Door Bumper Clear - Mike Forde & Vegas II: Do The Playoffs Hurt Star Power?

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Here’s something we didn’t see coming… Mike Forde, NASCAR’s Managing Director for Racing Communications, joins Freddie Kraft, Tommy Baldwin, and Stephanie Otey on Door Bumper Clear this week! The crew wastes no time as Mike and Freddie jump right in and clear the air of their past disagreements, including a comment Freddie made about the Daytona 500 just a couple of weeks ago. In Spot On Spot Off, the crew discusses Ty Dillon’s miscommunication with William Byron that led to their catastrophic crash, which of the four drivers below the cut line can make it Championship Four, and Steve O’Donnell’s comments on the Playoffs potentially hurting star power in NASCAR. Plus, we have #AskDBC, Reaction Theatre, and more!Real fans wear Dirty Mo. Hit the link and join the crew.👇https://shop.dirtymomedia.com/ Want more DBC? Check out and subscribe to the new DBC YouTube channel! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The following is a production of Dirty Mode Media. Called me Frat Freddy the other day in a group tech. Or he just misspelled fat. Either way, he can kiss my ass. Let's fight. Let's get it over with us. Let's knock each other out and let's move on. I think he's a whiny.

That's what I think. Next thing you know, I got no fire seat on. Routy Nation fans are getting lucky tonight. You want to have gimmicks. Let's go all out. I would never, and here they come, never and like they never have before. Right enough, you love them. Hey, what's up, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of Door Bumper Clear, where we're all, some of us are running on very little sleep. Some of us, because they stayed up too late studying notes. Some of us because we were flying back forward. I think, I don't know, you may be the most rested person here. But I am still Freddie Craft, I think. Spotter for Bob Wallace, spot for Dean Thompson this week. Joining me as always, Thomas. How are you today?

Good morning. I feel good. I got a little toothache, but. You had an interesting remedy for your toothache. You were just telling us. Just drink a bottle of tequila. Not a bottle. No.

No. Carson, I don't know where the hell Carson is today. Who knows? I forget where she took off to. But Stephanie Odie has joined us. I don't know what the hell you did to get thrown to the wolves like this.

But I think you were here the other day in the studio and that next thing you know you're hosting one of the shows. Yeah, I was like, okay, the NASCAR has to learn. Okay, I just came in here so randomly. So the long story short was. I was introduced to NASCAR.

just a year ago. I met Ross at a charity event for a folds of honor in Nashville. And then I jump into football season and Denny becomes a diehard Ohio State fan, mainly because of Travis upstairs. Of course. We are well aware. Yeah. So they came along to a bunch of our games and I took a gamble this out offseason,

hoping to get some ESPN games. And then I needed to diversify my work. And that's when I was like, okay, interview your friends. So it's just kind of ripple effects. So it's been awesome. Everyone in this world has been very welcoming. I'm still learning. As you noted, I'm doing all my study work, but it's been fun.

And it's been successful, too. You've been part of that win streak, too. And I was going to say, you should be the most sought-after interviewer in the series because everybody you interview wins. Yes. It's every week. Speaking of how the hell did you get here? Mike Ford, where did you come from?

How the hell did this happen? That is the question. as I know Lee Daffa I was catching up on episodes sort of get my bearings and surreal is not is maybe not the word I use completely bad shit crazy

might be the word when Mike Davis called me I was I was like wait wait does anyone know did you ask anyone did you talk anyone yeah Freddy's all about it all right so for the backstory that a lot of people

may not realize Mike is the what is your official title Managing Director of Racing Communications for nextco So basically what that means is every time Mike listens to this episode, this show, he gets mad of me about something. And if I ever get in trouble, it's usually I have Mike that I hear from first, something stupid that I'd say.

So, yeah. We've been good this year. How many times you could? How many times? There's probably been moments this year. I think, so how this actually started is, so Steve O'Donnell, NASCAR president, was on the Dale Jr. down there last week. And after the interview, we went up to Mike Davis's office.

just to shoot the bowl and catch up. We haven't seen each other. So it was myself, Amanda Ellis, who I think a lot of people know, if you listen to Holler Talk. Now that NASCAR podcast that I co-host, she's one of the co-hosts as well. And so she started talking. I did not, I did not bring this up.

I did not bust chops here. And she started getting in on Mike, on the conversation you had with Reddick about is the Daytona 500 as important as it used to be. And so she was doing, it very Amanda, very nice, very good. And I was like, let me just step in a second. That was outrageous what he did.

And so... So one time. So I think this year was just one time. I was going to ask you, so like, has there been one? I mean, obviously, we got called to the hauler one time. That was maybe the most. But... I had nothing to do with that one.

Okay, so that's even better then. Do you have a moment in the last few years that you think that sticks out where you really wanted to just punch me in the face or something like that? Yeah. Let me count the way. How long do we got? Yeah. So I've,

as I've kind of gotten into this role and done this now, this is now my, wrapping up my 19th year in NASCAR, but in this particular role of sort of managing the competition comms, probably doing it now six years. I've, I started off with the super thin skin. Everything else is fat,

but the skin is super thin. And I've gotten thicker. skin and so I don't really let as much bother me. I remember I blew up in Mike two years ago maybe when I think you said

the next-gen car ruined Super Speedway racing, it's ruined short track racing and now it's ruined road course racing and so I got really upset about that. Yeah I did hear about that one. Somebody mentioned that one to me. I forgot about that one. Yeah, that was probably not ideal.

Has all the attention been behind the doors? or have you guys done it? Like, have you been heated to each other's face? We text. We've texts back in four times. The show's been better since Tommy NASCAR's been on. Now that we have two members of the NASCAR family here with us, Tommy France and Mike. But, yeah, you know, but the good news is, you know, today we can kind of let it fly because you and Amanda are the only ones from NASCAR that ever listen to this show.

So we can say whatever. Nobody's going to know about it. I think they'll listen to this one. So I think that's. And when I was getting into it with Mike, and I kind of feel bad because I've also made a rule, because I made this mistake before going to people's bosses and not to the direct person. That's just a chicken move. So I was thinking about it. I felt bad.

And I don't think your question to Redick was out of line. I think it was probably oddly timed, but I think you were going off, you know, conversation that maybe junior was out of right. But so my point to Mike was like if Reddick was like, no, that's crazy. It's Daytona 500 is awesome. It's still in the number one race. Like I want to win that more than ever. I just don't think it would have been clipped and posted. I think, I think.

So that's what I get on Mike a lot. I'm like sometimes Dirty Mo trades on negativity to get engagement. And he argues with me on that one and I'll argue back. And then we get Leland in a good place. like we it was it didn't get, I wouldn't say he had heated, but Amanda was like, all right, let's change your stuff good. He's like, this is not arguing. I'm like, yeah, this is just sport.

Like I tried to explain to those guys in the trailer sometimes when I'm in trouble, when I was in trouble, used to be in trouble. I'm like, we all have opinions, right? Yeah, I know it's that big word up there that says NASCAR, but we all have opinions and we should be able to speak our minds and they're like, well, do it behind closed doors. It's better. Well, sometimes we try doing it behind closed doors. Sometimes you don't listen.

But I think what Freddie and was trying to get at really is, and you're here, so we might as well ask you, with the Daytona 500, do you think we've gotten too content with it? Like too relaxed of where we are, where the cars are, it's the Daytona 500. It's the biggest race of our lives. I mean, you know, I've been lucky enough to win it. Every time I go through that tunnel, I get chills.

It's the most greatest feeling. in my racing career that I've had, you know, but have we got too complacent of just saying it's a Daytona 500, we're going to go race every February? Should we look at things that make it even better? And I think that's what he was, Freddie's way, trying to get at, but what do you guys? I was just trying to piss Mike off.

What do you guys, what do you guys think about that? So, well, what I think and what I think NASCAR thinks might not be totally in sync, although I do think they feel this way as well, is that I don't think any less promotion has gone around it. We have production days in January where we push it. We go up to New York City for a media tour. We had that DAP program. I'm sure you guys have talked about the driver ambassador program

where now we give drivers points and eventually financial gain to promote the sport and go out there and use their time to talk about NASCAR. and we're using that in January and early February is going to be nonstop. What I do believe, and I know you guys also agree, is that I think moving the clash, while I think it's awesome at Bowman Gray, I think it was awesome at L.A. Having NASCAR activity start two Thursdays before the actual 500 was awesome and really was super important. And now, because everything got condensed, and the good and bad of COVID is we've learned efficiencies.

And some would argue that we kind of over indexed to the efficiency side versus the buildup side. And I would be one of those who argue that, too. And I think Steve O'Donnell, I was talking with him about this. And I think he says this too is like, man, I would love to get back where we have practice on Monday. Or you can't have a new race on Saturday. We can't have the butt shootout or sprint a limit. or Bush clash or whatever it was, you know, the iteration it was. But is there something we can do instead or build up the New Smyrna races, for instance,

to be more of a have a national series feel so that Speed Weeks has that plural at the end of it as it does. So long way of answering is, I think you have a point, Tommy. I think there is the condensed nature of it now for financials, efficiencies has made it less of a, you know, grand, grandiose event. So hopefully maybe there's somewhere down the line we can do something about that. But I don't know if there's any plans just now. I know when I was talking to OD is like, yeah, I got to talk to probes, jump probes about that and see if there's something in the works. It would be, I don't know that I can do two more weeks in Daytona.

Those were long weeks. Yeah, I mean, I think in today's world, ever since COVID, I don't think the everyday race fan will do that anymore. Yeah. You know, we don't even see that in traffic on Sundays when we're pulling in the racetrack, right? I mean, you used to have to leave three, four hours early to get to the racetrack for the gates to open. I mean, everybody's adjusted, right, the fan. So I don't, I don't necessarily agree that we have to stretch that week way. I really like the New Samaritan part of it. You know, there's a lot of great race car drivers that race there during that week, and that can be

more promoted in a NASCAR way for sure. But I do think we can't get complacent on the product on the track. You know, we got to work on making the Super Speedway stuff a little bit better, put some handling into play. And Reddick mentioned it after he thought about it, that the summer races, the cars are harder to drive than the colder races, right? The February and the October, Talladegas, or whatever one we do. but we need to not just relax on that because that is the biggest stage in our sport.

And I think we need to just keep working on it. How did you end up in the position you're in today? Like I know you come from the same place we do. Coming here today? Not today. In this sport. Yeah. So I'm from New York as well.

I'm from Queens. And I worked in, so I went to Fordham University. Shout out that. I was listening to Diffy again, and he's like, I think I got to wear a hat. That's kind of the rules. Yeah, but it's all black. He wasn't even like supporting anything. I know, right.

Exactly. No sponsors. So many memos I did not get. So, and worked on the newspaper there. My goal when I was a younger, when I was a kid, was to be a newspaper reporter. And I started working at the New York Post. It was a kind of a cub reporter slash agate clerk, which is box scores, horse racing results, things like that. And I was, long story, I'll try to make sure, is I was in the, I made a mistake for the second day in a row and I was getting yelled at by my sports editor, Greg Gallo.

And as I was getting yelled at, the editor-in-chief comes in and says, hey, why don't we covering NASCAR? And the sports editor goes, well, I don't still think there's a readership for it. And he goes, no, there absolutely is, like the ratings for NASCAR right now are great. And this was about 2002, 2003. and going thinking back i think it's because so rupert rupin murdoch owns a new york post and also just bought the rights he owns fox just bought the rights to nascar and it was like why is my paper not covering naskar picked up the phone buses some chops and it just rolled downhill and as he was like all right i'll i'll look into it and i said i'm i'm a big nascar fan which i was i'll do it and i think

he just was like i don't want to think about this anymore you handle it and so i met uh covered, I was the first time at NASCAR ever was covered on site for the post. I was at Pocono Raceway. Carl Edwards won and met the right people, Herbrenum, and a job opened up and he interviewed me. And I got the job and rest of this history. Here you are. Yeah, I went at Freddie. What's, aside from me getting your blood pressure through the roof at times, which I don't need help on.

What, what, what, where are you at like during the races? Like, you were, you were not there yesterday, right? I was not in Vegas, no. But like, so during the race, when you're at the track, are you up in the tower with them? So during the race itself, I'm in race control, yeah. So that's somewhat new about six-year practice, and it's, I think it's a game changer because of, you know, folks like yourself, but media, you know, Gluck is, you know, posting on Twitter or X and Bob Pockers is.

And Pockers will have a call, a question about a call we made or, you know, a decision or what we're going to do. it's a rain delay. So I'm able to be a fly on the wall. And so I'm listening to the broadcast. I have headphones that can listen to the broadcast and also have conversations with everyone in the room. So if I see something bubbling up on social media, which is obviously going to be a story or if their broadcast is talking about something, I can say, hey, Elton Sawyer, hey, John Probst, hey, Brad Moran, this is happening. Can you give me some background? You know, usually I can hear what the decisions are so I know I don't need to ask. But if there's something And that's, you know, someone I don't know.

I can ask that question. So, yes, I'm in race control and then the media center during non-race activity. I haven't seen you at the media center yet. I'll have to say hi. I've only been to a few races, but. You were in Charlotte, right? I was in Charlotte, right? I was in Charlotte.

Yeah, I was in Charlotte. I was having meetings all over. I met with John Doll. He was great. Oh, great. Yeah. John's the man. He's the one who's championed the podcast, hauler talk.

Download it wherever you find your podcast. Yeah. Mike started the podcast as you and he texts me immediately. like after the first couple episodes and he's like, I don't know how you do this. Oh, dude. Like talking about like, I thought I had thick skin. Then I got to start a podcast. Oh.

And like state run media, I would be getting North Korea gifts every time I tweeted like, hey, listen. Like, absolutely not. This is bullshit. Yeah, good luck. I welcome the, the camaraderie. Yeah, I think, I think that's, I feel like there was, like, I don't know if there was contention between us on your side.

I like, I didn't seem like there's any at all. But I think we became friendly when I needed a shoulder to cry when I started this podcast. And the biggest thing for me, and I told Mike this and I told when we got called at Hall, we told them that. And it was like I'm never, I know that I'm saying stuff that's probably going to draw your eye or in times. And it's always been for me, it's never been, I'm trying to say this outlandish thing to try to get attention. It was something that I actually believed that, listen, this sport has been my life. You know, my dad grew up racing. This is what I've done for my entire life, basically.

And, like, I just wanted to be the best it could be. So if I have an opinion that I feel strongly about, I'm going to say it. Because I, like Tommy said, like, we all want it to, you know, we all want it to be great. And sometimes maybe my opinion isn't what the most popular thing in your world. And, but I welcome the, you know, even when we got called to the hall or the first time, I don't think I even know who you were at that point. You know, this was, I don't even know how much. long ago it was but you know then it was then we started texting a little bit back and forth then

because it was like just give us a chance to you know give our side of it like don't just go on one side of yours without a you know with a hypothetical scenario from us maybe like so then I would text Mike after the race like if we had questions or all right give me what were you guys doing here why did you make this call whatever and that kind of opened the lot of communications to you know now where we're at where I like I said like I've never had any animosity towards you um you know I don't know if you could say the same and it's always been it's probably in the moment and maybe in the moment maybe mad at each other but it's like realized I think we're both just doing our job and we both feel strongly about it one way or the other.

Right. I think that's, that's right. And I was, Burton said that, you know, when he was on your guy's show of, like, we'll scream at each other and yell at each other. And then, and that'll be cool because we all have our different passions. You know, my job description is different than your job description. And my viewpoint is different than your viewpoint. And I think that's, that's the great part about this sport, too. And so that's why sometimes I'm, I got to take a deep breath. But sometimes I got my boss is saying, this is wrong. You got to fix this or, you know, figure it out. So what was the message after this past weekend on your side, your thought process of the race? From an ASCAR point, I think you look at the storylines of the playoffs. It's, it's, you know, you can, I know we'll probably get to it a little bit, but when you're talking about thinking about formats, I think you have to admit that this playoff format has increased, certainly storylines, increased drama, increased pressure. and like Byron was almost in tears. And then you have Denny just doing Denny things.

Like, you know, I made a joke when he won the poll after some court decision that went into effect of like, and where we, I was moderating. I said, we're here with our poll winner for the Southern 500, Denny Hamlin, because of course we are. He always seems to step up when the chips are stacked against him. So, and so Denny went in his 60th the way he did. great finish. The restarts were awesome. I think it was a very good race. It wasn't Kansas good, but it was, I thought it was very good. I thought Kelly had a funny tweet last night where it was like, poor Ford got called up to do DBC and Dany ones.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, we have like a W.W.E style feud. That's longstanding now. Did that start around the time he got his podcast? No, when did that start? He was, yeah, you know what? Probably. Probably.

God, they hate our opinions. Yeah, Dirty Moe gets itself into a lot of trouble. I was like, and then he named it, actions detrimental. And he eventually did get an action detrimental penalty. Then he got a little 12-1 on the show. He got 25 points taken away right there. For the chest thing at Phoenix.

If he didn't have a podcast, that probably wouldn't have happened. I would, I would. Sure, he doesn't really get the fat rat's ass. Well, let's get into the. Vegas winner. Wednesdays is tied with Kevin Harvick.

I almost said Kevin O'SFar. Kevin Horvick. But have you guys ever seen him that emotional? I talked to him just earlier in the week with everything he has on his plate. I think it was just a matter of time

until the emotions came out. Yeah. You know, he, you know, I think he's mentioned his dad in some interviews and there's some stuff there that's, you know, driving him to really want to get this win. Now you saw that some of that emotion after the Kansas race, which I don't want to talk about anymore ever again.

But yeah, I mean, this one means a lot to him. It's 60, 60 locks you into the final four, still chasing the elusive championship. So I think, Mike, you know, you kind of saw all that come out in one moment there in victory lane. Yeah, I don't want to speculate on how his dad's doing. But obviously that was probably the reason. So, you know, Denny's, you know, I saw our. Ryan McGee, who has as good a pulse, ESPN.com reporter,

as good a finger on the pulse of NASCAR and NASCAR history as anyone. And I think he probably, Denny has already clinched the spot of Best Never to Win. And he mentioned that with yesterday's win, he clearly is now cemented that. And now we'll see what happens in Phoenix because, like, you don't want to bet against him, especially this year when every, you know, he's taking a page out of the Michael, Jordan Handbook is, you know, his business partner of, you know, all slights are taken personally, and he steps up and wins the big one. For sure. Tommy, the race itself, I thought it was a good race. You know, like Mike said earlier, it wasn't Kansas grid, but it was a good race. You know, still, you know, you battle dirty air. Our car, I felt like it was really good. And we sped on pit road by the good old 50.01 and got marred in traffic. And that was really the end of our day.

We couldn't recover from that. Couldn't fight for Lucky Dog on restarts. too deep in the pack. But, you know, I felt like the race was kind of, you know, it was pretty good. Yeah, it was okay. It was really hard to pass. But the tire fall off was was decent. You know, we did notice during the pits, you know, the pre-raced pit stop road stuff. There were a lot of red boxes with a lot of teams more than I've seen in a while.

So I had a feeling there was going to be some speeding issues yesterday. We backed ours down one light just to be safe. But, you know, when you're trying to push and you're trying to do all you can do, sometimes you get in trouble. But, you know, all in our pre-race notes or our weekly notes, it was noted that that place is known for speeding. Yeah, we were, I think we ran like a, so you can obviously, the speed limits 45 miles an hour.

They give you a 5-mile-an-hour race so you can run up to 50. And I think, you know, our practice role, like our hottest section was, like a 4970 maybe or 4960 so we thought we were pretty good that's usually kind of where we're at every week and and we you know come down one time bub was like man he's like I know he's like the only thing was at one point I was you know my break my brake adjust you know bias to get in the box and he's like but I don't think I sped he's like I never really changed anything and it's just what like I said it was damn a thousand or a hundredth over so but yeah the the race in the front though seemed pretty good and then at the end obviously two tires kind of mixes everything up again

Lugano goes up there and saves his day. Did he, though? I don't even know where he ended up. I mean, he ended up in the top 10th. I think he was eighth, but did he save the day? I mean, he, like, he was, he didn't get any point. I think he gained. He didn't come in at a spot, right?

He didn't really, like he. I'm saying he, I think he gained like eight points because he's like 16. So, yeah, I mean, he did a little bit. It's a, it could be a big deal at some point. For some, like, like, I said, he was, like he's, how many times we see this guy do this where he's running towards the tail end of the lead lap or, you know, mid, mid pack at best. Paul makes some crazy call at the end and then kind of finds a way to get top five, top tens, even wins at times. Yeah, I was, I was kind of laughing to myself while watching it

because how I watch a race is I'm not, I don't root for, I root for storylines, just kind of like a media member. I don't root for a driver and, uh, and I root for my week to be easier. Like, if, if we make a, if we make an officiating decision, that's a bad call or we, you know, there's, wait, wait, wait, wait, what? What did you just say? Very, questionable. Very rare. Allegedly. Yeah. Oh, very rare. Very rare.

Very rare. All right. All right. Go ahead. I'm sorry. And usually if we make decision, it's right in the moment. Yeah. Of course.

Yeah. Of course. Just like what? So, so. So Lugano makes that call to, or Paul Wolf makes the call to do two tires. And he's now on the, on the front row. And I'm like, here we go. And then the caution comes out, like immediately after.

And it's a messy one. And I'm like, like Ligano is going to win, which I love Joey Lugano. I don't understand that Joey Ligano hate. It's really a bummer to me. But it exists. And then I'm like, I'm going to have to hear about the playoff format all week long yet again. And then as we'll talk about later, everyone starts losing their minds about how long the caution is taking to clean up.

And I'm like, oh my God. Like, they're right. Like, Joey Lugano is going to win this. And it's just going to be the longest week ever because of course he did win. Like, this is exactly what's what happened. Are you in the background going? Brad. You get ready to fuck yourself.

Brad! Like, I'm like, how fast can I get to Las Vegas? Brayette. Elton. Come on. And I, like, I want to make clear. I'm not rooting against Joey Logano in that instance. But I'm like, this is, this is part of the script.

This is what's going to, I mean, clearly. And it's like, it's almost like, you know, it's almost like you can relate it to, like, sports betting almost where you're like, if you got a bet and you just see it, you see it playing out, like, how you're going to lose this bet. Like, if this, like, if this, like, it's, like, it's, like, like, it's, like, like, like, like, like, it's, like, It could be the most outlandish thing, but you're like, I know what's going to happen. This guy's going to run this kickoff back and burn me here. 100%. So there's no such thing as Booky's anonymous, a friend of mine used to say.

Well, I was ready to move on to spot on, but Tommy wants to get to Kyle Bush making a top 10. New rule, man. Yeah, you got to talk about him when he does it. You got to talk to him. Because I think he tried running the Legends race at the Bullring. I don't know how he did. Yeah, I've seen pitches out. Oh, we're going on.

I'm saying bitches running last in the cup race and he's going to run. a ledgers race. But, man, I thought it was going to be the same issue yesterday. Green flag, he drops right back to where we were. And he marked, he did a good job yesterday. The car was pretty good. He ended up, I think, eighth, right? Yeah, he was in the top 10. He's been doing a very good job of saving Cheddar's money, from what I'm understanding. Colby shared this with us last night. Alex, what was it? You have to be top eight. Because I saw that. Everybody thought it was the tenders if it's top 10. But it's, he nailed it, top eight, and you get the Chips and Koso, yeah.

When is that? What night? Well, I don't know. I don't have to find out. Oh, must not be a very good promotion. Must not be happening much. He's got to mention it in the post race. I thought you were talking about the car chief last night.

I did too. When he first said it, I was like, what? Did he have a bet with cheddar? Yeah, cheddar. Do you think that he's starting to lose, like, that spark to keep going? Because, like, it's got to be so deflating doing this week after. after we I can't imagine that he is

I mean it's got to be weighing on him especially somebody you know like like we talk about here all the time and Michael attest to this too like he is by like one of the most talented guys ever strapping a race car in the history of our sport period um and it's like he didn't forget how to drive you saw in Cota this year you know he was up there contended for the win and it's like since that race there's seasons

took a nosedive um and this was the first race I remember that was cleaned for him like I feel like every week it's practice qualifying the race he's in the fence he's spun out like they haven't had a clean race in so long that this this one hopefully can just kind of jumpstart them to like you know okay

the weight has been lifted a little bit now we can kind of go back to racing but like you said Tommy the speed just has and they're now they're in a weird transition where crew chief's stepping aside and he's coming into crew chief so you know there's a change there to get through the rest of the year but it was good to see him up front because

you know for as much shit as we give him all over the years Like we need Kyle Busch running well for a sport. In his personality, he's gotten a little quieter. Remember, guys, I'm new here. I don't know. You don't know Rowdy? Yeah, I don't. This guy is quite, I have interviewed him once, and he, he, it was a little snappy with one question.

No. Yeah. What did you ask him? Do you remember? So him and Bowman got into it, and I, I literally immediately went from him to, I forget, I think Bowman said something after the race. And so, or no, I forget even what happened. But I asked him about it. And he's just like, I've no.

idea what you're talking about. And I look at him like, you're trying, I'm new here, and you're trying to make me look bad. You know exactly what I'm talking about. He's breaking in. Most of the time in ask her, I probably don't know what I'm talking about. I'm like, come on. So then I go to Bowman right after. And he handled it with like personality. And I'm like, Kyle could have played up to it. But I'm wondering if it's because he's been struggling too much like. No, no, that's been a hit ball. Yeah, that's Kyle. Yeah. I feel like I get it out of them. I owe it. Really? No, you didn't do anything wrong. All right. Yeah, I think, no, I think Tom is right. I took an ego hit then.

I think he was warming you up. He has, you know, I wasn't here for the Dale senior years, but I think it's kind of the same deal, right? Like he wants to test you and, and so that was probably... Dale didn't do it. Dale, Dale did it such a different way. What did he? Oh, yeah.

He just, the way he said things and the spark and what he did, he just, he kept the fans engaged to love them, right? When the other people have come into the sport and tried to cop. copy it. It just, it just, the reflection was a completely different. Interesting. Yeah. Well, yeah, just to close the loop, like to, to what Freddie was saying, a good Kyle Busch is good for NASCAR. We, um, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it makes all the difference in a bad, a bad, good, Kyle Busch. I guess was good for NASCAR right now. We just have,

Kyle Busch. Now we just got, yeah. Before we move on, I did want to mention the Xfinity race was phenomenal, like, which the Xfinity races have always been phenomenal at that place. What a battle. There was some post race. contact too. Oh yeah. The three, the battle between the three of them with Jesse, I just can laugh in the moment when I see Jesse and Connor race in the hell out of each other, Tommy, because I mean, the amount of time that those two spend together, like, I can just imagine what's going on in their minds when they're out there battling for a win, but then you had a veteran like Eric

in there. And, you know, it was just, it was a really good race. And I was surprised, you know, I thought that once Connor got away on that last restart, he was going to kind of check out and be gone. He made that one mistake. One mistake. He didn't get to the bottom and, you know, and left the door open a little bit. But good race, man. It was a phenomenal race. And then, yeah, afterwards, stuff, a little fireworks. I know you mentioned that, Jesse.

And I didn't see what happened with Jesse and Sanchez. I know Sanchez is kind of, he's got a history of maybe, you know. And that phone was dropped. And he, I think the past is, you know, kind of catching up to him. I mean, you know, he finally had a, he's got pretty good race cars a lot. Yeah. He had a car that could definitely finish in the top five. on Saturday, but again, it's how you go about it, man, right?

It's how you, when you get into these spots and you're not there much, you have to be in getting those spots to earn respect just as much to try to win the race, right? It's, you know, I think a lot of drivers, they get into that spot and, you know, they want to knock everybody out of the way and win the race. And sometimes you need to get in there a couple times to earn that respect, right? You seem to respect that, you know, Amadillo, he races. This is Eric Amarola, by the way.

Yeah. He races very hard. He races very hard, right? I mean. But Connor, Jesse, they all respect it because they all did it. He's been up there. They know what to expect. And when you got somebody new up there trying to do the same thing, they don't like it, right?

So I think it's going to take a couple more times for now. Nick to gain some respect, you know, and I think it'll be fine. But his past definitely pissed Jesse. He's got a lot of speed. And, you know, we saw that in the trucks. We saw that. Now we're seeing it again in the Xfinity series. I know it's been on pit road, I think, and still got it, you know, drove back up to the front there.

Corey Day was another one that was kind of hauled ass at the end of that race. I know Corey's been getting shit for running into a lot of stuff. But at the end of that race, he was really, really strong. And I do have to give a shout out now that we've, I mean, I don't know what's going on. I assume we have generated a large Kiwi fan base here because our, anytime SVG wins, our views go through the roof. So I will mention that SVG was hauling ass in the beginning of that race yesterday. Running the wall in three and four.

I don't know where he started, but he drove up into the top 10. He was running like eighth. I'm watching him. I watched one time. He just ripped the fence in three and four. I had a big run, went in one, cleared the guy. And I looked, Josh DeW Williams was standing next to me. I just looked at him.

I was like, where the hell is he going this week? And he said, as he cleared him. He said, man, that was awesome. You know, like it's... So, I mean, we talked about it last week. If this guy can figure out how to run top 10 on ovals, it's getting there. It's going to be a problem for the rest of us.

Yeah, he's chugging along. Hey, it's Dale Jr. And for the latest DBC gear, we need you to go to shop.durdymomedia.com. We've got plenty of options, and we're adding new stuff all the time. Shop.ddurtymomedia.com. Spot on.

Spot on. Did you want to go first? I think he's a whiny bit. That's what I think. Send it. Why me? All right. Are we ready to get into spot-on, spot-off?

Let's do it. All right, well, this was, speaking of Twitter, this is the number one topic everyone wanted to talk about. And it was mainly about Ty Dillon. The communication mishap. Who was miscommunicated? What exactly happened? So it was about 31 laps to go.

Ty Dillon's slowing down, getting into Pit Road. then massive slam. Obviously, William Byram did not see him signal or anything. He said that he didn't hear anything. And then you see Ty saying that he told a spotter to tell William Spotter that, but he didn't get any signal. So do you think that Williams' frustration was warranted or should he have been more aware of the cycle?

So before you go, I'm so excited for this conversation. This is, I think, in the NASCAR podcast power rankings on the system. discussion door bumper clear is P1. So can you, instead of just answering that question, like, just do a deep dive on how this all works because I think it's, I think it's fascinating of like, what is the spotters role when someone pits and just everything that goes into it because that was the one kind of like just thing that was hanging out there yesterday at the end of the race that no one really understood how to answer.

So, you know, in this moment, you know, so I think one of two things happened here. And there's a lot of stuff that happens up there. you know, it happens quick. Like, I know that the spotter of the 10 basically had a half a lap to communicate. They made the call to pit as he basically passed the start, finish line. Before the record, Freddie, they were terrible. They were awful. They were old.

They were by far the slowest car out there at that time. Yeah, by far. And they were like the first ones to pit every time. So they were usually ended up on the oldest tires, late in runs. So whatever, he gets the call to pit. Now, what happens in our world is we will try to run down to the guy. Like if this is me, if I'm spotting the tent, I will try to run down to the guy and let him know, hey, tap him on the shoulder. I'm pitting this time.

The leader or whoever is behind us. It's usually whoever is behind you or maybe the next two guys behind you just to let them know. So you could be talking to multiple people. You can be talking to multiple people, you know. But it's tough like where these two guys stood. They're very far apart on the roof. So I don't know that the spot of the tent had time to go down there. He may have sometimes you just kind of step back, get on the, get on a stool and get up and wave and tell him like a lot of times.

you're like we or you just have a guy hanging over the rail time you've seen this before where you just got you're hanging over the railing waving your hand like that that's a signal to pit but sometimes you can't like if you're too separated you can't see that so you try to go down to the guy and i think one of two things happened here either he didn't have time to go down there and was trying to wave from his spot hoping that he would see him and brandon obviously never saw him you know there's pretty obvious the 24 had no idea that the 10 was pitting um the other problem is it's possible that in this moment we also communicate as a lap down car like if the leader's catching us or our lead that car is catching us I'll look at somebody and say I am going to the top or I am going to

the bottom and it's all hand signals we're not really talking because it's probably a distance between this so there's very possible like my hand signals and I'm going to have to change these now but my hand signals for pitting and I'm going to the bottom are the same like if I look down at somebody like this and I go like that that means I'm pitting now I'm coming this time and usually if they look there right behind me or whatever they'll know, especially if it's for a battle of position. But it's possible that the spotter the 10 did

like pitting because it wasn't time to pit yet. No, no, he was putting. There was no, we weren't in a pit cycle. And yeah, so he, when he does this, you hear the spotter of the 24 tell William that the 10's going to run the second or third lane because I think

that maybe if he did see a hand signal saying down, he might have thought that he was going to give him the bottom. Like, you know, you're going to have, you're going to get the bottom here. And that was the message that got relayed. You know, I don't know that that's what happened, but it could have happened. You know, where that's, that can be easily confused with, I'm pitting, or you're going to, you go to the bottom.

And it's just like it says here, miscommunication is the best term for it because I don't know, obviously nothing was done maliciously. And I kind of, tie would be the one I maybe put the most fault on just because he didn't execute his entry very well. He ends up sliding off the bottom, you know, sometimes

you see a guy. When you have a car that's handling that bad, it looks like that all the time. And you, you, How many times you guys up there when a car is really slow and it's just all over the racetrack? And it's all over. Well, sometimes you can't even slow it down well enough to get to Pitt Road, you know? And he was, I think at the time, he was over a, he was a second and a half off the pace. Yeah.

I just think that we got to the, he got to the point there when you got, I think he heard in his interview, like, it was almost relieved that that took him out of the race because they were so bad. But, you know, in that moment, like, it happened. a day before, no, in that race, we were running down the back stretch and Charles made the call to pit and Priest was right behind us. And I knew I didn't have time to get the priest's guy. So I told Bubba, I'm like, you really have to let

priest know you're coming here, which they do in all the ways. You see him wave out the window. You'll see him swerve back and forth down the back straight away. That's kind of a signal to the guy behind you that I'm coming to pit road here. And I didn't see any of that at a tie. You know, so you can blame the spotter if you want, but a lot of it's on you as well. You got to execute, like

if, I think if William sees tie slowing down on the white line, I like to see when they told them the pit, though. They told Ty to pit about the start-finish line. Oh, the lap before. Oh, my God. Yeah. So they had about a lap, the three-quarters of a lap to figure it out.

But it was, yeah, I mean, it's just unfortunate, but, you know, I think Ty could have done a lot to help there. And you know that these guys are behind you. You know, you know, like, what's going on around you. But I think Ty was probably just really frustrated to how his day was going. So going off that great question, the next question is, do you guys now, this? we can get together and talk about that as spotters. Yeah. Like, do all you guys go, man, what do we need to do differently?

We talked about it on the roof yesterday because obviously the 24 spotter was pretty heated at the 10 spotter. And, you know, at the moment, it's like, hey, let's everybody calm down. You know, we don't know what happened. Can you go into details on what? I didn't hear it. I couldn't really hear it. There were kind of a few people down from me. I saw two of them get heated yelling at each other.

Then I saw somebody else. Tyler Green kind of went in and diffused the situation and said, hey, man, this guy, you don't know that he did anything wrong. You know, I don't know what happened. I wish I knew that he went down there or didn't, you know, and like I said, I know it's, there's literally, there's probably 25 people between the two of them on the roof. So it's hard to get down there to them. There's bags, there's shit everywhere on the roof nowadays. Fires, cables. Yeah, so. The amount of monitors and the iPads up there is driving me insane. But, uh, so do you guys now will go through your council? Like, how does that, do you got? Yeah. So, I mean, we won't for that. We won't. We'll just, we have as group chat that we'll all

talk about. But like I said, it's, it's probably something that's very specific to that moment. Just a miscommunication between those two where it was very obvious to the 24 did not know that the 10 was pitting. And we have to figure out what the spotter of the 10 could do better to let that know or to let him know or the driver of the 10. Whoever really dropped the ball there because obviously, you know, this changes a lot of things as far as we, you know, the playoffs are concerned. The way that drivers have a little tally for whoever does them wrong and they got to get him back. Do spotters have this too? Oh, yeah.

Oh, really? For sure. Crew chiefs. Everybody. Owners. NASCAR. PR people. PR people.

That is true. That is very true. I just feel so bad for William because like if there's ever been like the Mr. nice guy of the sport, it's William. And like I hate that he's going to be behind the eight ball now. And he was having a fantastic day. I mean, they ran top three. I think every stage and was going to probably run in the top five for the race.

And now they go into Taladega of all places, you know, behind the eight ball. Well, looking at the playoff picture, he's not alone in guys that dropped. Chase Elliott and Blaney both had tire issues. Chase Elliott with the penalty, tire rolling over to the adjacent pit stall. And then... Adjacent is way too big a word for DBC. What does that mean? What the hell are you talking about?

It's kind of like a math term. I thought NASCAR guys were like the mathy guys. Yeah, you're in the wrong room for that. Okay. So... I don't even know what. I couldn't even spell right. Jason is like, it's a synodend for next to.

I feel like that word is not that complex. Listen, you took a $15 word. Although I will say if I'm like in talking, I won't say like adjacent to my car. Like I went, okay, I got you. I gotcha. But no, but Ryan Blaney, this is his second tire issue in three weeks. Penske should have been so strong going into this one. And do you think they're being too aggressive on air pressure or what's going on and how do they adjust this for Talladega?

Penske's been known to be on the aggressive side of. air pressure. If you look on the 12 car, they don't take off very well in the beginning of a run, right? And it's for a reason. It's on purpose, right? It's just to get everybody on the end of the run. So that place is because of the bumps. It's really hard on the sidewall. And between air pressure and hitting the limiters and the shocks, it's a very rough track for, and very hard track to be taken chances of low air, but it's also speed, right? So, you know, I guess it got to a point that might have been too low. He could have hit the, you know, run over debris.

I don't know. I know NASCAR inspects every tire. So we'll see if we hear anything in a garage. Well, Lugano was worried, too. During the broadcast, they started talking about Ligano. It was worried about having the same problem. Yeah. He came out of it.

I guess it wasn't a problem. But to your point on Penske. The thing is, now. it's like we all we've been talking about is Penske at Phoenix. Penske, it's Phoenix. It's a lock, you know. It's a good point. Right now.

Yeah, that's the thing. It might not mean be a Penske and Phoenix. It's a lock at Phoenix, but you still got to get there. Right, right. But everyone's always condemning Phoenix, right? We've all have, right? Well, you know, the Penske car is going to dominate. Well, guess what?

The playoffs have changed that. The point system has changed that. Mike, do you think one of these four guys could still, obviously, I mean, you've got to think that Blaney, not that I've ever, not that I've ever gambled on anything in my life, but I would say Blaney's got to be the betting favorite, probably for the next two races. You know, obviously very good at Talladega.

The championship odds change. He's won, yeah, that's for sure. He's won the last two Martinsville races, the fall Martinsville races. So, like, if one of these guys is the guy you're going to circle to come out of the winter race, it's probably got to be Blaney, I would think. I think so. I think with Blaney, I think that's why he didn't seem as despondent.

Sorry, that was a big word, too. The media folks over here. Alex, can you give me a fucking dictionary, please? Yeah, that's probably why he didn't seem as sad. Give me a vowel, please. Spelling me. As he could have been, because I think he felt super confident. And that's why.

Here's the thing, Mike. You look at the guys that are below the cut line. They're all going to, except for winning, right, they're all going to be doing the same things as Ryan, right? Getting stage points, doing the things. that need to be done. Ryan's the furthest back. So you think it benefits him? No, nothing benefits Ryan Blaney right now.

But he doesn't have to worry about anything about winning at this point. I understand that. But that's like win or nothing is now like, okay, it's like Byron's going to get stage points. Chase is going to get stage points. Ligano's going to get stage points. Briscoe, Bell, Larson, who's not going to get stage points? Well, last year, Hamlin, Kyle Larson, and Christopher Bell, they were all above the cut line going into the round of eight and then the wins matter. a misfortune of one or two of these guys. And you're going, we're going to a place this week where, like, I think Ryan's in the worst

spot, obviously. I think he's kind of got to win. Because to your point, Tommy, everybody's, everybody's going to be chasing stage points. But, you know, like, with Talladega looming, you know, 15 points can be erased in one turn, you know? So, like, I think Byron's okay. Like, if he can, he can race his way in still. Chase Elliott, they've got enough speed lately. They could race their way in still. You know, everybody, obviously, this, this is why this race is in this round, Mike, you know, and I was kind of critical of it. I don't love that it's in this round, but you're going to have to get through this race no matter what to get to the final four. The guy that won yesterday was going to be the weakest going to Talladega.

He has struggled there. And he has admitted that he has struggled on Speedways in the last couple years, right? I know he's won the Daytona 500, but it's not, he's just not comfortable of waiting and passing people like he used to, right, at the end. But that guy who was going to be probably the weakest is now in. So you got all, the rest of the seven guys that they have to compete, man. You wonder, hypothetically, you know, because what you just said, he probably doesn't have as much control of his own destiny, but you almost wonder, does he try,

does he, he knows that Penske's so good at Phoenix. Does he try to win even more? Like, I don't know if you try to win harder, but if he can keep Blaney and Ligano out by winning Talladega, obviously that you would imagine that helps him. So that could be an interesting story. Yeah. And I think he's more of a teammate to the other two now.

That too, yeah. Right? So I think he's going to be helping him in the draft and doing the things that need to be done as teammates. Yeah, for sure. And to your point, Mike, we saw that last week. That was what the conversation was about last week was should he or should he had not have passed Ross

because that was the matter of taking Joey out, you know, putting Joey in or taking him out. And, you know, for your, side of this. We just, we saw some notes yesterday about the radio communication stuff about points. And I did want to ask you about that because, you know, obviously there's been talk of like they don't want anything. They kind of said, we're definitely going to tighten up on this for the round of eight. Now, like, what is, what does that look like for you guys? Like, I know, like, are you monitoring everybody's radio or are you listening for key phrases? Like, I don't know,

how do you guys police that up in the tower? It's, it's tricky. Pleasing it's almost the easy part. It's sort of deciphering what they're saying is the hard part, because you know, they've gotten kind of good on keywords or they know that. Some of them have gotten good. Like the 48 saying save your tires coming to the checker last week was probably not executed very well. Fair. They've got to come up with better code words.

Fair. So, yeah. So what we do is we do have, Brad Moran, or the managing director of the Cubs series, has scanners. But what we really rely on is our off-site race control that we just started this year. So at the NASCAR production facility, which is right next to R&D Center, we have a fully built-out state-of-the-art, has millions of dollars of video monitoring. We have the data, the SMT data off the cars.

We have all the radio channels, the in-car cameras, and everything. So, for instance, John Probst during the Charlotte race, and we have a radio communication to the race control. And Scott Miller, former SVP of competition for NASCAR and former. recruit chief or Jeff Burton and others. He is kind of leads that project. So, and we, so we have a two-way monitoring,

our communication system there. So, pro se would, you know, click the button say, hey, Scott, have,

have the team monitoring. Oh, I think we did 48, 41, because 48 was following. Chestain. Chestain. And then 41 was following,

the 22. Just, just to see if anything, was happening. So we, they're, they're monitoring back, back, back, back at home because, you know, as you know, where he's control is, it's a little bit of control of chaos. There's a lot of people doing multiple different jobs and you have to pay attention to line up and penalties and pro trailer and whatever it is. So that's on the series director to monitor that stuff and then we have a whole now team.

How much shit they created. Yeah. And that's the thing that's, did you hear me curse on channel two yesterday? The thing for me is, and you talk about this because we get this question. a lot like it's a it's a it's a weird thing because we had this you know you used to call it 100% rule whatever where you know you're supposed to give 100% effort all the time but in some instances like it's it's more beneficial to you and your team to knock you know we talked we talked about last week where you know SVG comes out of the pits and he's saving tire for the restart but he in turn lets ross go for a position where now this is you know obviously very beneficial to ross and you know, he's not pushing as hard as he could, but it's also very beneficial to his race because

he's got good tires for the restart. Where does this line come in of like what is, you know, in Danny, you know, if, if say Lambert last week tells Danny, do not pass the one because we want to keep the 22 out is the message. That would probably be very frowned upon, I would assume. I would imagine that. But that is also the best thing. If Danny thinks that's the best thing for the 11 team. Like he is he is trying to do what's best for his team. Like what, how do we draw that line of, you know, I know and I know it's integrity. I know some, we talk about gambling a lot. Some of the gambling stuff is kind of driving where you don't want the races to be manipulated at all. But at the same time, Denny is trying to do whatever he thinks is best, in his best interest

to win a championship is keep the 22 out. You know, how do you, how do you police that? It's, it's tough. It's, so we got rid of the 100% rule this year. It was just too subjective. So I think, I forget what the language is exactly now. Do the best you can. Yeah, it's, it's, um, use your big language. Yeah. Please don't use anything. It's adjacent to the 100% rule, um, where, uh, it's adequate.

I think, so I think I, what it has to do with is really just, you're still trying to get the best finish as you possibly can. What, you know, I had a conversation with Pockers over the weekend on, on this topic. and it's the language isn't super black and white of in the event or in the championship or you can argue what what's what's best for your team in that case so I think we view it as the event in that race and so Brad Moran had a meeting with as he always does with the crew chiefs this weekend during pit selection sometimes he gives messages sometimes it's just picking pits But this time he did say he kind of gave him the lay of the land on what we're looking for here. You didn't get any questions.

Really what it comes down to is as long as you're talking about your points position, you can talk all you want. If you're talking about other people's points position and where they are, that's where we're going to step in. So that's kind of the black and white and the line in the sand. That's as simple as we can look at it. But there are going to be, I think that anyone is a good conversation of how we would look at that. it's a hypothetical so we didn't really dig deep into it because he did pass them.

But yeah, are we talking about the race? We're talking about the championship. And then also you can have the argument of like, is it better? Would you rather chess? Chess Sings was running better. But 22 is very good at Phoenix. I was going to need you to make me a list of all the things I can't say because I was talking. I was talking about Bub with Bubby yesterday.

Like we, I didn't mind getting that off week last year for Phoenix. So I got my. I got my, so if you can just give me a list. Were you in Phoenix when that happened? No. You're not in the points. No. Just letting you know.

Yeah. So you can't talk about anything. Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm going to because then I get Phoenix off again. I'll start my office. I think if you do that again, you're going to get more than Phoenix off. I know you were suspended, but you, did you even get on a plane? No.

No. Did you know they were going to drop it before you got? No. So I knew that the, I knew on Wednesday that I was getting suspended. And then Dave called and they were going to, we were going to appeal. And then he said, I forget what the hell was going on exactly. He said, but we're not going to appeal. If, like, do you mind if we don't appeal?

And I was like, no, I'm just booking my flights now for wherever we're going this weekend. No, so, yeah, I didn't. But I was joking yesterday. But I said, we can get an easy week off here. Like, we start this off season early. I just got to find out what we can't say on the radio with Martinsville and do it again. You can't say anything. No, I'm not saying shit at Martinsville.

I promise you. Everybody can go after themselves on that one. Well, that wasn't the only wreck. We had another one. This was between teammates with Christopher Bell wrecking Ty Gibbs from behind, spinning him out. That leads to an 11-car wreck. But instead of getting them on a red flag, they ran eight laps on a yellow flag. Yeah, Mike.

Can we riddle that one out? It sounds like Mike was not about this either. Yeah, Mike. He knew this one was coming. Well, that was one of those where I was watching on Twitter and I saw everyone talking about it. So I think everyone on the radio that took four tires were like, what is taking so long? Everyone on two ties were like, this is great. It's still dirty on here.

This is fantastic. I did. So Freddie texted me the rundown yesterday. And I did get a hold of Tim Berman, the race director, to see if it did take longer in his opinion or was there a reason or anything like that. So it took two laps longer than we had hoped. There was no talk of a red flag. I guess I can get to that after. So they were about to,

TB was about to open pit road. And they rated up from the pit road official that the ADA couldn't move and they needed to hook them. That took two laps to get the tow truck to pit road, hook them and get them off pit road. And then they opened it up. So we would hope that it was six laps. It was eight.

Same thing happened in the previous one, which was also eight. laps, the 24 went to pit road, needed a hook. So those two should have been six. They became eight at no point where a red flag was disgusting. So that's your goal? Like in a wreck, you know more than six laps. Is that what you guys shoot for? No, it really... This was eight laps. Yeah, we don't want to burn laps, so as quick as possible. So, you know, it depends when that caution happens. I think it also felt longer because it happened in turn one, so that it was almost, you almost look at it as like it was nine laps because that whole first lap was a green flag lap because the leader took the

took the green um so i think it depends when they pick up the the car when they can open pit road um we we work with tv to make sure that you know they come back and can show the pit stops things like that so i think tv at that point was commercial free for the rest of the way um so i don't think there is a number we have in in our minds of what it should be i just know that one took two extra laps than than we wanted. And nobody notices that if there's 100 laps to go. You know, but the problem was there's whatever, 24 to go, 23 to go, when the wreck

happens and now you're burning. And they're different strategies. Yeah, and to Mike's point, like the, it's very, you know, bias on what's going on. You know, LaMbert came down to me because they were probably the first one of four. I think they should call a race now. It's like, why the hell are we read? And I'm like, I don't know, like, all down there.

And then, uh, it's raining. Yeah. And then, but I'm sure the 19 and the 22 were like, yeah, it's dirty as fuck over here. So we got to, hold on, drop that 88 on pit road. It's debris in turn four. We've definitely, I think we've all been in that position where you're leading late at Indy. You know, we're leading. We're leading and it starts raining.

And I'm like, it's not raining. Like, we don't want to yell. We got a big lead. They're like, everybody's calling in rain. I'm like, the fucking ain't raining. It's fine. It's raining its ass off behind me. But I'm like, nope, that's good.

Just keep going. But, yeah, so everything's up. And we hear it all the time. And I used to love hoots for this. And Berman does it a little bit now. you know, you would have the lucky dog. Whoever was in the lucky dog spot would be calling in. There's debris in three and Hoots would just be like, yeah, I bet.

So it would always be funny. So you're always going to be about yourself. And obviously you don't want to see that happen. But like what you said, Mike, was I noticed like we were talking about it. He's like, why the hell isn't Penn Road open yet? And I was like, they're hooking up the 88 right now. So it's definitely delayed a couple laps. But do you talk to Saco?

So John Sago is the official up there. Do you ask that question? Like, would Lambert talk to him or Sacco says? Like, Lambert would probably have gone to Saco in that moment. Like, what the hell's going on? Why aren't we going red? And at that point, like, it's weird. Like, I feel like you should know because if we don't go red immediately,

we're not going to burn four or five laps and then go red. Like, it wasn't, you know, I know there was, it was Tommy's fault. Tommy's oil was all over the fucking racetrack. So, but it was on the apron. Well, what happened was there was oil went where he wrecked, but they didn't notice until, I don't think, later on after they towed it, there was still oil coming out while they were towing it. So I did hear...

I heard somebody say that on the radio. So I think that made the caution a little bit longer, too, because then they had to clean that mess up. Yeah. But, you know, like I said, it was on the apron. So, like, a lot of times you'll see it if... Tim did say that. The red flag will come out if we have to drive through something.

Like, if it's a big mess and there's oil on the racetrack and they got... We'll go red. But, like, you nine times out of ten, we'll go red before we ever get back to it. You know, it's going to be a quick red flag. There's very rarely... I can't really imagine. imagine many times where we got, you know, he's not going to go red once we realize we got to tow the 88 off after we've already run five laps under caution. Like, it's just, it's not ideal, but it is, it's what's going to happen in that situation because you can't, you can't open pit road with a tow truck and the 88, you know, running down there.

So it was, it was, it was frustrating to burn laps there, but I don't know that there's really much you could do differently. Well, before we wrap up spot on, spot off, we, you mentioned it earlier. Steve O'Donnell came in and talked to on the Dale Jr. download. he said that he thinks the current playoff format potentially hurts driver's starpower. I wonder if that's just rewarding chaos over consistency and even if it's sustainable. Yeah. So if it's if you're asking me that question, I, you know, I see, I think what Steve was saying was there's, it's hard to have a Jimmy Johnson again when you have a one race championship. And so when you have someone, and we've seen it happen a number of times with, you know, Kevin Harvick.

when he won nine during the COVID year and then didn't make the championship four. Kyle Larson last year, I think had five or six wins and didn't make the championship four. I forget if he did. But he didn't win the championship, obviously. I don't think he actually made the championship. Yeah, he wasn't. Yeah, he didn't. So I think that's part of what he was saying.

And I think that's fair. I think me personally, when we talk about the playoffs, I think everyone thinks NASCAR hates the 36. There's one person at least that is for 36. six races. I am. I think, and that my mind has changed considerably at the beginning of the year. I would have said, no, I think we need a playoff. After hearing a lot of discussions and arguments for it, I think my mind has changed. It changes every day because I think yesterday was way more interesting because of the playoffs. I think Charlotte was way more interesting because of the playoffs. So now maybe I've kind of swung the pendulum the other way.

Take up your mind, NASCAR. I know. Well, the in-season tournament spice things up. did too. Yeah, absolutely. So I think where my head is at on the Star Power, if I think the 36 race season without playoffs would really, really help Star Power because there's two reasons. And I know, Freddie, you said you're not going to talk about playoff formats ever again. I'd like to, but it's not, it's unavoidable. I'm proud of it. Yeah, I know. So like my, here's my thought is like if say it's William Byron leading the points every single week and he's running away

with it, TV has to talk about William Byron every single week. So, either, I think one of the two things are going to happen. One, you're like, this guy is a stud. Like, I had no idea how awesome he was. Or you're like, screw this guy. I am so tired of hearing him. I now hate William Byron. But if an emotion is fired up on you, that's great.

And then two, the winning in, I think, and the winner in advance, and OD talked about this a little bit, too, with the Daytona 500 winner. You know, you talk about him winning the playoffs, but you just won the 500, like, which, like, that doesn't seem right. but he does think that winning, I think there are moves being made because of the winner in advance, winter in, and talked about,

you know, Blaney has done it two years in a row at Martinsville, and now he has to do it again, and that's awesome. But, you know, I look at what Blaney did at New Hampshire, Blaney wins at New Hampshire, TV doesn't have to talk about him now for two races. So our biggest star,

top five for sure, our numbers from NASCAR.com, I think he's number one. Whenever Blaney wins, it gets the most traffic. And now he is a non-story for two races, which hurts his star power too. Yeah, we talked about down here like the week, you know, he wins New Hampshire and then wrecked in practice. And I'm like, that's a major story if he's not locked into the next rounder.

You know, like, you know, so and the thing that I think hurts sometimes too is, you know, we get to these cutoff races. And the conversation isn't even about the guys that have been dominating all year. It's about the guys that's 12th and points. You know, look at this group that's battling for 12th and points. or eighth in points, you know, and I think that, you know, you take attention away from the guys that have been the top three or four, you know, the guys that are the Byron's, the Blanies, the Danis, Larson, you know, the guys that have been kind of the fastest guys that are dominating all year. You're not talking about them because you're talking about, oh, look at this two-point battle.

But hold on a second. Our issue, my biggest issue as a car owner back then is what we had no, I had no firepower to go into a sponsor and say you were going to get TV. time. Nothing. I didn't have any, because we were running 21st to 28th every week. No one was talked about. When the format was first set, it kind of gave us all, hey, you know, we have a chance if we sneak in a win now, now we're going to get talked about. So, yeah, I mean, yes, Ryan Blaine. What happens if Ryan Blaney runs bad for two, three weeks? You're not going to, the TV's

not going to talk about him anyway, right, if there was a 36 race playoff, right? If he's having a rough week, the camera. I'm totally with you. That's why it's such a hard decision. You know, you can't, it's a whole, it's a balancing act, right? No matter what we're going to do, people are you going to get talked about or not in different situations during the race. I don't think any of that matters, to be honest with you. I think the biggest thing that people complain about is the guy that dominates the year that is leading the points going into any playoff system that NASCAR creates, because I'm going to say NASCAR, because it's not TV, right?

Nope. You got to bail out. for that. Right? So, don't ever say that. The winner, if it's a 32 race championship and that's four races, playoff, whatever, that guy, whoever wins should be, get the most points, start with the most points, right? They shouldn't be back to zero and, okay, thank you for us talking about you all year long.

Now you have a one and four chance of winning instead of, you know, 40%. probably going to happen. That was, so we got... Breaking news. Well, breaking news. Yeah, oh, well, I think we talked about it. I feel like I have. If I haven't, so, no.

There you go. There's your clip, Dirty Mo. We're just going to clip that, too, no way. There's going to be no context. We said we're going to get some shit out of him today. Okay, I was going to save this for AskDBC, but I've been wanting to ask you this for the playoff format,

and I know you don't want to talk about a playoff format as much anymore. Okay, but obviously, I come from the college football world, and they, I don't understand why we don't apply. It's basically like an invitational where like college football is the only sport or winning itself is not enough. And in the NASCAR playoff system, you win and you get in. And I was talking to everyone earlier, the Austin Dillon example from last season where you're not winning the race

and then you pull a move at the end. NASCAR rightfully removed his playoff spot, but he still got that win. My case is that in college football, you have a whole committee, like you're part of that one. And they look at each race because not all wins are created equal. And so to your point about the consistency, if someone wrecks, they're running well, then they wreck.

That won't hurt them as much as getting a really solid win. The committee has a system for it, but like wins matter more than losses. So a loss like that, like some guys had yesterday, it won't derail you, but you got to win the races and do it in a favorable manner. So just that one-off guy won't earn her spot in. Like you got to have a full season. Yeah. And I think Denny has talked about this because he's part of the playoff committee too.

And I think you guys have talked to us. But we tried to get as many voices from each side of the spectrum of no playoffs, different version of the playoffs, love the current format. So Denny was anti-the-current format, obviously. I'd be interested in see how he feels now or if he wins the championship this. this year. But that was one of his points. He said he had a horrible Bristol and it did not matter at all. Like he doesn't, he didn't care that he had a horrible because to your point, like the points reset. And so there was not like him running horribly did not matter at all. So that's one of the things we're talking about too of, you know, hey, like should we not have a reset and just pick up where you left off in the in the rounds.

And I think that's probably so. I wish that was the case of the shit. I mean, people forget what everybody shows up to win every week. There's no, like, do you like stop a little bit of focus? Because now the 11 team's going to, like, put everything into that 11 car for Phoenix. You know, the 11 Phoenix car, or are they going to still work on Talladega as much? You know, that's... I think it's all Phoenix.

It does seem like the 22 kind of did that last year. Yeah, we always say, like I've said for years on here, like the three biggest races of the year, are Daytona 500 Phoenix. Not if you listen to DBC. I think he was super focused on Vegas. It's still more important than the other ones. It's just wasn't as important as it used to be.

He had it. Hey, you, you set that tone right there. That's your fault. But, you know, and then the third biggest race of the year, I think, is Las Vegas because now you have three weeks, essentially, to prepare for one race.

Where everybody, it's the same as, you know, like, I hate to use football analogies because everybody wants a freak out about it. I don't even know anything about college playoffs. If you just say, all right, you know, the Giants, you're going to go and you get to play the Eagles in three weeks in the Super Bowl. The Eagles got to go play to all these other teams to get ready.

You can just sit there for three weeks and get ready and watch every damn bit of film on the Eagles. You know, it's such an advantage to have that time to where you can just divert all your attention to one race and, you know, and we've seen in years past. Last year it was in a perfect example. Like the guy that wins Vegas goes to win Phoenix. I think that he planned this. because he, I talked to him before the roval.

I think that he had, because he said it even after the race that Vegas was the one he needed to get past because it's a question mark for Martinsville in Talladega. I think to your guys' point, 100% it's all Arizona. He even said he's got a busy week. So, I mean, it's all in on Arizona. I think so. I think he's getting it this year. Tommy, I'm sorry to extend this conversation, but I think I would really like Chris Gale to be a bigger story. I think he seemed to really improve that a lot.

and on this topic of what he can do the next two weeks, and it's going to be all on Chris, I think it's going to be a really interesting thing to watch. And you think about it going back, you know, early season, off season, like Denny wasn't thrilled about that. And it had nothing to do with Gail, I don't think. I think he just felt like he built a, he built up a really good relationship with Gabe Hart,

and he felt he was on the verge of a championship. Like, as a former crew chief, like, are you, how impressed, Like, am I overstating that? Like, what Chris Gale has done this year with that 11 team seems bananas. Yeah, I mean, he's been in that system a long time. So I think it was a very comfortable move. I think what really steps out in my mind is there's three Gibbs cars in the top four right now. So Gabe Hart moved, focus on the whole company as a whole.

So I think, again, that's kind of like a Joe Gibbs move, right? Here's what we're going to do to make our whole. team better well today it's showing yeah those two changes have gotten these teams in the top three right now so i think overall a 1 a plus joe gibbs right yeah of a change absolutely and you saw you saw that video a few weeks ago after where i forget what race it was where gay bart said i'm sitting and the champion is in this room i just don't know what numbers on the door you know it seemed like a company-wide meeting and there you go he's it gay barts a great we've been trying to get him this show, man, because we're going to have some fun when he's on this show because...

I didn't have to change his Monday schedule around a little bit. Can we work on that? He has opinions. You might be getting a tax date for that one. Yeah, he's great. He's great because he just knows, man. I mean, he's smart, smart. And I think that move is a key move for the whole organization right now.

All right. Well, I think it's time for reaction. I can't say it without adding a little accent. Reaction Theater Have you ever done that? No, we have not. Okay. Now you're going to have to do it.

Now you're going to have to do it every week. Reaction theater. You have to do it with an accent. I don't know if Carson's going to be capable of that, but we'll see. As we were talking about, guys, lots of opinions coming in after each race. You guys, as fans can call in and voice those opinions. Let's hear what they had to say this week. Alex, what we got?

We got some good ones this week. Oh, good. I'm saying you're playing NASCAR 25, and this game, pretty fucking realistic. T.J. Major says clear. I go clear up and there's fucking a car there and I fucking crash. Don't worry. Happens to Brad all the time. You got something in common.

Well, I'll be damn. Old Dennis Hamelin got number 60, but it's even better. Browdy fucking nation. Top 10 Fenton. So that's good enough as a win, so we're getting waiting tonight. And new Blaney fans, go ahead, get the toaster ready. We'll see y'all at day in next week, boys.

This is some great accent You know, Freddie Crabb Get a hold of all your spotters up there Get him to tell the guy Yeah, he's pinned down low You know, hey, slow up a little bit Dang, what's wrong with you, Freddy? That was my fault

The poor guy was standing a couple to my right And I could have helped, right? Yeah, I could have just I should have went down there If he would have told me That they were pinning, I would have went And told Brandon But he didn't mention it to me

Let's go Mr. Dennis James Hanwin gets winning number 60 and I get to 69 my wife. Jesus. When did that happen? We didn't. Do we ever talk about that? Our fan base is,

I didn't realize how much sex was involved in NASCAR. Like, I didn't realize how many relationships were directly as affected by the results of these races as there are in reaction theater. I didn't, I don't know. Growing up, I didn't have, before I got in the cup race and I should have gotten a better plan with Meg, I should have picked a better driver or something. I need a favorite driver. If I could have realized that if you get late, if your driver wins races,

I would have picked different drivers. Here's my last one. Big owls. Oh, God, we're back at Big House. Tommy walks in from a race up north. Flow racing shows there's some back and forth. Fire suits ruffled, tempers they did flare. No, Tommy just.

wants a piece and zen A couple of drinks, yeah, with his friends. Someone calls him Tommy Francified what his own from there. Never know what's going to happen here. Big house. But it usually starts with a beer. Big house.

The wife is calling in. It's well past time to go home. Big outs. I'm sure how much we drank, but it was a lot. Big outs. Of course I'll do a Yeager shot. Tommy is missing. Whereabouts Unknown Big Al's

Carson she just wants to stay We're still going Because there's a line of DBC fans there Trying to be her day Big Al's Do you guys typically get Sing-along? This is a repeat of last week

I got one about me From Big Al's last week So we got to start charging Big Al's for They'll have some free drinks. Yeah. So we have had a string of very talented callers, calling with songs. And we had one guy that you actually got a job here for a little while.

He was putting raps together every Sunday night and calling in before we did the podcast on Monday mornings that were unbelievably. I don't know where he disappeared to. But if you're still out there. You have that type of shit on your podcast? We do not. We don't have the word shit.

Not alone that. I'm going to go out of a live and saying, open up the call. call lines for the NASCAR podcast. Probably a bad idea. Do you have a number we can call out? Have you guys going to leave an audio message? Why don't we have a couple callers call in on there about this?

Yeah, we could do a little prank call for you. Based on the calls, I don't think you want that. All of us, Dale Jr., be called into the trailer. All right, well, the right number to call is 704, 802, 95. 7-2. Open 24-7. We'll play the best ones each week on the show. They clearly love the sing-alongs. I think those ones are a hit. Those are always the hits. And anything sexual for Freddie. Not for me. I don't know what's going on this year. It was never like this before. It started in Daytona with the guy getting a foot job about Byron. And we have just fucking gone off the rails every

week. It's getting worse. I can't say I've ever been on a show that's mentioned. It's Kyle Bush is what started. Well, no, it was Byron. It was the first call. And then Kyle came on the show. And when Kyle was on the show, 27 calls came in that said their love lives are directly affected by Kyle's results. And then it has gone down a slippery slope since then to where we are now using numbers. I thought 6-7 was the popular one.

But I guess 6-9 is now going to be the one. I know we killed Axe BBC with the spotter communication. But I did want to ask Mike because Jordan talked about this last night on their show. and we can't talk about it, we'll cut it out. Talking about the potential of the Dover All-Star Race, maybe being a run-with-che-brung type of race, or maybe, you know, I've heard some crazy things coming out of there, but is there anything you can talk about with the All-Star Race for next year?

I think he was probably referring to what O'Donnell said on Dale Jr. We were trying to kind of make it bigger. Obviously, you know, when it was announced that Dover was the All-Star Race, there was a lot of consternation around that. and understandably because, you know, it was, you know, Charlotte and then I guess Texas was kind of also kind of like, oh, that's a weird place. And then North Wilkesboro, everyone loved. Seemingly, talking to the folks at SM, the ticket sales right now for Dover Renewals are really good. So I think people are kind of embracing it.

But one of the things he said on the download was, you know, we offered the teams to run what you're wrong to a point for this year. but it was a little bit short notice. And so I think if we potentially, if we want to relook at that idea, now's the time to do it, say, all right, hey, like, you now have five, six, seven months to think about it and, like, can we do this? I think O'D, like, admitted that it was,

it was too short notice of a call, so he didn't want to put it all on the teams. But there's, there's some, there's going to be some brainstorming around how to make this different and make it really feel like a, special event. You're looking forward to that, Tommy? Are you looking forward to potentially opening some stuff up?

They're relying on us, sorry, NASCAR, to spend money, because now we're all going to have to spend money to figure out how to go fast, opening up the rules. So it changes stuff, right? It costs the team's money. It's like, you're the ones that picked over as an All-Star Race. You're the ones that are doing this, but now we're going to have to spend the money to put on the event, right?

to put on as good as show as we possibly can. So I don't know. But what money you're going to be spending? Because you can't really burn wind tunnel or sim time. How do you know? Well, there's a cap on wind tunnel. I know that. But how do you know now we're going to have to spend some time on that

instead of the other racing part of it, right? I mean, it's like... Would teams do that? They would... For possibility, yeah. I would say that, yeah. I would say it as a whole, like, You have to build a model for it to run and sim the correct way.

You have to do something, right? So there's a process for all of it, right? You can't just say... But it would be like CFD runs, though, which is also CAP? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm asking, would teams do that over for a non-points risk? It seems that can do a lot of things behind the scenes. It's just going to cost money.

I just, I hate it. You know, I know Goodyear is going to hopefully have a tire test there, which will make all the days. difference in the world for what we're going to do. It's going to make difference in the world how you guys are going to set up to stages, right? How the race is going to be played out. Once you guys lay that out to all of us, then we can go to work on Goodyear is going to be able to go to work on a tire. If it's going to be a hard one for 50 laps, softer one for 20 laps, real soft one for 10 laps. Slick. Yeah. Yeah. You know, rain tires. I heard one time the other day, I'm like,

holy cow. So, I mean, we need to focus on the That's not cost the teams a lot of money, but let's put on a good show. Yeah, I'm not saying that that is 100% going to happen either. I think OD kind of tossed that out of like if this is something we want to do. You guys toss out a lot of shit all the time. Then we have to spend the money to go do it. It's common. No, no, no.

I'm not saying that he tossed it out as like we're going to do this. It was, I think it was a conversation starter from Dale saying, hey, let's, you know, the Dover all story is because he doesn't like it either. So that was one of the topics. He's like, I, and Dale brought up the, I'm not saying, and ROD wasn't saying that this is what we're doing and teams have to spend the money. Yeah, tell Tommy, stop bitch, he's on.

All of a sudden, Tommy France went away real fucking fast there. I don't know if everybody, he can quickly. He can quickly. It's time for shit show, whole thing. It's pretty good. You were not in anticipating that. That was, that was different. We have reaction, theater.

And shit show, whole fame. You can dub that every time I'm not here. I apologize to everybody's speakers in their trucks and vehicles. In my ear, Tommy. That just came to me. I just like, like, class. Thanks for letting us know. You forgot about your tooth for a couple minutes, at least.

Now, not only my brain and my tooth hurt, my ear hurts. Well, just, okay, I thought it would take away the pain. No, now I got three headaches. Get another bottle of tequila. I got news for you. You got more than three headaches, my friend. All right. Well, each week we nominate someone and the fans will,

vote on who gets inducted last week. It was the Roval Reversal. Robal reversal, I don't even know what that was. What the hell was that? Is it probably just the Danny backing up? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ross got up. Finishing it backwards, yeah. But remember to vote on your shit show Hall of Fame Twitter poll on who you want to see to be inducted into the shit show Hall of Fame.

What do we got? Oh, I think, I mean, obviously. I think we got an obvious winner. you know the the tied Dylan Byron thing my buddy Tappley I thought he had a really good tweet yesterday about that he's like all you people that want to compare to askar to stick in ball sports he's like what just what we just watched was you know whoever damn Travis Kelsey running in the end zone for the Eagles to chief to beat the Eagles and somebody from the Cleveland Brown just ran off the sideline and tackled him like that that's just how like it's yeah that's Denny Danny says it's a really good point that's with the one race championship his point is yeah everyone brings up the undefeated Patriots team that beat that the Giants Yeah high five on it

That the Giants beat What are we watching here? This is this guy I don't know what these two I thought this was gonna get bigger than it was But this guy So these two rack This is Super Dirt Week on Oswego this weekend

No this is not Oswego Is it is? No it isn't Where is it at? This isn't the working man's modified 50 This is not Ossuego Super National I thought I was just assumed The big blocks where it was Us We go, but it's not Us Wego

So they just go back and forth, running into each other Now to hook. No, he's just... No, there's front tires off the ground. Yeah, because he's pushing them. Then he gets a little shot to the wheel here. Which is obviously, I don't know if you can pay attention, but this is on Flow.

And if you want a Flow discount, I got it. FlowSports.com. You can sign up now, get 15% off your Flow account, which, you know, they had a lot of good racing on there this week. This wreck here, though, was the one, this guy went for a tumble. Oh, Lord. Wow. That was a priest.

Yeah, that looks just like the priest wreck from this was, I think, a NASCAR Euro race, right? Mike, I don't know. Dollar looks like that. I don't know the drive. I have the driver's name here. It'll be in the tweet. Georgio Magi, luckily walked away. I mean, that was, that was maybe worse than Priests' wreck.

so that one I think definitely needs to be on there I have a I have a casino shit show from the weekend that's that was pretty funny I will I will I will not use the names to protect the innocent but there was innocent or guilty innocent I felt very bad for this person so I walk up I walk in the casino where I'm playing roulette with Joey Campbell a couple of the guys from the 47 team and a friend of mine a former guest on this show was at a table over and I walk over to talk to them and I'm talking to them and as I'm talking to them they're putting a a chip on just 35 or 34 I think was the number every time every role just number 34 number 34 number 34 so I'm

talking to him he's he's doing it every time every time every time so we have our conversation we leave I go back over and one of the other guys with me he's like oh that's that's that's so and I said yeah he's like I'm gonna go talk to him and I was like I don't know like if you know him or not so whatever so they go talk to him and as I go back to playing whatever I maybe five, ten minutes up, I look up, I look over there and I'm like, oh shit, he hit, you know, so I'm going to go see him. So I walk over to see him. Congratulations. He goes, yeah, I missed that role because your buddy came over and talking.

Oh, I know. It's like, oh. Oh, man. Of course, I had to tell. We have a very funny picture that obviously I'm not going to share. But it's our buddy took a picture because we're like, this guy's just over here bothering him talking to him. So we're just busting his chops. So they tried to take a picture of them.

and in the moment they took the picture is when the person realized that his number came out, so he's got his hands on his head as they're having a conversation. It was maybe the funniest thing from my weekend. How much was he putting on $35? Yeah, I was going to say, $1,200 hit or something like that. I was going to say, I'm like, I'll throw in the $35. That's a heartbreaking. No, yeah, it was, it was, I was, the picture is, I'll show you guys.

How much was he down? I don't know. by the end of the night. It was, that's brutal. That's brutal. Hey, I won DBC picks.

God dang it. Who the hell did I pick? Oh, Bell. What a pick by me. Where are we? We're Carson's buying dinner right now. We're probably going to McDonald's,

if that's going to be the case. I know. Poor thing. I got to jump in. We are going to Talladega. And Carson, a.k. Stephanie,

you have first pick today. Okay. Well, we were discussing. this. I wanted to take Briscoe, but unavailable. So I've been between Joey Lugano and Bride Kislauski.

Two very good picks of this place. Is this like a collaborative effort, folks? No. I'm absolutely not. I would say... I need caution to stay last, so she buys dinner. Yeah. Okay, so the odds aren't out yet.

If it's going to be collaborative, yeah, if it's going to be an all group effort. No, I'm going to help her out. I think the favorite would be Lugano, but like I don't know how, I don't want the recency bias of Penske to weigh in. But he, I bet he's going to be the favorite. But he's also going to be balzy with his points position in the playoffs. Would you pick it?

Pick something, please. Brad Kislauski. I like that pick, except for T.J. Spotton, so you're probably saying. Do you guys think I made the right call? Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's a good pick. Good. We got Thomas.

You're next. All right. I'm going to pick. I'm going to pick Priese. Priese? Yep. I mean, that's a good pick. The guy flips over every plate race.

Do you, Mike, I don't know. Do you want to partake? You're more than welcome to partake. Sometimes some people get a little strange with making picks. All good. I'll go with... He's free queens. He don't give a shit.

I'll go with Eric Jones. Eric Jones is a very good pick at a play race, especially lately. I will go with the... You got everybody still. Buddy, I'm coming for you. I'm taking a guess of who you're taking. Who you got? Who you think?

They're all three. Well, there's three. I would say, I think you're going to take either Blaney, Bush, or Briscoe. No. I am taking the guy that I think has been the most consistent plate racer over the last few years is Austin Cindric, I think.

It's a good point. You know, he's... I got Bubba. I'm using Bubba upcoming. You only got two more. He's not Martinsville, you think? Really? Oh, you're excited about Martinsville.

That's great thing. Yeah. You have a reason. There's something going on. Honestly, you wouldn't know this, but I pick him every year for Martinsville. The last Martinsville. I win the majority of the time. I mean, the last, we've run top five, the last two or three races there.

So it's a good place for us. And we've won truck races there, so it's one of our favorite tracks anyway. But Cendric, I need to go sweep here to catch the guest. Me and Tommy, we can't lose, but the biggest thing is that. because we got to beat Carson, so she buys dinner. I feel good about it. You do. All right.

Weekend winners. Weekend winners, Thomas. Big race? Obviously, we cover quickly. Obviously, shout out Danny, 60th win, Amarola, Armadillo, whatever you want to call him. Wednesday night. Huddleston wins the Archer race across street Saturday.

Friday. Friday. Friday night. What else you got? Ronnie Silk dominates the modified tour race at Thompson. Matt Hirschman wins the race of champions at Thompson His 10th. I did not know that race is at Thompson.

Yeah, they moved it. They moved it today, right? John McKinney won the sprint race on Friday, the 50 lapper. Lofton, a little lofton. Little, little tense at the end of that race. Yeah, I lost a little... I didn't think so.

When I got in the car, I had a bunch of tweets that were like, this kid did them dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty. He did. And he did. He did. But it was not, it was not as bad as what I was seeing. He did. He ran him up the racetrack.

If Bert was a, Bert should have gotten behind him and moved him at that point. Burt passed him clean. Got alongside him clean. That's, that's not how you race, man. Sorry. I mean, I, listen,

who's in victory lane? He will be, but that will cost him. I'm just saying. That will cost him one. Well, they were, then they were, I don't know. Motors getting pulled out after the race is over time. I don't even know what happened.

I'm going to, it's going to be interested in, a driver's meeting on Friday. Yeah, this week, right? You're going for a championship this week? Luke's going for two championships, yeah. The smart championship. Is he running the Lameau? And the car's championship.

Excellent. More winners. Ty Majeski wins the Winchester 400. Matt Williamson and Buzzy Choo's car wins Super Dirt Week. That was his fourth one? Yeah. I've seen a big ass, I guess they named the trophy after Buzzy Voodman. I think that's pretty cool.

So I saw a big picture of Matt with the trophy there. But we have a lot of friends on our team. obviously Buzzy and Riverhead Raceway go way back. Buzzy, Brian, uh, spot the crew chief over there. Just the group of those group of guys are crazy. Uh,

and we love them for it. Um, so that was good to see them win. Uh, the one race, they didn't want to talk about. I still don't know who the one race because the only video I saw was it was Keelan Harvix,

which we could have put that in shit show. Like, you know, Keelan looks like he's got the thing that wrapped up and then it's up tangled over a lap car. What'd you, what'd you, what you think about that?

Yeah. Yeah, I just think he was expecting the lap car to go high and just, uh, he had a, How old's that kid, man? He's going to learn a lot. But I think the next time he just takes his time a little bit to see. He had enough. I think he had two, three-second lead on the second place

or far enough that he could have just took maybe a split second to give the guy a chance and see what happened. But, yeah. Tommy, you mentioned it. You're going racing this weekend. Jack, I assume we're ending as well. Smart Tour finale. Luke's racing for championships.

What's he got to do? Is it just heads up now? He's heads up now. He's heads up with. He's heads up with Ryan Newman and Pauley Hartwig, and then basically heads up in the late model race, in the pro late model race. He's got one point lead with Dennis Sets, its team,

the ownership team, you know, going for the owner's championship, yeah. Fun, fun, fun, so good luck to you guys. Are you going there or are you going to Tel Dago? I'm going there. Yeah, and war room for Talladega. Excellent. Steph, thank you very much for filling in on very short notice. What do you got going on this weekend?

I should be going to Tennessee, Alabama. I'll probably get that confirmed either tonight or tomorrow. It would be a fun matchup. SEC's wide open. I think... Where is that in Alabama? Yeah, it's in Alabama. I do...

Do double duty then. Tell it again. Oh, gosh, you're right. Oh, Jesus. Now you're drool. She's definitely going to do both. Oh. When streak?

Okay. Who should I take? Bubba, call them right now. He won me one, though. He did win me one, though. He did win me one, though. That's like a centric. I don't care that much about DVC picks.

I can buy dinner. I'm getting too nervous to do more interviews, though, because it's like... But you're an open team now. You got to know when you're ahead. No bonus money. No bonus money. Where can you... Obviously, a lot of people maybe not know you.

Where can they follow you? If they're into college football, we're going to try to drag you more into this NASCAR world, so where can they see your content? I've been pretty dragged in. Yeah. I'm covering college football with ESPN this year. I'll probably get out to... some Ohio State games just because that's where my heart always is.

But yeah, I've been doing some NASCAR. It's been a lot of fun. You can follow me at Steph O-D-O-T-E-Y, not O-T-A. I almost said O-T this morning. Everyone says it. I mean, I think it's kind of like a universal thing. But yeah. You don't have a nickname based off your last name?

We're going to have to give it. I'm the youngest of four, so everybody would always call me little O-D. But like, so I've had a show with college football about like, it was like Letterman Row O-T, like overtime. time. O.T. That's a little play bit. Come up with a bed. Well, I'll figure something out. Yeah, I'm sure. Well, hopefully if we ever need you, you're just a phone call

away. I hope you, we didn't scare you off today. Tommy, I know he could be an asshole the time. The rest of us are saints. I'll bring my dictionary next time. Just leave it on the table for me. Open up to whatever fucking crazy work you're going to say. Mike, what do you got going on this week? I'm sure you're not going to go to Tal'Daga. You're not going to do anything fun. I mean, just... I'll be at the last street,

Talladega. I'm heading out there first thing on Friday morning. And now we know that you're cheering against Joey Lugano. So I mean. I am. Jesus. I was worried as I was as those words were coming out of my mouth, it's like, man, this is, this might get me in trouble. No.

Now, I think everybody knows. I know. I know. Right. It's, and you, I think we do it across all walks of life of everything. Like you just, and some, it's, you know, your mindset, you just, you can imagine, like, the worst case scenario at times. Like, it's like, where is this going to go that everything's going good?

How could this blow up in our phases right here? Which I guess is why I have a job. Yeah. It's a big Exactly Maybe not after today Just don't watch the Simpsons anymore Yeah

Anyway Mike Thank you for joining us I've never ever in a million years Thought that was ever going to happen But I'm glad it did I appreciate Steph again Thank you for filling in

I saw a shitload of fans At the race this week As always we see him all the time At the garage One guy told me he liked Tommy better than me So I told him to F himself But again Thank you guys

for listening. Last week's numbers were crazy. You guys have really been showing up this year, and I really appreciate it. We will be back next week. We're out. Peace out.