[13] CBS Sports president Neal Pilson and motorsports editor Ken Squier believed that America would watch an entire stock car race live on television.
Prior to 1979, television coverage of the Daytona 500 either began when the race was halfway over, or as an edited highlight package that aired a week later on ABC's Wide World of Sports.
On February 18, 1979, CBS presented the first flag-to-flag coverage of the Daytona 500[14] (and 500-mile race to be broadcast live on national television in general).
On May 29, 1980, CBS paid a fee of roughly US$50,000 or $100,000 to Charlotte Motor Speedway to broadcast the World 600 NASCAR stock-car race.
Benny Parsons edged out Darrell Waltrip to win a grand prize of $44,850 in a race that was watched by perhaps 3.7 million viewers on the network.
[15] During its coverage of the 1983 Daytona 500, CBS introduced an innovation which director Bob Fishman helped develop – a miniature, remote-controlled in-car camera called RaceCam.
After years of trying to win it, Dale Earnhardt appeared headed for certain victory in the 1990 Daytona 500 until a series of events in the closing laps.
These events helped push the DieHard 500 from the heat, humidity, and almost commonly occurring afternoon thunderstorms of late July to a much cooler, and in the case of the weather, more stable early October date.
Among TNN personalities from the motorsports operation were Mike Joy, Eli Gold, Buddy Baker, Neil Bonnett, Randy Pemberton, Ralph Sheheen, Dick Berggren and Rick Benjamin.
The network's ties to CBS allowed it to pick up country-themed dramas from the 1980s that originally aired on the broadcast network such as The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas, neither of which had been seen on television since their original runs ended, and also allowed it to serve as an overflow feed for CBS Sports broadcasts, which happened during a NASCAR Busch Series race at Texas Motor Speedway in 1999 (though the network was a center of controversy by not airing the following year's second-tier race at Texas following a rain delay)[22] and also during a PGA Tour event at Firestone Country Club.
The 1998 Pepsi 400 was also moved to TNN when the race was postponed from the then-traditional July date to October 17, 1998, as a result of the 1998 Florida wildfires.
CBS had lost affiliates in several major markets as a result of a realignment in the wake of Fox landing the broadcast television rights to the National Football Conference of the NFL,[30] and was actually not available in a NASCAR Busch Series market, Milwaukee; that city's new CBS affiliate, WDJT-TV, was not available to some Southeastern Wisconsin cable providers.