The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (5 page)

Bruton Smith, the owner of Bristol as well as several other tracks on the NASCAR circuit, addressed the multitude from the main outdoor stage. "The only jokes I have Obama supporters wouldn't like, and we're all bipartisan here," he said with a chuckle. Later that weekend Congress would vote health care reform into law, but on Friday the bill's passage remained a long shot. Smith playfully worked his audience, asking whether health care was going to pass and eliciting in response a roaring "No!"

Smith called to the microphone his director of children's charities, retired Air Force major general Tom Sadler. The general picked up the battle cry, telling those gathered that they were "the lone pole in the tent. You're the greatest patriotic sports fans in all of sports. Don't worry about it, folks. This country is far too great for a few people to run it into a hole. It's because of people like you. God bless you. God bless this country!"

Amid the many testaments of fealty, it was easy to forget that the ranks of the NASCAR faithful were dwindling.

 

Competitive stock-car racing, with its fabled moonshine-running roots in the Prohibition-era South, burst into mainstream prominence a decade ago. It was then that NASCAR signed a multibillion-dollar consolidated TV rights deal. By 2003, after losing its long-time chief sponsor, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and replacing it with the less controversial Nextel, NASCAR had become the second-most-watched sport on television, behind football, boasting a fan base of 75 million. Pretty soon NASCAR plotlines began appearing in Hollywood blockbusters—
Herbie: Fully Loaded, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
, the Pixar movie
Cars
—part of the cross-marketing deals worked out by the sport's new Los Angeles office. Races at time-honored tracks in the South were removed from the schedule; ones at new, larger facilities in southern California and Las Vegas were added. There were even plans to open a track in New York City. And to avoid displeasing its growing list of Fortune 500 sponsors, officials fined drivers when they tussled or cursed. In 2006, near the height of the sport's popularity, NASCAR president Mike Helton pronounced, "The old southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence."

But since then attendance at races has steadily fallen. NASCAR leadership attributes the decline in ticket sales to the miserable economy, yet television viewership has also plummeted, corporate sponsors have been pulling out, and the publicly traded company that manufactures NASCAR collectibles has tottered near bankruptcy. To fill the stands at the 2010 Daytona 500, NASCAR's biggest race, the speedway had to cut the price on many tickets by half, remove seats, and reduce what it charged for concessions and merchandise. During the actual race, a giant pothole formed on the track, twice sidelining the cars for a total of more than two hours. Increasingly, NASCAR seemed like a clunker.

For their part, fans complained that the drivers had become too corporate and bland, that the racing itself was boring, that the newly standardized race cars—redesigned for safety and closer competition—no longer looked anything like the Fords and Chevys and Dodges that they parked in their own driveways. Stock-car racing is currently dominated by Jimmie Johnson, the skilled non-conflict driver, a clean-cut Californian whose race team, Hendrick Motorsports, seemingly had all the resources and character of a Mercedes-Benz plant. Victory at the track now appeared to be in the hands of the technicians in the lab, rather than in those of the shade-tree genius mechanics or the gutsy drivers. At a time when the rest of America was forced to reckon with a "NASCAR demographic," NASCAR itself seemed to lose touch with its presumptive base.

During its sixty-two-year hist ory, NASCAR has been run as a somewhat benevolent dictatorship by the sport's founding family, the Frances, who over three generations have unilaterally amended rules and regulations as they saw fit. So it was all the more surprising when the association of stock-car racing reacted to its woes by implementing an array of changes demanded by fans. NASCAR officials widened restrictor plates on engines to allow the vehicles to generate more power and speed. They scrapped the rear wing, regarded by purist gear-heads as a sign of Formula One's nefarious influence, and returned to the rear spoiler, which is what you saw on Chargers and Camaros anyhow. They relaxed rules against "bump-drafting," a dangerous maneuver in which a driver, tailgating at 120 miles per hour, knocks the back end of the car in front of his and is drawn forward in its wake. Having pushed the Sunday start times to late afternoons and early evenings in hopes of attracting larger television audiences, officials now moved most of them back to 1
P.M.
, when traditional fans were just coming home from church. And, desperate to reconnect the sport with its rebel roots, they said to the guys on the track, "Boys, have at it," a bit of vernacular signaling that drivers would now be free to police themselves and to show more down-home personality—never mind that home for all but a handful of the top racers was now somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line or west of Texas.

In Atlanta, two weeks before my trip to Bristol, one of the "boys" heeded the call. A driver named Carl Edwards, more than 150 laps off the lead, decided to exact a little old-school vengeance on a young racer named Brad Keselowski, who had collided with him the previous season. At speeds of about 190 mph, Edwards intentionally steered into Keselowski's car, which spun out, flipped, hovered airborne for a harrowing moment, then landed, nose first, pile-driving into the ground. Although Keselowski was pulled from the wreckage without injury, the sight of a car airborne in proximity to the stands exceeded even the ordinarily sanguinary predilections of the NASCAR set. "That's not stock-car racing. That's carnage. That's demolition derby," Liz Clarke, a sportswriter for the
Washington Post
and the author of the NASCAR history
One Helluva Ride
, told me. "Fans want to see a wreck, not a blood sport. The mandate to 'have at it, boys,' it's a very debasing way of treating a sport in order to sell tickets and drive ratings."

Long known as the hottest ticket in NASCAR, Bristol had sold out fifty-five straight races, with a season-ticket renewal rate of over 90 percent. But in the days before the race it appeared that, for the first time since 1982, the speedway would be nowhere near full. The local hotels were reporting steep drops in reservations, and on the neighboring campgrounds—normally blanketed by monster RVs—much of the land remained vacant. The track's management decided against lowering ticket prices—which started at $93 a seat—opting instead to "add value" as a way to draw walk-up ticket buyers. One of the added-value features was a thirty-five-lap "legends race," a competition featuring twelve of NASCAR's most beloved former drivers. Rounding the second turn on lap thirty, fifty-six-year-old Larry Pearson slid into the outer wall and aimlessly drifted back down along the track, into the path of Charlie Glotzbach, age seventy-one, whose throwback stock car hurtled into Pearson's sidelong vehicle, plowed it into the infield wall, and erupted in flames. An unconscious Pearson had to be cut out of his car. Over the next twelve days he would undergo six surgeries to treat two broken legs, a shattered pelvis, two broken ribs, a broken ankle, and a broken right hand. So much for resurrecting NASCAR's fabled past.

 

Having only recently moved to Nashville from Brooklyn, I was new both to the South and to stock-car racing. When Mike Helton learned that Bristol would be my first race, he said, "Any fan sampling NASCAR today who felt it like I first felt in 1963, they're going to stick around in the sport just like I did." We were sitting in a trailer parked on Bristol's chockablock infield. Helton, who grew up in a nearby county, said that this track embodied NASCAR's core values—values, he admitted, from which the sport had veered. "We were so busy growing that our respect and proudness of our heritage got overshadowed. What you've seen in the last couple of seasons are moves that NASCAR is making to remind us of that heritage, of what made NASCAR what it is."

To help me feel NASCAR as he had first felt it, Helton offered to arrange a ride in Bristol's official pace car, a Ford Mustang painted in a checkered-flag motif. I thanked him but said there was no need; the guys at Ford Racing had already extended the same invitation. When I arrived, as instructed, at 7:30
A.M.
, the empty stadium felt like the inside of a Coca-Cola can, the metal bleachers rising up on all sides, a stripe of red running along the top. I folded my six-foot-three-inch self into the Mustang's back seat. Nestled back there with me was a writer from
Time
magazine, also tall, also a Yankee new to the track. Riding shotgun was Claire B. Lang, a petite reporter from Sirius NASCAR Radio. She waved a microphone in front of our driver, Brett Bodine, a former Cup Series racer in his fifties whose job it now was to pilot the pace cars at NASCAR events. "Have at it, buddy. Step on it," Lang said. And Bodine did.

The Ford rocketed to 80 mph, which on the short track felt like twice that, the car careering into the next turn almost as quickly as it came out of the last one. Since its dramatic 30-degree banking allows for more speed than at other short tracks, Bristol has long called itself the "World's Fastest Half-Mile." This superlative proved insufficiently exciting: in the run-up to this race Bristol's marketers rebranded it "the half-mile of havoc," airing ads that replayed the radio call of the Edwards-Keselowski crash followed by a narrator ominously intoning, "The one question on everybody's mind is: What is going to happen at Bristol?"

There, in the pace car's back seat, the question on my mind was much the same. On the corners, Bodine skimmed the walls and then, on the straightaways, slung us down for an extra burst of speed. As we screeched around in that tight oval, I struggled just to remain seated upright. The exertions of the engine and the shifting gears made it sound as though the undercarriage was being torn apart. I could see almost nothing of the track in front of us, nor could I see the stands looming overhead, nor the pit, nor the infield. The only thing I had a clear view of from my backseat perch was the wall to my right, which, with every turn, leaped out, a concrete blur only inches from the door.

Bodine spoke casually into the microphone, narrating his actions for Lang while fiddling with a transmitter. "Here's a hard brake to get into turn one. Put the throttle down in the middle of one and two. Now we're accelerating down the back straightaway."

Unlike athletes in other professional sports, a NASCAR driver is blessed with no conspicuous physical gifts—neither great height nor strength nor explosive quickness. The thing he does so well most of us do every day on highways and back roads. The car he drives even looks like a sedan, like the cars we drive. So it's less of a stretch for fans to imagine that they could be a race car driver than, say, a guard for the Chicago Bulls or an Olympic gymnast. And over the years, the diehards regularly showed up or tuned in because of that easy identification with the drivers, that alluring mix of reverence and familiarity. Richard Petty, known as "The King," would sign autographs for hours and was said to have the "common touch." Dale Earnhardt Sr., for all his success as a driver and a brand, was always thought of as working class. By contrast, a recent HBO documentary meant to reveal the real Jimmie Johnson, who has now won the sport's top prize an unprecedented four straight years, showed him flying on his private jet, drinking healthy smoothies, and hanging with his wife, a former model, in the kitchen of their largely vacant mega-mansion.

Between turns one and two, to demonstrate how our speed had offset the gravitational effects of the track's steep banking, Bodine brought the car to a full stop.

"I'm standing on my head! I'm falling out of my seat belt here!" Claire B. Lang said, her voice rising animatedly at the end of each word. Instinctively I leaned in the opposite direction, as if to keep us from tipping over. After Bodine got the Ford whipping around the track again, he reminded us that in a race forty-two other cars would be fighting us for position. One of the most repeated sayings around NASCAR tracks, a phrase coined in the 1990 Tom Cruise film
Days of Thunder
, is "rubbin' is racin'." Although specially designed for high speeds, stock cars have fenders and are meant to "trade paint." Bodine said to try to imagine those other cars bumping and pushing us around a bit. Although I'd like to say that I was able to envision myself as a badass NASCAR driver, that the only thing separating Brett Bodine and me was where we sat in the Mustang, I couldn't entertain the thought of a single car driving within twenty feet of us—not without seizing up.

 

NASCAR has always been defined by its wrecks, by thrown helmets and thrown fists. Indeed, NASCAR's wider popularity beyond the South and Midwest can be traced to a fistfight at the conclusion of the 1979 Daytona 500 between Cale Yarborough and the Allison brothers, Donnie and Bobby, that was caught live on national television. And the crash that killed Dale Earnhardt Sr., on the very last turn of the 2001 Daytona race, not only ushered in NASCAR's more stringent safety regulations but also propelled the sport into pop culture ubiquity. With all the added attention, new fans flocked to NASCAR, chasing an icon and an experience that were already gone.

Humpy Wheeler, one of NASCAR's most illustrious promoters and recently the president of Charlotte Motor Speedway, explained to me that this craving for violence was act ually embedded in NASCAR's backwoods Southern DNA. Whenever he speaks to young drivers at NASCAR's annual rookie seminar in Florida, he always recommends that they read Senator Jim Webb's book about the Scots-Irish,
Born Fighting.
"If they can understand what makes that culture different and interesting—the meanness in it, why fellas love to fight, how they 'turn red' and completely lose it—then they'll understand the South, country and western music, and stock-car racing," Wheeler said. Darrell Waltrip, who in his prime in the 1970s and 1980s won eleven times at Bristol, now was a broadcaster on Fox and owned a car dealership not too far from my home in Nashville. He told me there was no denying that the sport was "blue-collar, Middle-America, shotgun-in-the-back-window. That's our fan base. You can't make a dog meow."