The spring race at Darlington Raceway is now the designated Throwback Weekend for NASCAR. It is the perfect place for it, despite the fact that it is not NASCAR’s oldest track. It is the oldest superspeedway on the circuit and likely one of the more rustic venues that the NASCAR Cup Series competes at.
Sunday saw NASCAR having to compete head-to-head with Formula 1, which was racing at the Miami International Autodrome outside of Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla. A woman I know actually made the drive to Miami Gardens to go to the race Sunday. Both races went green within minutes of each other.
In all seriousness, this scenario could have been avoided, but NASCAR likely insisted upon it in order to (in their eyes) maximize TV ratings. Seriously, if they really wanted to do that, they wouldn’t have put the race on FOX Sports 1 and had PBA Bowling on FOX. In addition, it’s not a good idea to put both Cup and F1 on at the same time. Knowing that this race went rather long (the finish was after 7 p.m. ET), it would have been a good idea to start the race earlier. If you know something’s going to be on that could siphon away some of your audience, get out in front of it.
Likely the biggest draw for Sunday’s broadcast was that three different legends were going to be in the broadcast booth. Stage one had Richard Petty in the booth. Bobby Labonte tagged in for stage two, while Bill Elliott took over for the final stage.
In Petty’s case, he was also the honorary starter, so he didn’t show up in the booth until lap 24, after the first green-flag commercial break. Petty does have booth experience. There were a couple of times during his career where he got out of the car extremely early, then went in the booth. An example of this was the 1987 Budweiser 400k at the now-defunct Riverside International Raceway.
After Neil Bonnett was killed at Daytona in 1994, CBS, TNN and TBS had a revolving…
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