NBC Just Found A Free-Wheeling (And Winning) NASCAR Announcer Combo

Just because Dale Earnhardt Jr. has joined NBC’s telecasts of NASCAR races this year does not make them episodes of The Dale Earnhardt Jr. Show. Earnhardt’s job is still to provide insightful race analysis with two others, not to hog air time with jokes and old racing stories.

Earnhardt won’t be able to prop up NASCAR’s television ratings all by himself. As Sports Media Watch wrote last week: “Dale Earnhardt Jr. has accomplished a great deal in his professional life, but turning NASCAR ratings around may be too much to ask.”

All Earnhardt can do is enhance the product and see what happens. He can’t do anything about the facts that NASCAR has added one gimmick after another, that there seems to be no fire in the bellies of most of the drivers and that the same three guys keep winning all the races. (Kevin Harvick won his sixth Cup race of the season Sunday by beating Kyle Busch, who has five victories.)

Although the Cup race at Loudon, N.H., was delayed a few hours by rain and run before a thin crowd that had to be smaller than 10,000, Earnhardt, Jeff Burton and Steve Letarte essentially called the race, with Rick Allen, the play-by-play man, contributing from the pits.

It was the third announcer arrangement in four races, and it might not be the last. But NBC might have found a winning combination at Loudon. Allen virtually disappeared in the last half of the race, with Earnhardt, Burton and Letarte animatedly discussing strategy and equipment. Maybe the viewership numbers won’t be big, but the experiment worked.

Their chatter was fun, informative and interesting. Allen is a talented and solid play-by-play announcer, but the conversation in the booth Sunday was much more free-wheeling and emotional, as if Earnhardt, Burton and Letarte could just let it rip. And when Harvick nudged aside Busch for the lead late in the race, they whooped it up, just like a fan would.

It was good stuff. It was different!

Next week, in Long Pond, Pa., NBC plans return to a format that will have Allen and Burton in one booth, and Earnhardt and Letarte in another booth. But NBC promises to keep trying to find the sweet spot that its announcers are comfortable with and its viewers like.

The idea is to feel as if the three guys are hanging out on your couch — it would have to be more like a sectional! — watching a race on a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. It may seem cosmetic and unnecessary, but after a fan vote, the three analysts wore racing T-shirts Sunday instead of jackets and ties, perhaps even loosening them up.

(Earnhardt wore an old Dick Trickle T-shirt, haha.)

What does NBC have to lose? Ratings and viewership numbers have been down in double digits for 17 of the 19 Cup races. Last week’s race from Kentucky drew a 1.3 rating and 2.3 million viewers — down 19 and 16 percent, respectively, from the 1.6 rating and 2.7 million viewers a year ago and 32 and 29 percent from two years ago.

A few race fans have said there has been a certain Junior overload. He was enormously popular, but he did not win seven Cup championships as a driver, like his father — or even one championship. Some people think he piggybacked off his father’s fame. But Dale Jr. is a way better talker than his daddy. Let him fly.

Three analysts are a lot for any sports telecast. It does not help that two of them — Earnhardt, from North Carolina, and Burton, from Virginia — sound a lot like each other to a Yankee. (Earnhardt seems to have a longer drawl. Or is that Burton?)

Letarte is a former crew chief from Maine who focuses on technical aspects of the race, but he has been around NASCAR so long that his voice has picked up a bit of a drawl, kind of like how football coaches from any state sound after a while like they are from Alabama.

But Burton is bubbly and descriptive, and Letarte is insightful and earnest — and, most important, neither stepped Sunday on Junior, the star of the show. He won’t reverse the ratings slide all on his own, but he has some help and more freedom to chat. He chastised himself on air for reading a script for a commercial poorly, but he gets a pass.

This unconventional setup is well worth another shot. These guys are only going to get better together. And finally: an exciting upturn in something NASCAR related.