Sunday afternoon, the NASCAR Cup Series will head to Atlanta for the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500, where a longtime sports reporter will take part in the festivities and set the stage for an action-packed day of racing. Erin Andrews, who works the sideline during the top Fox NFL game each week, will serve as grand marshal and tell the drivers to start their engines.
According to Adam Stern of the Sports Business Journal, Andrews will take part in the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 as part of a sponsor activation. Tubi, the free content streaming service owned by Fox, partnered with Chip Ganassi Racing to provide a paint scheme for Ross Chastain’s No. 42 Chevrolet Camaro. Andrews is an ambassador for the streaming service and has promoted it several times over the past few months.
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Chip Ganassi Racing has a new deal with Fox-aligned free streaming platform @Tubi that starts on the No. 42 this weekend at Atlanta and will continue on the No. 1 at Richmond in April.
➖ Tubi partner @ErinAndrews will be the grand marshal at Atlanta as part of the activation. pic.twitter.com/Y9R4rwsL0A
— Adam Stern (@A_S12) March 15, 2021
“Tubi is a streaming service, and we are really excited about it,” Andrews told Good Day DC in early February. “Do I really need to say anything more than ‘free?’ You heard me. It’s free. We all know during quarantine [that] we sat back and watched our streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.”
Andrews continued and explained that she ripped through the available content by June-July. Working with Tubi provided her with even more opportunities to kick back and enjoy content. She listed several movies featuring Will Smith and Matthew McConaughey as examples of the content, as well as TV shows like Hell’s Kitchen.
The 2020 version of the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 did not take place in a manner that anyone expected. The race was set to start on March 15 and feature SEAL Team star Judd Lormand as the driver of the pace car. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the sports world to a halt. NASCAR began a 10-week postponement and did not return until May 17.
The drivers did eventually return to Atlanta to run the race, doing so in June after an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, died in police custody. Bubba Wallace turned heads prior to the race while wearing a shirt that said “I Can’t Breathe. Black Lives Matter.”
