{"id":60,"date":"2007-07-10T06:56:09","date_gmt":"2007-07-10T12:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/nascar-the-last-pepsi-400\/"},"modified":"2007-07-10T07:11:23","modified_gmt":"2007-07-10T13:11:23","slug":"nascar-the-last-pepsi-400","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/nascar-the-last-pepsi-400\/","title":{"rendered":"NASCAR: The Last Pepsi 400"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since I got burned out on weekly NASCAR racing a few years ago, about the only races I try to make an effort at watching are the restrictor plate races, since they usually have more excitement than the others. Saturday night&#8217;s Pepsi 400 was one of the better races Ive seen in a while. Here are some random thoughts I have about it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Isn&#8217;t there a &#8220;big one&#8221; supposed to happen at plate races? I think the most number of cars we saw in a wreck Saturday night was two or three. What happened?<\/li>\n<li>TNT debuted their Wide Open coverage. They touted that viewers were getting the 16&#215;9 &#8220;letterbox&#8221; view on regular 4&#215;3 screens.  I switched back and forth from high def to regular a couple of times, and the high def picture still showed more than the regular picture. Plus, on the high def side, they wasted a LOT of space at the bottom with their info box or ad box or whatever.<\/li>\n<li>I will give kudos to TNT for at least trying something new. Putting the crawl at the bottom of the picture was interesting, but, like ESPN, the crawl doesn&#8217;t go all the way across, stopping on the left side where a regular 4&#215;3 picture would end. Couldn&#8217;t someone have watched a Fox broadcast to see how they do it? TNT and ESPN\/ABC neither make full use of the high def screen real estate; they both have a lot of wasted space. And what&#8217;s with the non-high def in-car cameras? Fox had those.<\/li>\n<li>The main goal of TNT&#8217;s Wide Open coverage was to get people to watch commercials. Didn&#8217;t work on me. I set the race to record on the Comcast DVR, and started watching it about an hour and a half after it started (the only live viewing I did was to compare the picture against the regular TNT channel). About half way through the race we decided to go see a musician friend play, so I watched the rest of it after we got back. I did see one commercial though, and it was pretty funny. It was the one where Larry MacReynolds hopped on the golf cart to go get a Subway sandwich. The rest of the time, when a commercial came on, I hit the macro buttons on my remote that skip 30 or 60 seconds at a time. I guess the most effective &#8220;commercials&#8221; were when Bill Weber announced that the segment was &#8220;brought to you by&#8221; whoever.<\/li>\n<li>Kyle Busch is definitely a man without a team. He&#8217;s a diamond in the rough, and once he matures I predict he&#8217;ll be one of the better drivers on the circuit. It&#8217;s critical for his career to get with the right team next year.<\/li>\n<li>NASCAR and Sprint officially announced the name of the Cup series for next year. As predicted, it&#8217;ll be called the Sprint Cup Series. I wonder if the Sprint car folks have any concern about that name?<\/li>\n<li>Tony Stewart once again opens his mouth and inserts his foot. Why can&#8217;t he just do what his teammate did and say &#8220;I haven&#8217;t seen the replay yet&#8221; and if they show him a replay, say something less insulting about his own teammate?<\/li>\n<li>Dale Junior is looking for a new driver. Hey Dale? Why not help someone who helped you when you were wrecking cars at Nashville Speedway USA? Casey Atwood would be a good choice. Put him in some decent equipment and he can get the job done.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure where the Cup cars are racing next week. That&#8217;s a shame. I used to be so into this sport, my whole weekends were planned around it. If NASCAR doesn&#8217;t figure out that they&#8217;re losing long-time fans at the expense of getting new ones (who won&#8217;t stay around as long), they&#8217;re going to be in deep trouble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since I got burned out on weekly NASCAR racing a few years ago, about the only races I try to make an effort at watching are the restrictor plate races, since they usually have more excitement than the others. Saturday night&#8217;s Pepsi 400 was one of the better races Ive seen in a while. Here &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/nascar-the-last-pepsi-400\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;NASCAR: The Last Pepsi 400&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-racing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}