Game Over 
EEEEEEAAAAOOOOWWW!!!
Twelve hours, 500 miles, 2,000 tires, 7,000 gallons of gas, 20,000 Dale Earnhardt Jr. shirts, 16,000 hot dogs, and an inland sea of light beer: My fearless voyage into the 34,400- horsepower heart of Nascar, Texas.
(Page 2 of 5)
That was 160 mph. Today, I hear, they’ll come close to 200.
8:56
On the grass in front of the main grandstand, a giant mobile stage is being set up for the pre-race ceremony. At the center, stairs lead to a large inflated Nextel castle, and on the sides sit three life-size characters from the 2006 Disney movie Cars. I’m going to go out on a limb right here and say that I believe Cars may be the best movie ever made about NASCAR. My three-year-old son, with whom I have watched the movie about 25 times, will back me up on this. Yes, it’s a Pixar cartoon, but it is spot-on about everything in the NASCAR world, from the look and feel of the tracks and the infields to the adoring faces of the fans.
Ah, the fans. The night before the race I had spent some time among the 40,000 faithful camped in the sites outside the stadium (for which they’d paid considerably less than the fans occupying the infield). Many of them had been there all week. NASCAR fans are not shy—not the men who stood around drinking beer in large groups, chanting, “Titties! Titties! Titties!” at women cruising by in slowly moving trucks, and certainly not the women, many of whom did indeed bare their breasts in return for the showering of plastic bead necklaces.
I had a guide for much of the night, a journalist from Beaumont named Jerry Jordan, himself a NASCAR fan who has been to many races. This, of course, was my first, and I betrayed my ignorance when I began asking people who their “favorite drivers” were. Two clean-cut men from Kansas wearing NASCAR caps with the numbers 20 (Stewart) and 24 (Gordon) stared at me as if I was stupid before pointing at their hats.
“Tony Stewart,” answered another young man at a nearby fire, and a cheerful young woman agreed. “I love his attitude—he’s just like me. You gotta have the right attitude to race.”
Jerry and I wandered to another campsite, where a couple from Silsbee, near Beaumont, drank beer and watched the OU-A&M game. The man had long hair, an East Texas drawl, and a casual but defiant redneck air. He wore a Budweiser cap and his wife wore a Bud jacket. Jerry recognized a fellow traveler, and this time he asked the question the way NASCAR fans ask it of one another: “Who’s your driver?”
“Dale Earnhardt Jr.,” the man responded proudly. “Nothing but.” He held up his beer. “I drink Budweiser too. I don’t need to share the wealth with anyone else.” He looked into the fire. “Junior’s never going to fill his daddy’s shoes,” he said, “but he’s his own person.”
Who’s your driver? As I would learn, it’s not a matter of favorites, and for a lot of the faithful, it’s not even a matter of choice. Football fans root for individual players, but only because they play for their team. NASCAR fans feel about their drivers like Baptists do about Jesus.
9:15
It’s still breakfast by my clock, but I’m watching the first corny dog of the day get eaten by a teenage girl in a Caney Cougars T-shirt. The man next to her has a plate of nachos. The PA announcer reminds us to go to the main souvenir midway and “grab some of your favorite driver’s merchandise!” NASCAR devotees tend to get to the stadium a lot earlier than most other sports fans, and they fill the time with two all-American pursuits: eating and shopping.
More than $2 billion of NASCAR-licensed products are sold every year, and the road along the grandstand looks like a carnival, with dozens of large hauler trucks selling stuff and thousands of fans with nothing to do for hours but … buy stuff. Many drivers have merch trucks. Junior has five, and in front of each one, fifty people wait to buy hats, T-shirts, and jackets decorated with his face or his number or the logo of his primary sponsor, Budweiser.
Dozens of companies that sponsor NASCAR cars have marketing tents or booths along the midway. Nextel, which will pay a total of $750 million through 2013 to be NASCAR’s main sponsor, has a giant barn where you can buy a cell phone or get your picture taken with life-size cardboard cutouts of Stewart, Gordon, and Junior. At the Chevy and GM tents, pretty girls greet passersby. Goody’s people hand out “headache powder”; U.S. Smokeless Tobacco dispenses snuff. Nearby, four fans on a mock-game-show stage play NASCAR trivia, with people in the large crowd chiding them for not knowing the answers to questions like “Who is the youngest winner of the Daytona 500?”
The race is five hours away, but some would argue that this is the main event for NASCAR fans—hanging out with other like-minded folks, people who love speed, noise, and the occasional breakfast corny dog, people who know that the youngest winner of the Daytona 500 was Jeff Gordon. Age 25.
9:49
One of the reasons I’ve never taken NASCAR seriously is because it’s always seemed like a kind of endangered species refuge for white males, both on the track and in the stands. So I’m surprised when I spot my fourth interracial couple (he wears a Bud jacket, she a FedEx one). In addition, on Friday I watched a black driver, Bill Lester, race in the Craftsman Truck Series and yesterday saw several blacks in the pit crews. NASCAR has been working hard to expand its audience and recently hired Magic Johnson as a consultant.
I’m also surprised by the number of women I’m seeing, attributable, perhaps, to all the young hotties racing these days. At Friday’s qualifying laps—where drivers competed for the coveted pole position—the fans were lined up three deep behind chains and gates with their cameras on, their Sharpies up (caps off), and their hats and autograph books in hand. Half were women, and they called out to Jimmie Johnson, to Stewart, and to rookie sensation Denny Hamlin (“He’s pretty in the face,” one said as he walked by). But the racer who made them scream like teenagers was 26-year-old Kasey Kahne, the Brad Pitt of NASCAR, though he looks more like Noah Wyle from ER. After Kahne drove his laps, he got out of his car to talk to a huge crowd of reporters. “Oh, my God,” a woman with short blond hair standing behind the pit wall announced. “We’re gonna see Kasey Kahne!” Another joined in. “There he is! Kasey! Woohoo!” They waved at Kahne, who leaned against his car, sunglasses on his head, eyebrows arched, answering questions and trying to act casual. He was about 25 feet away.
“He’s smiling!”
“Awww!”
Three or four women began yelling at once, “Kasey Kahne!” He didn’t look.
“I’m watching him,” a woman said breathlessly into her cell phone. “He’s being interviewed ten feet from here!”
9:55
There’s always something to watch on the huge Nextel Vision screen just behind pit road: ads for Lowe’s (featuring Johnson), UPS (Dale Jarrett), and Nextel; scenes from Cars; videos of crashes—cars spinning out, hitting the wall, smoking—and winners spraying the air with champagne.
A couple of on-screen announcers talk about what to look for in the upcoming race. The Dickies 500 is the eighth of 10 races that constitute the Chase for the Cup, a new (since 2004) playoff system after a regular season of 26 races. People complain about the NBA’s grueling season, in which basketball players play from October to June; NASCAR’s campaign is two months longer, almost every single Sunday. By mid-November, when the cars pull into the Homestead-Miami Speedway for the last race, everyone is exhausted: drivers, crew, and fans. NASCAR’s is the Bataan Death March of professional sports seasons.
My Library
