IRL Richmond Rocks and ESPN SUCKS!

Despite the AWFUL broadcast coverage, what a great race. Next year, this is the one race I am going to make sure I attend. DK, it's only 139 miles from Columbia to Richmond... I'll be making Reservations in 2006.

Helio ran in the top 3 all night, handled traffic better than anyone else and had a little luck on his side with Manning and Yazukawa got together right in front of him.

There was non-stop action all night with cars trying to stay out of the way, cars trying to get in the way, drivers trying to block, drivers trying to avoid being chopped, drivers being patient, drivers being impatient, and tempers were flaring. The Toyotas benefited from having an engine test a week ago and the Red Bull Cheever drivers finally got to run up front and Carpentier had a great run to 3rd. Tony Kanaan finally made a mistake and for the first time in a year and 7 months spun, hit the wall and did not finish a race. Truly amazing he made it that long.

Danica stayed out of trouble, didn't cause any wrecks and brought the car home in one piece 4 laps down in 10th place. A very respectable finish for her first trip to Richmond. Yet ESPN didn't choose to focus on that success... instead they decided to leave their coverage of the race 30 minutes early to show a repeat of the Danica special they aired before Texas. An unbelievable end to really CRAPPY coverage of the Richmond Race.

Some of the finer moments from ESPN's booth work:

They had an in-car camera looking up from the dash at Danica's helmet. During a caution, Danica lifts up her visor and wipes her eyes. A pretty common occurrence on a hot night under caution. Anyone who has watched racing of any kind sees this all the time. Yet wonderful Todd Harris makes a big deal about how she actually lifted the visor and wiped her eyes while driving. Goodyear did jump in and explained to Todd that every driver does that when it's that hot. But the best was that you could hear Todd Harris in the background go 'oh'.

Midway through the race, ESPN showed a contrived piece with Todd Harris driving a Chevy Cobalt around the track with Goodyear in the front seat, Dr. Punch and Vince Welch in the back seat with Jamie in the middle. Other than waste a minute of our time, I have no idea what the point of that was.

I counted Todd Harris say or refer to the following analogy 7 times. Helio is driving hurt, just like when Michael Jordan had the flu and yet went for 60 points. Can Helio win while hurt? Umm... Todd... that was a bad analogy the first time, you didn't need to repeat it 6 more times.

And please, please stop referring to Helio and Sam as the "Penske Boys" We know you can't tell the cars apart, but here is a tip, look at timing and scoring and see which driver is ahead of the other and then as the cars go by, you will know that the first one in line was Helio and the second was Sam. As a side note, this was killing me during the 500 as Todd complained on every commercial break that he couldn't tell the Penske cars apart and in turn was just going to refer to them as the Penske Boys.

The sad thing is Harris' performance kept me from even remembering if Goodyear had any doosies. I'm sure he mentioned oversteer, understeer, marbles and dirty air at least 50 times... I'm just immune to it.

But on to the best part, the production of the broadcast:

So the broadcast was scheduled to run from 6:30 to 9pm here in Indiana. They had a 15 minute intro with a few interviews. Nice to see... so many times they come on air on the pace lap and don't even have time to run through the grid. Unfortunately everything went down hill quickly from there.

I gave tremendous kudos to ESPN and their advertising partners for the split screen advertising concept. Great idea. However, I didn't expect it to lead to 5 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of racing. Unbelievable amount of commercials. It's too bad the radio is 30 seconds ahead of my digital cable. Makes it impossible to watch the TV on mute with the Radio on :-(

Instead of having pit reporters in the leaders' pits, Jamie was in Danica's pit. In turn, we never did quite get a good explanation for why drivers moved up and down during their pit stops. But we did get a good description of Danica making her stops.

So the race finished at 8:25. Perfect... finally the IRL was going to have a race finish early with time to interview the top 5, show Helio not only climb the fence, but also in the winners circle. Get Tomas Enge's reaction to being black flagged in the final 10 laps costing him 3rd place. Get Roger Yazukawa's side of the Sharp and Manning incidents. Get reaction from Patrick Carpentier on his best finish in the IRL in his first go around on a short track. Get Danica' thoughts on surviving her first race on the bull ring. The possibilities to get all the drivers some face time after a very eventful race would have been outstanding publicity for the IRL leading up to Sportscenter.

Instead, ESPN sent Dr. Punch out to the fence, asked Helio to take off his helment for a 10 second interview then signed off without even giving the final run down of the event. And why???? So they could air a re-run of the Danica special they ran prior to the Texas event. HELLO???? WTF????

ESPN... YOU SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!! You've ruined basketball for me and now you are ruining racing.