ESPN Hopes Third Time Is The Charm

The big shift is on at ESPN where NASCAR is concerned. The final seventeen races of the Sprint Cup Series are coming back to the ESPN family of networks. There is a lot of hope in Bristol that the third time is the charm.

In all big companies there are things that work well and things that do not work well. ESPN has been leading the way in the reporting of NASCAR news on TV through the daily NASCAR Now series. The once laughable program is now firmly entrenched as "must see TV" for hardcore fans.

On the flip side, ESPN has been struggling to figure out how to get through to NASCAR fans on the Nationwide Series telecasts. The network has been drawn to the Sprint Cup stars who cross-over to the Nationwide Series for the last two years. It seems that the stories of the other drivers simply do not matter.

Once ESPN begins actually covering the Sprint Cup Series, the Nationwide telecasts get batted around like ping pong balls by ESPN's significant college football commitments. This year, the company has added even more games to the schedule. It should make for another interesting year of the Saturday races trying to get on TV.

Last year, the ESPN Sprint Cup season began with the Indy tire debacle and continued through a lackluster Chase for the Championship. This year, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has already put himself out of contention and Kyle Busch seems to be trying hard to do the same. The Roush cars are in the cellar and Richard Childress suddenly seems to be having big trouble down the stretch.

Instead of cutting back, ESPN has decided to jump into the deep-end and surround Indy with all kinds of TV coverage. Give them credit, in these tough economic times the network could simply have slashed the budgets and presented a trimmed-down Indy event to start the season. Instead, Allen Bestwick will kick off four days of NASCAR TV on Thursday.

NASCAR Now is relocating to the Infield Pit Studio for the 5PM Thursday show, which will be expanded to one hour. Bestwick will host and will no doubt offer an extended preview of the Indy tripleheader weekend. Marty Smith and Nicole Manske will both be on-site to add to this program.

This show sets-up a unique NASCAR original documentary that ESPN has never done before. Feel Your Heart Race is the title of this one-time special by veteran documentary filmmaker Doug Pray. Click here for a link to the trailer on You Tube. The program airs at 6PM and might be worth recording for a second look.

The Thursday nightcap is on ESPN Classic at 6:30PM following the documentary. The 2007 Brickyard 400 is replayed in a two hour timeslot. This is the last of the four replays during the week on ESPN Classic. Everyone agrees there is no need to replay last year's event.

Friday and Saturday the Sprint Cup Series on-track action is split between ESPN and SPEED. The complete schedule is on the right side of The Daly Planet main page. One ESPN team is at the speedway, while the other is across town at O'Reilly Raceway Park (ORP) where the trucks race Friday night and the Nationwide Series on Saturday.

Marty Reid will be joined by Rusty Wallace and Randy LaJoie for the Nationwide telecasts from ORP. These three have good chemistry and Reid and LaJoie love to tease Wallace about the tough luck of his Nationwide team. This weekend should be no exception.

As usual, the actual Sprint Cup Series telecast on ESPN Sunday will be surrounded by support programming before and after the race. Don't forget, this is the time of the year where ESPN offers a Sunday night one-hour review program that is fantastic. It runs through the end of the season.

TDP begged the network to expand it to the entire Sprint Cup Series schedule, but apparently the fact that Fox and TNT carry those telecasts played a little bit of a role. This show was a big hit last year and promises to compete with SPEED's Victory Lane once again.

There are 76 High Definition cameras ready for the Sprint Cup Series on Sunday. This year, the Bat-Cam will also debut. A hybrid of the Cable-Cam, this one will zoom down the frontstretch and over pit road at up to 80 mph. It should offer some great shots for the races off pit road and the double-file restarts.

Once again this season, ESPN is rolling out twelve voices to handle the live race. Bestwick will handle the Infield Pit Studio with Wallace, Brad Daugherty and Ray Evernham. Right next door will be Tim Brewer in his Tech Garage. On pit road will be Jamie Little, Shannon Spake, Dave Burns and Vince Welch.

The key to this broadcast will be the three men upstairs in the announce booth. Jerry Punch will again handle the play-by-play duties. He will be joined by Dale Jarrett and Andy Petree. Punch will be the traffic director for the eleven other voices on this telecast.

If we agree that tires will not be a problem, Punch may be looking at a very dynamic and exciting race. Double-file restarts at the speedway are going to make for a very different kind of racing than fans have seen in the past. It will also demand that the ESPN Director follow the double-wide action every single time.

This year, it may take multiple laps for the two-wide battles to sort themselves out, even with the bigger Sprint Cup cars. Avoiding the in-car cameras and letting the TV viewers watch the action from a fan's perspective is going to be a struggle.

ESPN has proven to love their TV toys and NASCAR coverage has often been an in-car camera festival. Losing the perspective of the track and the cars being shown by switching to an in-car camera is rough on viewers. TNT was outstanding this season in keeping the wideshots and cutting in-car when it made sense.

One thing to keep in mind is that ESPN also produced the Indy 500 this season and it was fantastic. The entire telecast was crisp and interesting from start to finish. The same management team that coordinated that telecast will be in charge for the NASCAR event.

The table is set and this is the third time for all the pieces to come together. With a good tire, good weather and NASCAR's double-file restart gift, ESPN may be getting off to the best start ever for their portion of the Sprint Cup Series season.

TDP welcomes your comments on what you would like to see from ESPN during this telecast. We open the floor to subjects from topics in the pre-race shows to on-track action and post-race coverage. As NASCAR fans who have been watching this series since February, this is a great time to suggest and then see if ESPN delivers.

To add your comment, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind when posting. Thank you for taking the time to stop by. TDP will offer live blogs for all the Indy weekend races. Please join us.

Local Charlotte Media At Forefront of Mayfield Story

The switch from the NASCAR media to the local Charlotte TV stations leading the way in the Mayfield saga was swift. Local TV reporters without some of the limitations of the ESPN and Internet media who deal with NASCAR on a daily basis have jumped into the deep end of the pool.

Click here to watch Mayfield jump from the sports report to the top news story in the Charlotte TV market. This WCCB-TV video also has the jaw-dropping assertion of the chief toxicologist in Broward Country, FL that is going to set the national media on fire.

Click here for the big Friday WCCB video that had everyone talking. Mayfield unloads for twenty minutes on various topics. His answers are amazingly concise and just add to the confusion over who is playing what games in this whole mess.

Charlotte area reporter Alan Cavanna has been very aggressive in his attempts to get front and center on this issue over at WSOC-TV. Clicking here will open a search page and entering "Mayfield" in the last seven days search will result in a handful of videos.

Cavanna first got Mayfield from his car to repeat that he has never used meth and subsequently wound-up in one of Mayfield's attorneys' homes being shown the negative lap report from Lab Corp. On camera, Cavanna gets the attorney to suggest that Aegis doctored the second Mayfield sample to save face on this issue.

Finally, WBTV's Sarah Batista gets Mayfield sitting on his front porch and talking casually about his reluctance to fall in line with NASCAR's original findings. Click here to see another local Charlotte area TV station deliver what ESPN could not.

Batista's interview contains Mayfield's version of what happened during the day of the second drug test, including calling NASCAR's version "a bunch of lies." It is a relaxed and calm Mayfield who does a very good job of getting his views across in this interview.

Kudos to all three Charlotte area TV stations for getting into this issue and using the resources at their disposal to put this issue out in the public eye. Without the hard work of these reporters, fans would not be able to see what Mayfield has to say and then make their own judgement.

Click here for the NY Times new take on Mayfield and the resulting effects on NASCAR.

TDP welcomes your comments and will continue to add additional video clip links to this post. To add your opinion on the media role in the Mayfield saga, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind when posting. Thanks for stopping by.

NASCAR's Version Of "Meet The Press"

Over the past several seasons, ESPN has rounded-up three NASCAR reporters several times a year and put them on the Monday version of NASCAR Now.

On a Sprint Cup Series off-week, it makes sense to let some of the media talk about the season to date and review the news. Normally, this is an exercise in who is going to win, why are teams struggling and some snippy comments about NASCAR.

All of this changed when a combination of elements struck the sport like a meteor. The economy plummeted, the US car manufacturers tanked and an active driver tested positive for methamphetamine.

Into these topics and more stepped media members Ryan McGee, Jenna Fryer and Nate Ryan. The program was hosted by ESPN veteran Mike Massaro. Kudos to ESPN for bringing only one employee to the table, as McGee is a full-time senior writer for ESPN the Magazine.

Massaro set the tone early with a fast pace and straight talk. Fryer and Ryan admitted that their early predictions of a tough season for Tony Stewart and his new team were off-base. McGee pointed out that the people and technology surrounding Stewart had been key to the surprising season.

Jeremy Mayfield is a topic that has the NASCAR media just as confused as the fans. A great video review of this year's Mayfield saga set-up the following discussion. Ryan reinforced that the image of NASCAR has been deeply affected by this entire matter. Fryer focused on the main problem of deep confusion in the garage area by the teams themselves. "The confusion in the industry among the competitors is insane," said Fryer.

"It's kind of like politics," said McGee. "When politicians start slinging mud at each other, they say that no one comes away clean. Nobody is going to be a winner in this thing."

One final key point exposed by Fryer was that Mayfield was allowed to return to the track even after his positive drug test because of flaws in NASCAR's own system of testing. The judge's ruling did not determine anything about the test, it was the system that needs to be repaired.

Moving on to the identity issues of the Nationwide Series, the reporters agreed to disagree. McGee reminded everyone that the attraction of the "Nationwide regulars" back in the day was strong for the fans. While Fryer floated the notion of having only one support series, Ryan reminded everyone that TV ratings and full grandstands come with having Cup drivers in the field.

Massaro gets credit for bringing up the struggling Brickyard 400 race at Indy on ESPN. Reviewing the past using video made the comments of the reporters even more biting. "I don't know that NASCAR really needs to be there anymore," said Fryer.

Ryan pointed to the damage done last season by the struggles of Goodyear to field a tire that worked on the new Cup car at Indy. After more than a decade, it seems that this event has lost a lot of luster. The USA Today veteran indicated that reports from Indy suggest about half of a capacity crowd this weekend.

A general discussion of potential Chase teams led to Mark Martin and Kyle Busch being profiled. Busch was not the most popular with the panel and his maturity issues are well known. Martin continues to command the respect of the media and that is no easy task.

The media jury is still out on Kevin Harvick and his future with Richard Childress Racing. Suggestions from the panel included Harvick moving to Stewart-Haas with Shell or perhaps just leveraging himself for a new team in 2011. It is clear that Harvick needs money for his own KHI racing operation, so his decision may well be driven by that need.

The reporter roundtable shows offer the panelists an opportunity to make a closing statement. This has proven to be both a blessing and a curse for those on the program in the past.

Ryan was upfront in reminding viewers that not one word had been said during the entire show about Dale Earnhardt Jr. to that point. Ryan reminded us that Tony Eury Jr. has blamed the media for Junior's problems. Now, without the same level of publicity and scrutiny, Ryan wondered how Junior will do for the rest of the season.

"It's been 72 days since Mayfield was suspended for failing a random drug test," said Fryer. "The fallout has overshadowed almost everything else. What was left of Mayfield's career is ruined and NASCAR's handling of the scandal will forever be questioned." Fryer made her point that there is still no end in sight to this mess.

McGee added a little tribute to legendary West Coast driver Hershel McGriff. He compared the 59 year-old Tom Watson being referred to as ancient during the British Open TV coverage when the 81 year-old McGriff had run a race just last weekend and finished in the top twenty.

This type of TV show is exactly the reason we continue to push for additional NASCAR TV programs that allow for conversation. Fans get to see and listen to those reporters who are normally hidden on the Internet and seen only in a snapshot above each column.

At a time when the NASCAR media has come under scrutiny for its slimming numbers and spotty coverage, the ability to see veteran reporters talking about this sport is refreshing. Putting a name with a face is always a positive when the media is involved.

Mike Massaro deserves credit for keeping things on track and adding in his own veteran views as well. This was a program that is likely to start some discussions and possibly return the focus of this NASCAR season to the action on the track.

TDP welcomes your comments about this TV program. To add your 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.