High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! CBS Sports President Neal Pilson and motorsports editor Ken Squier believed that America would watch an entire stock car race live on television. Before 1979, television coverage of the Daytona 500 either began when the race was halfway over, or as an edited highlight packaged 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 (and 500-mile race to be broadcast live on national television in general). The Indianapolis 500 was only broadcast on tape delay that evening in this era; most races were broadcast only through the final quarter to half of the race, as was the procedure for ABC's Championship Auto Racing broadcasts; with the new CBS contract, the network and NASCAR agreed to a full live broadcast. That telecast introduced in-car and low-level track-side cameras, which has now become standard in all sorts of automotive racing broadcasts. Therace drew incredible ratings, in part due to the compelling action both on and off the track, and in part because a major snowstorm on the East Coast kept millions of viewers indoors.