Michigan International Speedway was considered to be one of the key races in how the Next Gen car will be perceived on intermediate tracks in the NASCAR Cup Series. Naturally, if you’re not at the track, the TV broadcast is the primary way that you’ll think about how the race was.
NBC Sports seemed to have taken that to heart prior to the race Sunday, Aug. 7.
The FireKeepers Casino 400 brought Dale Earnhardt Jr. back to the play-by-play role for the second time in Cup this year. He fully admits that he’s not the best play-by-play man out there but that he enjoys it to a point.
Rick Allen took Sunday off from the booth. However, Allen didn’t just fly home and spend the day with his family. He was still there at the track at the butt crack of dawn with the rest of the production staff and was willing to be a team player, as Earnhardt explained in a tweet.
after our morning meeting, Rick stopped me and simple said to take a rundown (a detailed sheet of paper) for the CDTG show “just in case” there was a weather issue and I was needed to cover in the booth.
— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) August 8, 2022
Earnhardt explained that he wasn’t supposed to have a role on Countdown to Green Sunday. He was going to just lay out and go over some notes in the booth until the race broadcast started at 3 p.m. ET. As you could tell, that didn’t exactly come to pass as it was pouring at the track three minutes into the pre-race show and Steve Letarte was down an umbrella.
As a result of the deluge, Earnhardt and Jeff Burton spent about 35-40 minutes anchoring from the booth. They talked about the various topics of the day in the Cup Series and related their own experiences in regards to either growing up in the sport or having kids growing up around the sport. For someone who had effectively not prepared to work the pre-race show, Earnhardt did well despite not having significant prep time.
This is just one more example that Allen has stated previously about the kind of atmosphere that he wants on NBC Sports’ NASCAR broadcasts. In 2018, Allen told Frontstretch that he wants the booth commentators to be bound together as a group. That can mean anything from actually taking vacations together (which has happened) to helping each other out whenever one can.
Once the rains let up, viewers started getting more pre-race interviews once everyone came out from under cover.
Michigan apparently had its best attendance for a Cup race Sunday since 2016….
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Frontstretch…