At the Indianapolis Speedway it was Spain’s Alex Palou taking the Borger-Warner Trophy and the big money for winning the Classic Indianapolis 500 event. Santino Ferrucci of Woodbury, CT placed a strong seventh place.
In the NASCAR Cup Series,The Coca-Cola 600 was won by Ross Chastain. Ryan Preece of Berlin, CT came in ninth. Joey Logano of Middletown, CT earned the 17th place.
William Byron won the Xfinity race with Kris Wright coming in 18th and Anthony Alfredo of Ridgefield, CT finishing 25th. Kris Wright drives the Chris and Mary Our entry for the Cape Cod family of the father and daughter team. Both get their mail in Chatham, MA.
Corey Heim won the Craftsman Truck event with Parker Kligerman of Westport, CT placing 14th while Gio Ruggerio placed 21st.
In our after-thoughts, the Coca-Cola 600 was streamed live on Amazon Prime Video making it a paid streaming service for fans to watch. While MAX did offer the race with in-car camera footage, the main broadcast was exclusively on Prime Video, requiring a paid subscription.
An article from the Tennessean News notes that the Coca-Cola 600 was available on MAX, but the main broadcast was on Amazon Prime Video. A piece on Yahoo Sports says that Amazon Prime Video gained exclusive rights to five races per season, starting with the Coca-Cola 600. In The NASCAR case it appears that they are chasing fans away. With NASCAR not being able sell all of their seats now, charging a fee to watch the races on TV appears to be short sighted!
Does all of this signal to NASCAR fans in the future may have to pay a fee to watch all of the NASCAR races on the tube? We can recall when Bernie Ecclestone was in charge of F1. At the time “Old” Bernie even talked about how he considered to charge newspapers a fee to cover F1! Fortunately, none of this ever happened.
Even thinking about this situation is a “pipe dream” with NASCAR failing to fill all of the seats in their venues since the economic downturn of 2008 . That’s when sell outs turned out to be empty grand stand seats! The results of which were the removal of many seats in all of NASCAR’s venues. One Marketing Wise Guy called it Right Seating!