Usually motor racing broadcasts bore us with unnecessary cutaways to wives and girlfriends, but the Daytona 500 had a duck. The Aflac duck.
It looks like well-done CGI, but if not, Aflac better expect a call from the same dudes who kept my alma mater from bringing our bear to football games. That was a tame bear on a leash, man, kept at a relatively safe distance away from the players on the field. We're talking about potential race-interrupting "ballast" with a duck on the loose here.
Fortunately, there were no reports of advertising spokesducks accidentally getting punted by a stock car, so I'll stick with that clever CGI theory.
Now, if we could just cut away from the advertising a bit longer and show more of the race itself...perhaps this duck is on to something. Replace all the cutaways to people who aren't actually racing or working on a team with cutaways to ad mascots, and shorten the commercial breaks in response. Problem solved!
[H/T WTF1]