Cutoff Coverage Negatively Affects Darlington

In the world of motorsports, Darlington Raceway is truly unique.

Now in its 75th year, the track was built with an egg-shaped design to avoid a minnow pond. It is quirkiness personified. If someone built it today, it would look like the no longer-used oval at Mobility Resort Motegi in Japan (formerly Twin Ring Motegi).

For Leigh Diffey, Darlington was the race that he was looking forward to calling this year. Before this past weekend, he’d never been to Darlington, so he was looking forward to experiencing it.

I’ve never been either.

Sunday night (Sept. 1) was also the final race of the NASCAR Cup Series regular season. As a result, there was a lot of focus on the cutoff and drivers trying their darndest to get into the playoffs.

Of course, as we know, it ultimately didn’t matter since Chase Briscoe rained on their parade.

Darlington is tricky to race at and who better than the last two winners on the 1.366-mile oval (Kyle Larson and Brad Keselowski) to ask about what it takes to win. That is the route that NBC Sports took Sunday during Countdown to Green. After that, it was pretty much all cut off coverage.

Racing-wise, Sunday night’s race was nearly identical to last year. The only difference was that there was one driver (Larson) who was dominant at the front for much more of the race. According to NASCAR’s Loop Data, the amount of passing was all but equal.

If you watched the race, it didn’t seem like it for much of the race.

You would have thought that the passing ticked up in the final 50 laps when the pit strategy came into play. In reality, I think the lack of cautions in the first two stages led to the race getting a little spread out, but the broadcast was too centered on the point storylines to cover much in the way of racing. That is a strategy that hurts broadcasts. It’s one of the reasons that I don’t like playoff time in NASCAR.

A lot of the content that we got Sunday night was based around pit strategy. As I explained when I critiqued the broadcast at Richmond Raceway, NBC Sports is the better outfit to have covering such a race. Viewers had a clear idea of the different strategies at play during the green-flag stops (who stopped short, who was going long, etc.).

It also came into play late in the race when the cautions came out often enough to lead to a split pit sequence. Diffey, Jeff Burton and Steve Letarte were in a good position to keep viewers abreast of the various…