FOX Sports continued with its revolving door of booth analysts during its portion of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season. Mike Joy and Clint Bowyer were joined by a number of people — including Tony Stewart, who was back for a number of races, including the Daytona 500.
You had messes that shouldn’t be repeated, like what amounted to a five-man booth at Circuit of the Americas with Kurt Busch, Chase Elliott (on the phone from Colorado) and Guenther Steiner.
But then there was Busch acquitting himself well when he didn’t have any additional guests in Kansas. And Carl Edwards emerged from Central Missouri to impress at Darlington.
Jamie McMurray is someone who is likely good enough to be in the booth full time. However, FOX doesn’t appear to be game for that; McMurray said as much two weeks ago on The Dale Jr. Download. If that is so, that is a shame. I’d much rather have McMurray than Bowyer.
In our season preview, I wrote that Andy Lally was going to be in the booth for a race or two. That didn’t happen. Lally explained to Frontstretch in August that instead, Kevin Harvick, who will be full time in the booth in 2024, got his reps.
FOX Sports also had a new producer for Cup races in Chuck McDonald, who came from a football background. It was a struggle for him in the truck as the production seemed to be rather slow to pick up issues on track. At Bristol Motor Speedway Easter weekend, it was especially bad as Mike Joy had to guide the production from the booth at times. The hope is that McDonald gets more comfortable in his role going forward and the production can keep up with the on-track action better next season.
At times, the area around the tracks can cause problems. At World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway. pretty much everything under the sun went wrong and none of it was FOX’s fault. First came scoring pylon issues for the entire weekend, then lightning delayed the race for over 90 minutes in the opening laps.
Then, you had a off-site fiber connectivity failure that knocked both FOX and MRN radio off the air on lap 93. The working media had only a green screen where the broadcast was supposed to be. I had to use FOXSports.com for a decent chunk of the race to see anything from my seat in the media center.
Reading all that, you’d think that 2023’s NASCAR Cup Series coverage from FOX Sports 1 was a complete mess. It wasn’t. There were quite a few things that I wish were better, but there was still…
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