NASCAR Nation
Forget about the Soccer Mom, object of
obsessive interest to political strategists in the last two presidential
elections. Two election cycles is as much
concentrated attention as a voter bloc can expect to get in these
fast-changing times. The candidates of
2004 have fixed their sights on a new quarry: the NASCAR Dad.
So, at any rate, we are told by Democratic
pollster Celinda Lake, who coined the term. A
NASCAR Dad is a rural or small-town voter, most likely white and living in
the South. Once upon a time he was a
reliable Democrat, but he has been voting steadily Republican in recent
elections for “cultural” reasons — reasons having to do with guns,
religion, patriotism, and lifestyle. What,
exactly, is his connection with NASCAR — the National Association for
Stock Car Auto Racing? In the hope of finding out, I recently attended a
major NASCAR event at the Talladega track in Alabama. Before
I report on what I found, here is some background on the sport NASCAR
represents.
The term “stock car” refers to a street automobile from a dealer’s stock,
the kind you and I drive, as opposed to the custom-built pod-and-strut
mutants you see in Formula One racing. When
ordinary citizens began to purchase automobiles in large numbers in the
1930s and 1940s, some of them were taken with the urge to race against
other drivers on unpaved local dirt tracks. Spectators
assembled to watch. Drivers tinkered with
their engines to give them more speed. This was happening all over the
country by the late 1940s, when NASCAR was founded, but it was happening
much more in the South than elsewhere. Wherever
it happened, though, it was from the beginning mainly a working-class
interest, taken up by young men who liked fiddling with automobiles and
exhibiting physical courage among their peers.
A notable early attempt to bring stock-car racing to wider attention was
Tom Wolfe’s long article “The Last American Hero” in the March 1965 issue
of Esquire. Wolfe’s subject was
Junior Johnson, who raced from 1953 to 1966, and was thereafter involved
in the sport as an owner until 1995. One
of stock-car racing’s early superstars, Johnson had perfected his skills
by working as a driver for his father’s moonshine business in the
Appalachian foothills, racing along remote country roads by night to
outwit the “revenuers” — agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms. Johnson Senior was one of
the biggest operators of illegal whiskey stills in the South.
Tom Wolfe had no difficulty getting some color out of Junior Johnson and
his neighbors in Wilkes County, N.C. While
insisting that “very few grits, Iron Boy overalls, clodhoppers or hats
with ventilation holes up near the crown enter into this story,” Wolfe
nonetheless managed to leave his readers with the impression that
stock-car racing was a sport favored pretty exclusively by white Southern
rustics — the kind of people who keep coon dogs and, in common with the
late Hank Williams, believe that “hill” rhymes with “real.”
Junior Johnson’s own take on the episode
was of course from the other side of the cultural divide: “That Wolfe guy
was something else. He showed up down here in Wilkes County talkin’ funny
with a New York accent [Wolfe is from Virginia], and wearin’ fancy
clothes.”
* *
* * *
Officials of NASCAR nowadays wince at this Southern-rustic image.
Stock-car racing is, they insist, a sport
for everyone, an inclusive sport, a family sport. For
30 years they have been trying to shake off those connotations of
liquor-running good ol’ boys and big-haired women. They
have had some success in spreading interest around the country, but they
have not yet persuaded America’s cognitive elites to take stock-car racing
seriously. This was apparent in February
2001, when NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt was killed in a crash at the
Daytona 500. Earnhardt was mourned
extravagantly by millions of racing fans. Meanwhile,
from executive suites and faculty common rooms, from the wood-paneled
corridors of prestigious law firms, from the bustling,
“diversity”-obsessed editorial offices of broadsheet newspapers and
network-TV newsrooms, rose the plaintive cry: “Dale who?”
Yet if you look at the numbers, this is not a minor sport.
NASCAR’s Winston Cup, the biggest of the
three “major league” series in the stock-car-racing calendar, drew 6.7
million ticketed spectators for 36 events last year, an average of 186,000
per event. By way of comparison, paid
attendance for the NFL in 2002 averaged 66,000 per event, for major league
baseball 28,000, for NBA basketball 17,000. TV
viewership for a NASCAR race runs around 15 to 20 million, the same as for
many major-league baseball playoff games.
What is it that all these people are watching? What’s
the appeal? There must be some deep desire
in the human psyche to watch human beings race vehicles round a circuit.
Chariot races were, after all, an
obsession of both the Romans and the Byzantines. I
went to Alabama seeking enlightenment.
* * *
* *
Your first impression of Talladega speedway is of sheer size.
The track is an approximate oval, with
grandstands at both the long sides. Seen
from one grandstand, the opposite one seems to shimmer in the misty
distance. It is in fact only three-fifths
of a mile away, but appears farther because of the haze generated by huge
quantities of traffic all around, and by barbecue grills on the infield.
Oh, the infield — I had better explain
about the Talladega infield.
The infield — 212 acres at Talladega — is the interior of the oval.
You get to it by driving through one of
three tunnels under the track. Much of the
infield is taken up with maintenance areas, garages, administrative
buildings, and access roads, but the remainder — around 120 acres — is
available to fans. And here they are, the
hard core of stock-car-racing fandom. And
here are their vehicles: Your second impression of the speedway is that
you have never in your life seen so many RVs (that is, recreational
vehicles, campers) all in one place. The
infield fan areas are filled with folk who arrive typically a day or two
before the big race and just camp out there in the infield.
Some of the RVs are improvised.
One popular model consists of an old
school bus painted some improbable color, with metal railings welded
around the roof so the occupants can stand up there to watch the race.
NASCAR’s attempts to Disneyfy their sport
have made little headway in the Talladega infield. The
crowd is noisy and beery. They wear denim
shorts and T-shirts, baseball caps or bandannas. I
see a lot of tattoos and a lot of Confederate flags. The
track’s security people inspect the interior of each vehicle before
allowing it to park, and I was told it has been “some years” since there
was a shooting on the infield, but things still get rowdy, particularly
the night before a big race. (Among the
track’s other administrative facilities is a small jail.)
Rowdy, and raunchy too: The Mardi Gras
custom of beads for skin (you give the lady a string of beads, she briefly
exposes her chest) has come up to Talladega, and it is common to see girls
with several strings of beads round their necks — although, as one of my
NASCAR minders noted wistfully, “The girls you’d like to see doing it
aren’t the ones doing it.”
I watched the first few minutes of the race from the infield, near the
starting line. The 43 competing vehicles
circle the track slowly, two by two, behind a pace car. Each
car’s position in line has been determined by pre-race qualifying laps.
As they come to the starting line, the
pace car pulls off the track, a green flag is waved, and the drivers
throttle up to full power. Everyone had
told me that this is the most thrilling moment of a race, and they did not
lie. That mighty surge of engines, the
even mightier roar of the crowd, the smell of gasoline and rubber, all
combine into an extraordinary sensory experience. What
follows is necessarily something of an anticlimax, especially as it goes
on for three hours or more. The lead cars
tend to form a large “pack,” so you get a small reprise of that starting
thrill each time the pack passes your viewing point, but after half an
hour or so, as the faster cars lapped the slower ones, I lost track of who
was leading.
I wandered down to the pit area. Cars need
to be refueled at several points in a 500-mile race, and wheels need to be
changed. A driver loses position when he
makes a pit stop, of course, and part of the strategy of racing — there is
a great deal of strategy in this sport — is judging the best time to make
your stops. The pit work is done with
terrific dispatch, by teams who practice endlessly at shaving tenths of a
second off their turnaround time. The team
I watched — it was driver Bill Elliott’s — changed four wheels and
refueled the car all in less than 15 seconds. They
have a trick of pre-fixing the lugs in place on the replacement wheels
with an elastic cement. Then, when the old
wheel is off, on goes the new one, bang!, and the power wrench secures the
lugs, DZ!-DZ!-DZ!-DZ!-DZ! “Slicker ’n snot
on a doorknob,” pronounced the team leader with satisfaction as Elliott
vroomed away.
Up close the cars look surprisingly small and flimsy. Their
“stock” nature is, at this point in the evolution of the sport, highly
theoretical. Eligible models in the
Winston Cup series are the Chevy Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix, Ford
Taurus, and Dodge Intrepid, but none of the cars I saw bore much
resemblance to the street models of those marques. None
of their side bodywork panels paused to include a door, for instance; the
driver climbs in and out through his side window (which has no glass).
An owner I spoke with, who had a Monte Carlo entered in the
race, described to me in loving detail how his mechanics hand-tool all the
car parts in his 75,000-square-foot machine shop. I
interrupted him to ask: “You hand-make everything? So where, exactly, does
Chevrolet come in?” He looked a little
flustered. “Oh, you know, they supply some
parts . . . the chassis design . . .”
It is commonly said that car-racing fans go to the track in the hope of
seeing a grisly crash. From my own
encounters with fans on the infield and in the stands, I don’t believe
this. Aside from the sensory thrills of
speed and noise, and the rude social pleasures of the infield, the main
appeal of the sport, for most fans, lies in rooting for their favorite
drivers. Each one has some points of
character, personal history, or driving style that endear him to, or
repel, some section of the fan base. A few
are wildly popular with practically everyone: Dale
Earnhardt Sr. was, and his son, Dale Jr., now is. (“On
account of his daddy,” a lady fan in the stands said fondly when I asked
why.) A few are widely disliked.
Kurt Busch, a fast-rising young star known
for . . . unorthodox driving tactics, is a villain to
traditionalists, and to the kind of Southerner who believes in maintaining
the exquisite manners of the region even when you are trying to kill
someone. When the drivers were
individually announced during the pre-race proceedings at Talladega, his
name was greeted with a great outbreak of booing from the fans.
* * *
* *
What then of those stereotypes the NASCAR suits so strenuously try to
distance themselves from? The Southern
bias, for example? Since Talladega, smack
plumb in the heart of the Heart of Dixie, is the only track I have ever
been to, my personal experience of the sport has not been well balanced,
and I shall dutifully report that you can attend a stock-car race in any
part of the country. There are major
tracks in California, Kansas, and New Hampshire. The
mathematician in me wants to check the numbers, though, and the numbers
suggest the following broad truth: Half of this sport belongs to the
South, while the other half is spread out among all the rest of us.
Take the location of tracks, for example. Defining
the South to be the old Confederacy plus Kentucky, of the 21 major tracks
(not counting road courses) in the U.S., 11 are in the South.
These Southern tracks have 15.4 of the
available 32 miles of roadway and 1.31 million of the total 2.46 million
grandstand seats. Over a half, nearly a
half, and over a half. It is the same with
the 43 drivers at Talladega: I tallied 21 drivers from the South; the next
biggest regional group was from the Midwest, with 11 drivers.
Every one of these 43 drivers, by the way, was a white male. None had a
Hispanic surname, though Christian Fittipaldi is from Săo Paulo, Brazil.
The median age of the drivers was over 39 — older than I would have
expected. Every one older than 34 was married, with a median 3.5 children.
The Southernness, whiteness, maleness, and (though I am going out on a
limb here) heterosexuality of the sport offer obvious openings to PC
inquisitors. Last June, for example, a
board member of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH operation told reporters that
stock-car racing is “the last bastion of white supremacy.”
This was a counterstrike in a campaign by
Jackson’s critics to get NASCAR to stop contributing to Rainbow/PUSH, on
the grounds that the funds end up mostly in the pockets of Jackson, his
relatives, and his mistresses. The
campaign was eventually successful and NASCAR stopped their contributions.
In the conversations I had at Talladega,
fan approval was unanimous.
There was nothing racist about that approval, though. Among
the celebrities introduced onstage during the pre-game show at Talladega
were the current Miss America and football great Reggie White, both black.
They were cheered as loudly as anyone —
Reggie White especially so, for having taken a strong anti-Jackson line in
the summer’s controversy. It is true that
NASCAR fans are overwhelmingly white, but they have nothing against black
people. It is only that, like much of the
rest of the country, they are sick of the racial-guilt industry, and most
particularly of Jesse Jackson and his self-enriching shakedown schemes.
And although NASCAR has cut the tie with
Jackson, it maintains a busy program of “diversity internships” for
minority college students.
The reason for the paucity of black drivers and owners — there are a
handful — is captured by Adam Bellow in his book In Praise of Nepotism:
“In auto racing, an equipment-intensive sport with a high financial
barrier to entry, it pays to have family connections.” In
fact, the NASCAR personnel database reads like the First Book of
Chronicles, with drivers begetting drivers and owners in apparently
endless succession.
The social appeal of stock-car racing is wider than it used to be, and
getting still wider, with college logos now featuring among the ads that
festoon race-car bodywork. A sport built
around such a strong network of family connections is, however, going to
grow away from its roots only very gradually. This
remains a conservative sport. That
does not mean, of course, that its fan base can be guaranteed to vote for
conservatives. The folk I mingled with at
Talladega the other day were still largely working- and
lower-middle-class. If they were to lose
their jobs in a major recession, they would not stop to ask whether the
president in charge at the time called himself a conservative or a
liberal. Likewise, while they will cheer
on their commander in chief if he pursues a determined war against our
nation’s enemies, they will not long tolerate U.S. fatalities in a
drawn-out politicized conflict where vigorous action is restrained by
deference to the opinions of foreigner hecklers or self-anointed domestic
elites.
I am going to leave it to professional analysts to decide whether NASCAR
Dads will be decisive in the 2004 elections, and just register the
following impression that I brought away from Talladega with me:
Whoever comes into stock-car racing, whether as driver, or
owner, or fan, or political pollster, or just inquisitive outsider, will
find a sport in which physical courage is admired, family bonds are
treasured, the nation’s flag is honored, and the proper point of balance
between courteous restraint and necessary aggression is constantly
debated. I greatly enjoyed my day at the
races. If NASCAR fans really do form a
voting bloc, I would much rather they were on my side than on the other.
I am glad to have made the acquaintance of
a thrilling, noisy, colorful, commercial, very American sport.
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