NASCAR Celebrates The 4th By Blowing Up Kyle Busch

Seriously, watch this video...anytime Kyle Busch gets wrecked, it's worth seeing, especially when it's on the final lap and he gets booted from the lead by virtue of his own actions. Tony Stewart makes a great crossover move and Busch tries to block him one too many times. It's very much like Carl Edwards' crash at Talladega earlier this season:

(you can jump ahead to the 1:20 mark to get right to the action...)



Either way, Stewart didn't do anything wrong, and as a bonus, we all got to see Kyle Busch become human fireworks to celebrate the holiday.

I had a few other thoughts while watching NASCAR this Independence Day:

1. The NASCAR on TNT broadcast of the Coke Zero 400 was new, innovative, and could be a sign of things to come. They called it "wide open" coverage, and the key was that they rarely cut to commercial breaks, and when they did, it was only for three or four ads. Instead of cutting away, they kept the race video going as it had been and played a single advertisement in the lower right corner of the screen. They did this a handful of times throughout the race, and it seemed pretty effective.

Honestly, I feel like more and more of this kind of thing is going to happen on television. In an era of the DVR's ever-growing presence, it's getting very easy to avoid commericals. I find myself either recording a show or pausing the TV while I'm off cooking or something so that I can come back and be able to skip the breaks. Given the heavy saturation levels of advertising, I still see my fair share of ads -- but if we know anything about Madison Avenue, we know that they're always looking for ways to monopolize our attention.

Basically, I see it playing out the way those annoying little promos at the bottom of the screen during every show on TV now. At first, they were pretty innocuous -- just a line of text with the show's name and scheduled time. Now, they've turned into this:



I see regular ads taking a similar form in the near future -- instead of shows cutting away for extended commercial breaks that can easily be skipped by the DVR users of the world, they'll probably start showing one or two commercials at a time, or just running ads across the bottom during parts of the show/movie that are known to be less interesting. It will all be very annoying, as all advertising is, but since we're all consumers and people who work for advertising companies have no souls, it will all result in us lining up to dump our money into their pockets.

2. If you're not a NASCAR fan -- well, I can't imagine why not, but I'll continue -- you may have to bear with me for a second.

I just have to point out that Kyle Petty has been a pleasant surprise in the TNT race coverage booth this season. Usually, when they switch over from the Fox Sports team of Mike Joy, Larry McReynolds and Darrell Waltrip, I get just a little sad because I know the NBC/TNT crew just isn't quite as sharp. Especially since the loss of Benny Parsons, who was a fount of racing information and wonderful little squeals of delight at every tight pass or near miss on the track.

When TNT took over the coverage this season, Kyle Petty was not fun to listen to. At Pocono, I remember just wishing he would stop talking, or that Wally Dallenbach would just punch him in the face and get it over with. But since then, apparently Kyle's been watching old clips of D.W. or B.P., because he's contributing valuable information, getting a few of those polite laughs from his broadcast partners every so often, and pretty much carrying the team in the booth. I suspect that the removal of Bill Weber (who has the personality of a defrosted corpse) from the team probably helped quite a bit. Whatever it was, the trio of Ralph Sheheen, Dallenbach and Petty seems to be running on all cylinders right now.

3. Of course, all this talk about NASCAR wrecks gets me thinking about some of the craziest crashes I've seen...

Elliott Sadler at Talladega:



Ryan Newman at Daytona:



Steve Park at Pocono:



Michael McDowell in practice at Texas:



Geoff Bodine in the truck series at Daytona:



And of course, Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s fatal wreck in the 2001 Daytona 500:



I tell you what, I don't care what you think about NASCAR drivers and whether or not they're athletes -- no other athlete has to worry about the constant possibility of a fiery death while they compete. Anyone who can manipulate a 3,400-pound hunk of metal and rubber with 850 horsepower and 550 foot-pounds of torque around a track that is not conducive to turning...well...they deserve a lot more respect than they get from the "traditional" sports fans of the world.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed your 4th of July, wherever you celebrated it, and I hope that you enjoyed the fireworks, either on the track or in the sky...