It’s almost time for the race in California. This would be the second chance for me to use the DirecTV HotPass if I’d have elected to buy it. I’m still not completely sold. We’ll see if I miss it at all this weekend. That might be the clincher. Here’s my brief review on my experience from last weekend.

First, I’d like to point out that if I didn’t have a bigger screen TV, the deal would be off. With the split screens, they effectively turn my 56 inch TV into 3 20 inch TV’s. Not that I can’t see them, but I can’t imagine the 3 screens split up on a smaller screen. And second is I’m not able to view the race in HiDef on HotPass. Call me a whiner if you’d like, but I bet those who think so don’t watch the races in HiDef now. It does make a difference.

Being able to switch from the HotPass broadcast audio to the Fox broadcast was an excellent decision, and the option I probably used the most. When Fox was replaying events on there channel, it was nice to just switch audios for that period of time without having to switch away from the split view. My biggest complaint with DirecTV over cable is the 3 second lag I get when I switch channels. Three seconds is an eternity during a NASCAR race, and missing that much is long enough to miss the bump on Tony even in slow motion.

I liked individual announcing crews, and thought they did a very good job. Jr.’s crew was a little different from the others. You would swear they were “in the family” somehow. They announced the race as if they were part of the team. “Our car is doing great.”, or “We’re moving to the front”. The other announcing crews were not so possessive, but did a great job.

I guess the thing I’ll miss the most is the video of the race during the commercials. I’m not sure whether there will be commercials during the paid broadcasts, but for the free preview, there were. They ran it in the split screen so that I could watch Tony race. I was able to see at least one of the race events (Dave Blaney take out Kenny Wallace) on the small split screen while the Fox coverage was at commercial. I’ll have to find out if they’re gonna have commercials on the paid coverage. That might be a clincher.