FOX Hits Rock Bottom with Ignored Fire, Clint Bowyer's Silence (2024)

Texas Motor Speedway has facilitated back and forth many times in its history.

At first, it was a travesty marked by several obvious deficiencies. Then, it got good. Then, it was repaved for a good reason (issues with drainage) and effectively ruined by PJ1.

Now, things might be starting to get better … when drivers don’t wreck due to bumps. Sunday’s (April 14) AutoTrader EchoPark Automotive 400 started off clean, then turned into a wreckfest.

This was not the best hour (or hours) for FOX Sports. The trouble seemed to start early.

On the second lap of the race, there was some kind of stack up that started around where Ross Chastain was running. Do I know what happened there? Not really. All we have to go on is the booth talking about it and some aftermath. The root cause was never shown. Forty-five seconds into the race, and the broadcast team was already in trouble.

Later on, there was a fire in the pits.

You see the black smoke from the fire, but it’s almost like they ignored it. Thankfully, pit crews with leaf blowers put it out pretty quick, so no caution was thrown. This is another thing that should have been reported on more thoroughly when it happened. Watching this broadcast, you wouldn’t have had much of an idea of who caused it.

Later on, a shot was shown on the jumbotrons literally more than an hour later indicating that Ryan Blaney drove through some spilled fuel, setting it ablaze. However, it wasn’t Blaney’s fuel that caught fire (he hadn’t even taken any yet). It was Corey LaJoie’s. Apparently, the Spire Motorsports No. 7 team had some issues with spillage all day Sunday. It wasn’t broached on the broadcast, but I know for a fact that it was covered on PRN Radio.

The situation was made worse by the fact that it did negatively affect at least one driver in Ty Gibbs. The fire went through his pit stall, forcing him to delay his stop. That ultimately cost him track position.

Shortly before the fire, FOX Sports thought that it was a good time to de-emphasize the live coverage in favor of a piece where Michael Waltrip talked to Kyle Larson about his upcoming Indianapolis 500 adventures. I’m very happy that Larson is going to have at it at Indianapolis, and it seems like he’s adjusted well (he claimed after winning the Cup pole Saturday (April 13) that the Dallara DW18 at Indianapolis was somehow less sketchy than the Next Gen car in Texas). A good run at Indianapolis could very well elevate his stature in the sport and elevate dirt racing as a whole.

That said, lap 35 of the race is not where to show that. Especially since FOX Sports effectively missed the start of the first round of green-flag pit stops to show that. There’s a time and a place for features like that, and it’s not lap 35 of the race.

Later on, you had another instance where I have no idea what was going on behind the scenes. On lap 155, Kevin Harvick made a punny reference to Chastain’s crew chief Phil Surgen “surgically put [Chastain] into position to win the stage,” which Chastain ultimately did. However, this statement was followed by a long, uncomfortable silence.

This was bizarre to watch in real time. What followed was even more bonkers.

Harvick said, “Hello, hello, Clint,” to which Clint Bowyer quickly tried to claim that he was in complete agreement with Harvick and that he was speechless from Harvick’s wordplay. Then Harvick asked him what he did Saturday night. Apparently, Bowyer went to the Fort Worth Stockyards and had a great time. That led to Harvick accusing Bowyer of being hungover on live TV.

Naturally, Bowyer got defensive here. I don’t blame him. No one wants someone to accuse you of such actions while on the job. It’s rather unprofessional, to say the least. Then again, Harvick has spent a lot of time around Bowyer over the years. I feel like he’s probably seen Bowyer hung over in the past and knows what it looks like.

This was rough to watch, folks. Criminy, it was rough.

Let’s get a couple of things straight. I don’t know if Bowyer was hungover or not. I didn’t see him all weekend in Texas. If you have the time, it is OK to go to a bar and/or restaurant to enjoy yourself. I definitely did not have the time to do that in Texas.

That said, your fun cannot get in the way of your job. Even if Bowyer wasn’t hungover, just being accused of it is very bad.

That’s not all that is worth noting here. Tyler Reddick had a dominant car early in the final stage. However, he got burned by a terrible pit stop that cost him his entire lead over Denny Hamlin and then some. He then proceeded to run Hamlin back down like it was nothing.

That pass on-track was what amounted to a virtual pass for the lead since it happened before the round of stops ended. Viewers never saw this pass live on-air. FOX literally missed it. The booth acknowledged that fact as well.

Indeed, until the shenanigans picked up in the closing laps, the whole booth was truly off of their A-game. It’s like they just weren’t paying attention a lot. Just a bizarre broadcast to watch.

Also, Larry McReynolds butchered the name of Ryan Bergenty, crew chief on Todd Gilliland’s Long John Silver’s Ford as “Ron Burgundy,” the fictional San Diego-based news anchor from the Anchorman movies. McReynolds has since apologized (see below). Luckily, Bergenty took it in stride.

Post-race coverage was relatively brief since the 16 cautions pushed the race over the 7 p.m. ET sign-off time. Viewers only got to see interviews with race-winner Chase Elliott and runner-up Brad Keselowski before they left Texas to get to NHRA coverage from Las Vegas.

This was another instance of FOX Sports short-staffing their pit reporters.

Jamie Little was out there with Keselowski for what seemed like six minutes before she had the chance to interview him. Since TV gets priority in the bullpen over everyone else, the rest of the media literally had to sit and wait for her to finish. That is why you didn’t get an interview with William Byron on FOX’s post-race coverage.

Byron spoke to the assembled media on pit road for a little less than two minutes, then left. That’s why you didn’t get his side of the last-lap mess with Chastain on-air.

Of note, Keselowski talked about scoring a bit in his interview. At the time, NASCAR had scored him in third behind Byron, which technically would make not interviewing Byron even more of a mistake than it was. NASCAR only officially changed it something like 30 minutes after the race ended.

Sunday’s broadcast from Texas Motor Speedway will go down as one of the worst that FOX Sports has put out there in quite some time. The production continues to leave a lot to be desired. It’s putting decent workers in bad positions.

I get having to get out of Texas quickly due to the timeslot issues. I can’t do anything about the commercials. They are what they are.

However, we just cannot have situations like we had Sunday. It almost looked like a network in a lame-duck year mailing it in. We know for a fact that that is not the case because FOX has already re-upped as part of the new TV deal that starts next year.

Talladega Superspeedway is a great place to get back on-track. By NASCAR standards, the GEICO 500 is a pretty easy race to cover. Most of the field stays fairly close together, despite the fact that the Next Gen car has spread things out a little in recent years. If something happens, it’ll be fairly close to the front and easy to cover. The strategies rarely vary all that much, unlike Sunday.

Sunday’s race wasn’t the only problematic broadcast on-tap. Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series broadcast was interesting in its own right with Chastain in the booth, but they had their own problems there that we’ll cover later this week.

That’s all for this week. Next weekend is going to be quite busy. The NASCAR Cup Series will be at Talladega Superspeedway for its first visit of the year. It’ll be joined by the NASCAR Xfinity and the ARCA Menards series.

The NTT IndyCar has one of its crown jewel events, the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach. It’ll be joined by the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and GT America powered by AWS. The FIA World Endurance Championship will also be at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari in Italy. TV listings can be found here.

We will have a critique of the Cup and Xfinity race broadcasts from Talladega in next week’s edition of Couch Potato Tuesday here at Frontstretch. In The Critic’s Annex, we’ll cover Saturday’s Andy’s Frozen Custard 300.

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