Red Bull GRC Atlantic City: 3 Things We Learned

Red Bull Global Rallycross’s first trip to Atlantic City may not have been a shocker, but it did provide a few lessons. Here are our takeaways from GRC Atlantic City.

If Red Bull Global Rallycross was looking to expand its reach, it did that on Sunday with GRC Atlantic City. The event yielded the most cars entered in an event all season as the league laid down an impressively long track.

1. More is not always better

The TV commentators made a point of telling us how GRC Atlantic City had the biggest entry list of any Red Bull Global Rallycross race in 2016. Nelson Piquet Jr. came back for his second straight event after returning to GRC in Washington, while Subaru and Olsbergs MSE each added a third car for Sunday’s event.

That meant that there were twelve cars in the final – more cars than laps in the actual race. Now, GRC has been suffering from a dearth of entries this season, but Sunday might have taken it a step in the wrong direction. Red Bull Global Rallycross is known for its chaotic starts and seeing twelve cars try to push themselves all through the first turn was cringe-worthy.

And really, when a third of the field can’t even finish the race (we’ll elaborate on that in a second), what difference does it make? Everyone had good intentions but all that happened on Sunday was that we created more cannon fodder.

2. It’s the tires, stupid

Half the field had some kind of tire problem at GRC Atlantic City. Race winner Speed admitted in his post-victory interview that he’d had an issue, and it was a rear tire puncture on Foust’s car that caused him to fall from clear victory all the way back to fourth place. It was a truly amazing effort from Foust to drive the No. 34 home on three tires and a rim, just showing again how talented of a driver he is.

Meanwhile Joni Wiman, Bucky Lasek and Chris Atkinson all registered DNF’s because of tire issues while Steve Arpin lost a podium spot because he, too, had a tire go down late in the race.

As a race fan you never want to see a race decided because of something that’s out of a driver’s control, but those things happen (ask IndyCar’s Ryan Hunter-Reay). However, when it happens to six of your twelve drivers, then that’s a problem. Maybe everyone should rewatch this BFGoodrich promo video:

3. NBC’s TV coverage needs some improvement

Let’s preface this by saying that NBC Sports, as a whole, does some amazing work with their coverage elsewhere – particularly in IndyCar. However their Red Bull GRC coverage has room to improve and particularly on Sunday it did not fare well.

Race commentators Toby Moody and Anders Krohn confused Speed and Foust multiple times, not sure which driver was the championship leader; at times they also seemed to be struggling for something to say. Part of that is because of the camerawork, which did them no favors; it would sometimes be showing something they weren’t talking about. When they spoke of keeping an eye on Piquet due to a possible penalty, the camera instead showed the battle further up front. It did finally cut back to Piquet…later in the race when it didn’t matter anymore.

The real head-scratcher was NBC’s lack of a graphic displaying the final race results, especially as there were cars battling for position up to the start-finish line. The network did put up its usual list for the championship standings, but never showed one for the race results as they rushed to get to a beach volleyball game. Time was obviously of the essence but showing the full results of the race seems like something you don’t want to forget.

NBC Sports is a great team and Red Bull GRC is a fantastic league, so let’s hope that the kinks get worked out and TV coverage fares better over the final three races of the season.

What were your takeaways from GRC Atlantic City?

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