Lack Of TV Follow-Up On Incident Starts To Glare

Like Apollo 13 on the far side of the moon, NASCAR TV is in a black-out this Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday.

NASCAR Now is on hiatus for college championship week on ESPN2 until Monday and stick-and-ball sports are dominating ESPNEWS. Because of the off-week, shows like NASCAR Live, Trackside and RaceDay are also gone from SPEED.

This TV gap comes at an interesting time for both of these networks for very different reasons. As we mentioned in (click here) this post, ESPN pit road analyst DJ Copp was clear in his Monday NASCAR Now comments that the Paul Menard Yates Racing team was the root of the problem that caused an errant tire to roll across pit road Sunday in Atlanta. That is one of the Menard team's pit stops from Atlanta above courtesy of Getty Images.

Copp is one of the two tire-changers on the Ambrose team involved in the incident and should certainly have first-hand knowledge. One conversation with his teammates after the botched pit stop should have told the tale immediately.

As several TDP readers who posted comments noted, NASCAR Now did not offer any response from Larry Carter, the Menard crew chief about the incident. Fans continue to pepper Internet sites like this one with the same question. If one of the Menard crew rolled the tire out into pit road on purpose, shouldn't he receive the same suspension as Ambrose crewman Jimmy Watts?

NASCAR has been mum on the topic since the original penalties were handed down. No additional video has yet surfaced to either uphold Copp's version of the events or confirm NASCAR's conclusion that this was an Ambrose team issue alone.

Perhaps, lost in the shuffle is the fact that on Sunday there were all kinds of TV folks at the track. Fox telecast the actual race, with a pit reporter assigned to the Ambrose team. ESPN had reporters on the ground for NASCAR Now and SPEED saturated the area with production folks reporting stories for the Sunday and Monday TV shows.

So, what happened to the follow-up on what some are calling the critical incident of the race? Fans may remember some brief comments from #47 crew chief Frank Kerr and even a smiling Marcos Ambrose after the race, but apparently that was not the whole story.

The Sunday night TV shows came and went without mentioning the issue of a Menard crew member being in the mix. True or not, the conviction with which Copp reported this to the Monday late night NASCAR Now viewers certainly seemed sincere. Copp has a long track record with the show of being accurate with his comments.

As other readers have pointed out, Copp is an ESPN employee on an ESPN program. He is making an allegation not previously reported on national TV about an incident in which only his team was ultimately penalized. Perhaps, taking the time to get a statement from the Yates Racing team would have been in the best interest of fairness to all parties.

ESPN's Marty Smith may actually have updated this issue Thursday morning on the late night edition of NASCAR Now. Unfortunately, like many fans I was forced to put the show on the DVR and then discovered that college sports had run long yet again. Smith's report was lost in space.

If Smith did update this information, perhaps some readers could take a moment and let us know the content of his report. The video of Smith's segment was unfortunately not made available on the ESPN website, despite the obvious fact that this late night program ran well past the scheduled off-time.

It will be The SPEED Report on Sunday at 7PM that gets the next whack at this topic. Unfortunately, the SPEEDtv.com website is not updated with the host information for the show. Dave Despain will follow next at 9PM with Wind Tunnel and his guest is Steve Letarte, the embattled Jeff Gordon crew chief. It should be interesting to see if Dave responds to a viewer question or asks Letarte about this topic.

Finally, Nicole Manske will get into the act on Monday at 5PM on ESPN2 when she fills-in once again for Allen Bestwick on the roundtable version of NASCAR Now. Manske has three NASCAR media folks as guests, including ESPN's own Angelique Chengelis who does not mince words when reporting the NASCAR news.

All of this should make for a couple of interesting off-days to continue a little friendly debate and explore why this topic has not crossed-over from the TV to the Internet side of the NASCAR media. Perhaps, without the video proof, the topic will eventually just fade away.

As always, we welcome your comments. Just click on the comments button below and follow the easy instructions. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind when offering your comments please.

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Where Is The Real Tiregate Video?

Fan favorite and ESPN pit road analyst DJ Copp appeared on the late night Monday version of NASCAR Now. Host Allen Bestwick ran him through the scenario that found Copp right in the middle of the pit road tire incident from Sunday that changed the complexion of the event.

Copp is a tire changer for the #47 team of Marcos Ambrose and was actively involved in the pit stop that set all the chaos into motion. Over the past two seasons, it has been the plain-spoken Copp who is often the voice of reason when pit road incidents are being discussed on the program.

On Monday, Copp made several effective and simple points. Ambrose stopped a bit short in his pit box, which caused the rear tire to cross-over into Paul Menard's pit box after it was removed and rolled toward the wall. Copp reinforced that it was the Ambrose crew chief who alerted the team to the fact that a tire had come loose and asked them to go retrieve it.

The interesting part of Copp's interview was his statement that a Menard crew member had taken the slightly wayward Ambrose tire and purposefully rolled it out onto pit road. His suggestion was that rising tension between the crews during the race had resulted in this action.

From a TV perspective, all of this leads to a very simple question. Keeping Copp's statement in mind, where is the video of the incident? The single replay offered by Fox at that moment simply showed the tire rolling and then the crew member appeared running to retrieve it. Somewhere, there is much more.

As veteran fans know, in addition to the more than seventy TV cameras aimed at the race track from every different angle, each team records their pit stops for training purposes. This type of video has been used countless times in all kinds of NASCAR TV shows.

There is also a blimp or helicopter flying over all of the Sprint Cup Series races and providing a great overhead view of pit road, especially during pit stops. Finally, the NASCAR Media Group has additional hand-held cameras on pit road. Fans may remember one of them being involved in a little pit road incident last season.

From all these different and diverse video sources, somewhere there has to be a little better accounting of what really happened on pit road Sunday afternoon. While NASCAR has chosen to penalize the Ambrose crew member and the crew chief, perhaps as the late Paul Harvey would say, we should stay tuned for the rest of the story.

It should be interesting to see if it is ESPN, SPEED or NASCAR itself that finally comes up with the video that can back-up the statement from Copp and others that the reality of what actually happened does not quite match-up completely with the penalties NASCAR imposed.

Fans present at Atlanta who may have been shooting video during the pit stops should check their cameras, perhaps it may be a fan who can provide the information to finally set the record straight.

Eventually, the Menard team's potential interference and purposeful disgregard for safety on pit road will either be proven true or false. It might just be one little piece of video that tells the tale.

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Shannon Spake Moves To The Night Shift

This is a weird week for NASCAR on the ESPN family of networks. As many college sports fans already know, it is Championship Week. This week is packed with college sports and that has pushed NASCAR Now to the late shift.

The 5PM original airings of this program are gone this week. The program will instead air in the early morning hours on the East Coast Wednesday and Thursday. The Thursday and Friday daytime versions of this daily show are cancelled altogether.

As luck would have it, the off-week is a perfect reason for ESPN to let this show take some time off, despite the fact that many of the other ESPN daily shows continue with few schedule changes.

Shannon Spake will step into the host role for the Tuesday and Wednesday shows. Spake was impressive in a host role on several other programs and perhaps is better in the studio than on pit road. Fans may remember her from SPEED in a variety of roles.

ESPN will once again convene a reporter's roundtable on Monday. Allen Bestwick gets his second week off this season as it will be Nicole Manske hosting the program. Nate Ryan from USA Today, Michael Vega of the Boston Globe and ESPN's own Angelique Chengelis are the media guests.

This concept has worked well in the past and with Tradin' Paint on SPEED cancelled it should give NASCAR fans their only glimpse into some of the media who do not regularly appear on TV in Ryan and Vega. The absence of diverse NASCAR media members somewhere on TV is a hole that needs to be filled for 2010.

NASCAR Now has been having a stellar season with Bestwick, Manske and Mike Massaro co-hosting. Marty Smith and Chengelis have been appearing regularly with the hard news on the weekends. David Newton and Terry Blount still write for ESPN.com, but have a lesser role on the program. Tim Cowlishaw has been quietly eliminated from the series.

Once the season cranks back up with Bristol, we will all probably begin to see the economic reality affect the sport in new ways. Several truck series teams are struggling to return to action after the break and the valiant efforts of several self-funded Sprint Cup teams also appear to be on the verge of ending.

This year, unlike those in recent memory, the challenge for ESPN will be to balance the sports news and information with the reality of the world around us. So far this year, the efforts of the entire production team at NASCAR Now have been nothing short of impressive.

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