers, whistles, and applause whenever the races start and end.
The spanish broadcast sounds much better than those from last year, or even some of Fox broadcasts this season.
I always think they show the close-ups because the stands are empty. Marty already calling out the S&P's.
Stick with the racing! Nice so far...
These guys are flying!
DJ said that arrow does matter and that surprised me a bit. Saying they are going 170 mph on the straights explained that.
Yeah, glad to see and hear about the cup guys being ahead of the regular NW drivers!
I have a feeling that these guys are going to be pretty good by the time we got to the Cup coverage on ESPN in July.
Lets put one of the lady pit reporters in the Tech Center to explain something.
Tim Brewer is really useless these days...
Tim and the tech center are about as useful as instructions on how to eat a banana.
yep, and in commercial Annett spins. I don't really think they need the tech center.
Right about now, I think about how nice side-by-side commercials would be!
Nice report of the top 12 guys. Hope to see BK pass KB.
That drop down of the cars crossing the line is nice. Gives a sense of the intervals between cars. Wish they would use that instead of that interminable crawler across the top of the screen. Gets thruthe field a lot faster.
Would be nice to see the debris... if it's really there...
If I don't see the debris, I assume it doesn't exist. With today's cameras. they can show the name on a candy wrapper.
They could show the debris from a satellite I think, just because they said it's in turn 1, doesn't really mean it's there!
Debris has become NASCAR's dirty word!
I guess debris is NA$CAR's name for a timeout.
ESPN doing a good job of showing us the racing instead of focusing on the leader driving away.
That's a great point. They sure are...
Hey Marty & Company, let's know what is happening with the regular NW drivers too!
The better the telecast, the fewer the comments.
Yep, Marty found his stories and he is on it. Wish the racing was deeper, but it's Nationwide after all.
Kind of liking this telecast!
you and me both jun- i mean JD
Was it me or did Marty just say Kevin Harvick was the lead Ford in the race? If I'm not mistaken he drives a Chevy...
I didn't hear that one, Brendan. Happy that ESPN is on their game right now. What an incredible difference from JP at Dover for the last three years.
Is that a Nascar debris (tire going down) caution.
@Brendan I believe he was talking about Edwards.
I was waiting fo rthe Zaxby's car to spin!
they almost missed the restart.
I hate when something like this happens right after a fake caution.
Bunching them up is one thing, wrecking the field is another.
Interesting interview with Paul Menard and he a question about the previous caution. Hmmmm.
Oh no, a cup guy retaliates against another cup guy!
Who ever was ahead before the caution and the race ends in a green, white, checker wins. The finishing order is before the caution. Try this at some races. Let the winner of GWC get a new hat.
ha ha.
Nothing good comes from this.
Wow. How does Denny Hamlin not get his position back? He got wrecked. If I'm Denny I'm ging to find him
Maybe Clint is going to get his hair cut instead ! I don't remember Carl being fined from flipping Brad K in Atlanta but maybe he was.
I dont understand how Denny doesnt get his spot back. Makes no sense to me
They better keep the camers on Denny
be interesting to see replays of why Clint did that. He must have got hit.
What I always say is that manipulating reality never works.
No prob with drivers going at it, they always have and always will.
Just without that fake caution this would have been OK.
Are they going to interview any full time NW drivers?
Charlie, Clint was a little slow coming up to speed and Denny tapped him to start the crash.
The other version is that Denny was a lot faster and just ran him over...take your pick!
I think DH is finding out how BK felt when he spun him!
Oh ya, thanks JD. Helps to pay attention.
Thanks everyone! New column tonight for comments and live blog of TV tomorrow from Dover. Join us then and thanks for stopping by!
Finally interviewed Reed & Jason Leffler. Thought ABC forgot all about the NW regulars. Gotta watch the Preakness soon pulling for Paddy O'Prado.
Good tv today.
At least there was a replay of Boyer turning Hamlin.
I guess NASCAR and their "Boys have at it" still means "do what you want until you do something we don't like".
I've only been watching NASCAR since "05, something got me hooked back then, I don't know what it was.
Here in '10 I'm really getting tired of something screwing up RACEDAY!
Usually it's the broadcast partner with a crap broadcast, but some days it's NASCAR.
Today was NASCAR's day IMO.
ESPN did a real good job today, but that sour taste is still in my mouth.
HEY NASCAR, MAKE UP YOUR D**M MIND!
I thought Denny handled his interview great. He didn't hold a grudge and understood why he was wrecked.
Great, great, great job by ESPN. Started out with a nice wide, shot so we could actually see the leaders race the first lap and was good all day long.
Showed us battles for position, great split screen work, etc.
My only complaint is that they didn't show the debris but hard to when it doesn't exist. I wish the announcers would say we can't find it. I wish the networks would show what a fraud NASCAR is with these fake cautions.
I wonder how many thousands of dollars NASCAR cost the teams at the end with the fake caution. These owners need to get together and stand up to this crap.
ESPN... thank you for the improved camera work. Loved your broadcast!!!
For all the talk about debris cautions, I have yet to see where someone in the so-called media has interviewed or allegedly tried to interview Mike Helton, John Darby, or Robin Pemberton about a particular call or the subject in general. It seems to me to be a no-win situation for NASCAR - they're criticized if they call a caution and it turns out not to have been necessary, but the media would try to crucify them if they chose to not call a caution and a piece of debris caused a wreck injuring someone.
Richard in N.C.
Helton denies it in this interview...
http://sports.yahoo.com/nascar/news?slug=jh-questions043010
Of course NASCAR threw 13 debris cautions in 1990 and 69 last year. You do the math.
didn't get to see much of the race-just highlites, but agree w/Michael-too many "debris" cautions for my taste.
Michael, Thank you, but I really meant asking Helton, etc. about a specific, questioned caution. A lot has changed in 20 years and I believe everyone is more safety, and PR, cautious now - for instance no more open-face helmets. I watched, live, when Felipe Massa was seriously injured by a flying piece of debris (a spring) in an F1 race last year (Hungary?) and I am now willing to give race controllers more leeway and, in most cases, the benefit of the doubt. In light of all the controversy, it does seem to me that the networks should at least provide a picture of the truck going to check the debris.
If you do not maintain pace you lose your spot. Whether it was damage or just spacing out. Happened to R. Gordon on the road courses a few years ago.
The last caution they failed to show the debris. They could not find it. Safety is only a problem when something exists.
Just watched this one via DVR.
This booth is one of the best in a long time. AP and DJ have a great back-and-forth rapport; each one seems to know exactly where the other is going. And both let Marty Reid do his PxP job, which he does extremely well. It's a great combination of people.
The camera work was pretty good for most of the race. Kudos to ESPN for looking for battles all day long rather than focusing on Kyle Busch and the other leaders continually checking out on the field.
Denny was a class act in his interview.
The bad: Way too many commercials. Maybe it's a good thing that the Chase will be on ESPN if it gets us less commercials and in-house ads. (I do not care about Desperate Housewives one jot.) The interview with Ryan Newman was quite shaky, though the others were decent. It would be nice to see a few interviews with the NW regulars, but then again, the Cup regulars are dominating NW these days.
Also, NASCAR was to blame for that pileup at the end. Glad that KyBu was able to get out ahead of the mess; he deserved the win today.
All-in-all, this was a fantastic broadcast, commercials aside, and gives me hope for the Chase coverage.
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