The Daytona 500 is the biggest NASCAR race weekend of the year. An audience of the better part of 10 million viewers will be watching. Typically, you would want to put your best foot forward. It didn’t seem like that was the case on Sunday.
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Sunday is the biggest day of the year for the NASCAR Cup Series. The Daytona 500. 200 laps were scheduled, but viewers got 212 laps. At the end, you had a somewhat surprising (but not really) winner and some torn up equipment. You also had some frustrated fans.
While I take written notes about the races to write this column, I also check Twitter to see what fans were talking about. Obviously, one of the issues that people had with the telecast was the commercials. That resulted in the topic #Commercial500” reaching the top 10 in the United States trending topics on Twitter during the race. Sure, NASCAR would want people to be talking about their race on Twitter, but not like that.
Given the cost of the TV deals these days, I don’t often harp about excessive commercial breaks in Couch Potato Tuesday. I find that it’s not really worth my time. Yes, it bites, but you have to be realistic.
That said, I do keep track of the commercial breaks under green and their length. Sunday’s race had 14 commercial breaks under green which amounted to nearly 36.5 minutes. Five of those 14 (including the last four) were side-by-side breaks. The last of these breaks ended on lap 169.
As crazy as that sounds, those numbers aren’t really out of whack from what we’ve seen in the Daytona 500 in recent years. Those 14 commercial breaks under green are right about normal if you don’t have a lot of yellows. Sunday’s race didn’t have many yellows early (one outside of the stage breaks in the first 300 miles), so you’re going to get a lot of that.
What is a little different is that the final break under green ended with 32 laps to go in regulation (44 overall). That is something I can use previous races to check. Last year’s final green-flag break ended on lap 182. The year before, it was lap 179. It was lap 153 due to a bunch of yellows in 2019 and lap 183 in 2017. The latest that I found going back through my years of notes was approximately lap 188 in 2013.
The front-loading of commercial breaks early on is apparently a strategy that new FOX NASCAR producer Chuck McDonald is advocating for. McDonald comes to FOX NASCAR from FOX Sports’ college football coverage. There is…
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