ON TV, TEXAS. AND MICHIGAN

SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPETITION: Lap
after lap of two and three-wide side-by-side racing for the top ten spots,
Junior running up front, drafting, just plain exciting racing. Oh, you didn’t
think I was talking about the Winston Cup race at Michigan did you? The
"Junior" I’m talking about is Al Unser, Jr. and the race was at Texas,
not Michigan.

They just passed the half way point in the
Indy Racing Northern Light Series, and since they went back to green after the
red flag, and they’ve just put on an incredible show. Meanwhile, at Michigan,
they’re making their second round of green flag pit stops, and the field will
get spread out even more. Mayfield has a 6 second lead after the pits cycle
through.

The NASCAR drivers are telling everyone
how competitive this season has been. From one standpoint, they’re right. With
12 winners in 13 races, we’ve had more winners this year already than in the
last few years.

But the problem is that there have only
been one or two races where there was a lot of competition within the race.
Atlanta was the major exception where Earnhardt and Labonte finished side by
side for the lead.

THE "CHOSEN" ONE: I
listened a little bit to MRN’s broadcast of the Michigan race today. One of the
commercials was for Pontiac. They said that Pontiac had been chosen again as the
official pace car of NASCAR.

Talk about misleading. You don’t become an
official anything of NASCAR without paying them some big bucks. To say that
NASCAR "chose" GM is like saying that the auctioneer chooses the
highest bidder at an auction.

TV INNOVATIONS AND ISSUES: ESPN did
some interesting things during their IRNLS race broadcast. They had a camera
view from under the car that was really slick. They also electronically
highlighted one of the pit boxes during a pit stop.

One thing they did that wasn’t an
innovation, but that more race productions need to do, is split screen. It’s
great to see those neat views from the under-car camera, but when there’s
side-by-side racing, you want to see that too. The split-screen is the obvious
solution to that problem.

Another "innovation" ESPN could
use is a "Technical Difficulties, please stand by" graphic. It looks
like they had satellite problems at the end of the race, and now they’re showing
the Northern Lights commercial for the second time since they went dark. No idea
at this point who won, but it looked like it was going to be a two-car,
side-by-side shootout. Now they’ve gone to other programming, and still no word
on what’s going on.

To ESPN’s credit, they did come back and
show us the last 6 laps, and it was an incredible finish. But they’d already
showed us the winner on their "bottom line".

On CBS, the Michigan race was inundated
with rain and they went to a red flag condition. Now we’ll get to see how
committed CBS is to bringing us the whole race. Interestingly, CBS is showing us
now some highlights of previous Michigan races. Looks like those races were a
whole lot more exciting than what we’ve seen today.

CBS just told us that at 4:00 pm, they’d
be switching coverage to TNN. Where have I heard that before? Well, they
actually stuck with it. Looks like they learned their lesson from the Texas
fiasco.