Pennzoil 400 presented by Jiffy Lube
As you can imagine, the big news of the weekend came out Friday evening with Chase Elliott’s broken tibia in a snowboarding accident. Both the NASCAR Cup Series and NASCAR Xfinity Series broadcasts started off with discussions about the injury and what it will mean for Cup.
Here, we saw drivers such as Brad Keselowski, Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick talk about the situation and how they handle themselves away from the track. Our own Michael Massie and Bryan Nolen were there when these quotes were being given Saturday.
The general takeaway from NASCAR RaceDay is that likely nothing will change due to Elliott’s injury and that drivers cannot simply park their lives during the season. They have to be able to do what they like. Also, in Elliott’s case, he is not a novice when it comes to snowboarding. Wrecks happen on the slopes. We may never know the particulars of what happened here.
Las Vegas brought Danica Patrick back to the broadcast booth for what will be the first of at least three (two with FOX) appearances for 2023. Compared to Tony Stewart, she is a very different commentator.
In the past, Patrick has struggled to really work well with other analysts. That is not her fault. Her debut booth appearance back in 2015 was abysmal, but that was because she had Michael Waltrip jumping all over her to the point where she felt that she couldn’t contribute. Thankfully, things have gotten better since then, but they aren’t perfect.
Sunday’s broadcast saw Clint Bowyer cutting Patrick off quite a bit. It just seemed unnecessary to me. Let her contribute. She’s actually trying to do good work and if you cut her off all the time to do whatever, that will do a couple of things. One is that it will make the broadcast rather messy. Viewers will have some trouble following what the booth is going on about.
Second, for as much work Patrick does these days in media (her podcast, Pretty Intense, has 184 episodes as of this writing), she still doesn’t have that much TV experience. The number of race broadcasts that she’s worked on to this point is under 10. It takes a long time to really work into a rhythm.
Also, Pretty Intense is mainly an interview show. I’ll admit that a decent percentage of the subject matter is not really my cup of tea. Most of her…
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