I am speechless. Is this what NASCAR coverage has come to? A boothful of blathering idiots who can't shut up for one second, and an advertisement bar/ticker that takes up the bottom quarter of the screen and grows with a PIP-like screen that shows "clever" commercials during the coverage???

And...what exactly does TNT WIDE OPEN COVERAGE mean??? What a shame what once a hallowed July 4th tradition in watching the Firecracker 400 (or even the Pepsi 400) has come to one big marketing and advertising program with a little racing coverage thrown it.

I am speechless. Is this what NASCAR coverage has come to? A boothful of blathering idiots who can't shut up for one second, and an advertisement bar/ticker that takes up the bottom quarter of the screen and grows with a PIP-like screen that shows "clever" commercials during the coverage???

And...what exactly does TNT WIDE OPEN COVERAGE mean??? What a shame what once a hallowed July 4th tradition in watching the Firecracker 400 (or even the Pepsi 400) has come to one big marketing and advertising program with a little racing coverage thrown it.

Couldn't agree more. I just sent an email to TNT, but it was a waste of time. This is an embarrassment to sports coverage in general. But what are you gonna do? ESPN/ABC will be here soon.

Switched to watching TNT SD because I can actually see more of the race there then on the HD what's up with that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Too bad we have to always miss the bottom 25% of the screen

We need to email TNT and tell them some of the race is visible through all the Ads and graphics, they must have missed a spot! :rolleyes:

Could be worst, we could still be seeing all that Digger crap Fox was throwing at us.

That race used to be one of my favorites, but now that TNT has taken over the coverage it is unwatchable. I recorded the broadcast and ended up watching the first lap and the last two. The finish of the race was spectacular, but there was no way I could watch three hours of constant advertising. The garbage on the bottom of the screen is much too distracting.

Great ending to that race with Kyle "the ego" Bush in the wall.

The finish of the race was spectacular

For years to come

I cant stand either him or Stewart, I wish both ended up in the wall.

It's not enough that we have all the ads on the cars (which has always been part of the sport), but now with TNT we have CONSTANT ads throughout the race. I mean, constant. It was borderline unwatchable, but I'm sure they'll defend it by saying that they keep eyeballs on the screen instead of skipping commercials.

Was great to see the prima donna get wrecked at the end, but that was about it. He got what he deserved, Tony's car was better and Tony proved it. To his credit, he was apologetic about it afterwards, but he didn't need to be - he was blocked by a slower car that got what was coming to him.

Yahoo sports has an article this morning about the win and how Stewarts attitude has changed. They are talking about how he hasn't blown up and been blasting Nascar and Goodyear. Well I think I know why, HE IS WINNING, lets have him out of the chase and doing poorly and lets see how much he has grown up.

Didn't watch the race yesterday. Saw the highlights on ESPN. Wow is my only response to the graphics. It wasn't like that at Sonoma was it?

Hubby and I were also thrown by this new "in screen" commercial coverage. Now, we must have missed it, but can anyone tell me what the difference meant in the colors on the ticker? Only white and black but we couldn't figure out what they stood for? :confused:

Thanks :D

I guess they dont get any credit for NOT breaking away for commercials every 5 minutes? Geez, thats the whole point of what they were doing...the "clever" commercials during the coverage are usually the full screen commercials when there is no coverage...do you actually prefer the latter? Honestly, I dont get why they dont go ahead and do this for all of their races.

i guess they dont get any credit for not breaking away for commercials every 5 minutes? Geez, thats the whole point of what they were doing...the "clever" commercials during the coverage are usually the full screen commercials when there is no coverage...do you actually prefer the latter? Honestly, i dont get why they dont go ahead and do this for all of their races.

+1

I'm with the latter posters, I'll take a little less screen real estate in exchange for being able to watch the race during commercial breaks. I prefer the way ABC and the IRL handle it over TNT's version, but this is acceptable to me.

I think the drivers with white background were the "Coca-Cola Family Of Racing" drivers, i.e. those who have Coke as a sponsor.

Hmmm not a whole lot of serious Nascar fans in here. TNT did this same thing at the Coke 400 last year too.

Put me in the camp of I'd rather have a break for commercials rather than have so much of the screen taken up by the graphics. This was too excessive and I could not watch the race because of it. I personally despise all of the crawling tickers on the various channels. I get too easily distracted by the crawl and miss the action occuring on the screen.

Hmmm not a whole lot of serious Nascar fans in here. TNT did this same thing at the Coke 400 last year too.

And the year before that. :)

I'm surprised by how many people didn't like the Wide Open coverage. I like it because you are less liekly to miss any action. How many times does Fox go to a commercial and they come back to see cars on pit road? I think this would have been better appreciated if something had happened when the commercial was playing, but the race could still be seen on the screen.

I could take it or leave it. There were times during the race where it definitely felt like we were seeing less of the race than we should have because of all the graphics, but there was also a question of whether or not the sponsors were really getting their money's worth. Given how much more airtime they got (outside of the commercials), it seemed like a win-win for them. Still, this is just a once a year thing (so far), so we'll just have to consider it an experiment. Good? Not sure...

While we're not Stewart fans AT ALL, he was definitely a class act in victory. Kyle pretty much ended up where he should have, based on where and how he was driving, and Tony showed that he is not the same person he used to be - he was gracious and thankful, and didnt even have reason to be apologetic. He earned the victory the right way and had reason to be proud.

Hmmm not a whole lot of serious Nascar fans in here. TNT did this same thing at the Coke 400 last year too.

And the year before that. :)
Given the track record of TNT making changes to HD telecasts for the better, what do you expect?

I din't think the graphics were all that bad. When everyone has a widescreen TV and they can push the larger graphics areas out to the corner of the widescreen instead of leaving it where the 4:3 viewers can see it things will look much better.

You'll be waiting a looong time for them to have widescreen-only graphics, I'd bet they'll be protecting for SD sets 10 years from now.

The problem I have with TNT is that they take up way too much of the screen for little gain, just like ESPN's MNF monstrosity. At least with TNT you know it's because they're going to show endless ads there. With ESPN it's just a waste of space.

I'd rather them go to commercial and come out of it abruptly if there was a crash, just like they all used to do in the past. It's not like you miss much under green with NASCAR racing as it is nowadays.