Monday afternoon races are never good for the sport.
It severely limits the visibility of the event, regardless of where it is. Also, the on-track product can be negatively affected by both the track surface and the general desire to get the race over with.
Monday (May 1) saw Rusty Wallace join Mike Joy and Clint Bowyer in the FOX broadcast booth for his first TV NASCAR Cup Series broadcast for many years. He was already out of the booth by the time I started critiquing for Frontstretch, so I never really got to write much of anything about his commentary during his ESPN days. It does say something that ESPN replaced him in the Cup booth after only one year in favor of Dale Jarrett and relegated him to a studio role.
Last week, Frontstretch‘s own Michael Massie had the chance to talk to Wallace, who is now a part of MRN Radio’s broadcast crew. During that interview, he described the difference between calling a race on radio as compared to television.
Having to be more descriptive with your commentary sort of comes with the game on radio. After all, most of your listeners cannot see the race.
That said, I really wanted to see how Wallace would do in the booth. Compared to what I remember from the late 2000s, Monday saw a different Wallace in the booth. A bit more calculated and maybe not as wild. Then again, Rusty’s 66 years old these days.
What I did see is someone that did quite a bit of prep for his time in the booth. He came armed with some thoughts. There was a discussion of the whole extracurricular activities argument since Alex Bowman got hurt last week at 34 Raceway, something that Frontstretch’s Stephen Stumpf covered on Sunday.
Wallace seems to have followed Ty Gibbs fairly closely so far this season and has really liked what he’s seen. It is arguable that part of the reason that he’s gone about his rookie year so quietly is that the end of 2022 was really hard on him. We don’t really need to rehash why the end of last year was so hard on Gibbs. You can put up a hard front all you want, but having an entire crowd taunting you like they did last fall is going to be hard on the average 19-year-old (he’s 20 now).
Overall, I felt that Wallace brought some good analysis to Monday’s telecast. He was engaging to both Joy and Bowyer, drawing the regular analyst into a slightly more substantial role on the broadcast that was good to…
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