Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect from Sunday’s (Feb. 25) race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Last year’s event had 20 lead changes and wasn’t all that exciting. It was a lot like Saturday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series’ Fr8 208. That is not what we had.
Sunday’s race will be remembered best for the finish between Daniel Suarez, Kyle Busch and Ryan Blaney. FOX brought its A-game for it.
Yes, we haven’t had a finish like this in many years. In the 35 years that I’ve been watching NASCAR, you could realistically count three-wide finishes for the win on one hand. Examples would include Ron Bouchard winning at Talladega Superspeedway in 1981 and the time that Todd Bodine stole a win at Rockingham Speedway in 1995.
The biggest takeaway that I had from Sunday was that it was clean-up day. Remember the whole mess about whether William Byron or Alex Bowman was leading when the final caution flew and FOX seemingly did nothing to help viewers out?
That was alleviated on Sunday. Suarez was credited as the leader during the final yellow of the race and FOX used the same tech that it used when Michael McDowell was declared the winner of the Daytona 500 in 2021.
Probably the worst coverage on Sunday was of the big wreck on the second lap of the race. While the clip NASCAR posted to its YouTube channel starts with likely the best shot of the incident, it took quite a while for FOX to get there.
While only one driver (Josh Williams) was eliminated from the race due to the crash, many drivers had their races completely ruined. Some drivers, like Bubba Wallace and Chase Elliott, got away from the wreck with minimal damage. Others were off the pace from then on. Tyler Reddick ended up 17 laps down. Bowman was five laps down.
Compared to the season opener at Daytona International Speedway, there was much less to gripe about. That said, I don’t think FOX did the best job in relaying information about penalties. The green flag stops Sunday reminded me of what I’ve seen in the Trucks previously with a bunch of drivers getting penalized.
The Byron-McDowell incident was also a headscratcher. Very surprising that it didn’t draw a caution knowing that McDowell ended up in the wall. Then again, NASCAR didn’t want to throw the yellow in the middle of stops and screw up the race.
I think there…
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