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.
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10:00
The rain returns in a light, steady drizzle, but inside the garage, the crews are making last-minute changes to the brightly colored Chevy Monte Carlos and Dodge Chargers. They share names with current models put out by automobile companies that anyone can buy, plain old “stock” cars, but there is nothing stock about NASCAR cars. The engines are custom-made—$50,000, 358-cubic-inch, 800-horsepower V8’s that get about 3 miles per gallon. There are no mufflers or catalytic converters. The brakes, shock absorbers, and axles are fit for a Sherman tank, and the 12-inch-wide tires are absolutely bald, good for maybe 100 miles before blowing. The 22-gallon vacuum-sealed fuel cells have a foam baffling to prevent explosions. The body is beer can-thin sheet metal, welded together with no doors and an open window for the driver (the windshield is made of shatterproof Lexan). The headlights are decals. The driver’s seat sits inside a cage of tubing. The steering wheel clicks on and off a collapsible column. There are oil pressure and water temperature gauges and a voltmeter, but there’s no speedometer; drivers use the tachometer (RPMs) if they need to figure out how fast they’re going, but the sound of the engine and the tires usually tells them all they need to know. Racers understand better than anyone that all speed is relative, and all they want to do is go relatively faster than everybody else.
One of the core debates in NASCAR is, car or driver? Which is more important? On the one hand, because all cars must have the same internal and external specs, the race will ultimately be about the men driving them. On the other, the teams with more money generally have faster cars, and as driver Brian Vickers said in a pre-race press conference yesterday, “We all know you win these races at the shop.” In other words, careful adjustments to the steering, tire pressure, or chassis can give any car an edge. Earlier this season, Johnson’s crew chief was suspended for four weeks for raising the rear window to give his car an aerodynamic boost. As the saying goes, “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”
10:43
Former Dallas Cowboys running back Tony Dorsett, wearing a Crown Royal jacket (he was helping promote a company contest), stands under a restroom building awning between pit road and the garage and answers questions from a pretty blond reporter. “I’m becoming a NASCAR fan,” he insists. “I’m becoming a bigger NASCAR fan as the years go by.” A middle-aged man with a camera around his neck, who has been waiting for drivers to make the walk to the track, blurts to his wife, “That’s Tony Dorsett! Holy shit!” and begins snapping pictures.
11:00
It’s still raining, the sky is getting even darker, and I’m starting to worry that I’ve come all the way to the TMS just to wander the souvenir midway and stare at the Nextel Vision screen. But walking around pit road, I run into Tom Krampitz, the track’s government and community-affairs consultant, whom I had met in September when I’d first visited the track. “NASCAR will postpone the start for four or five hours if need be,” he assures me, “but they’ll run the race today. They have to. The TV advertisers won’t be happy showing it tomorrow on cable. Tomorrow’s a workday. No one will be happy.”
Back in September, Krampitz had taken me up to the grandstand roof for a bird’s-eye view of the track, which was built in 1995 by Bruton Smith, a fabulously wealthy North Carolinian who owns five other tracks. Smith then sold the track to the city of Fort Worth in return for a thirty-year lease. “He’s a visionary,” said Krampitz, gazing over the prairie. “He saw this piece of land and decided to create this.” Krampitz, who is tall and thin and looks like the character actor James Cromwell, told me that there’s always some kind of event going on at the TMS, from weddings on Victory Lane to proms in the Speedway Club. That evening in September it was a charity drive, where a thousand fans paid $25 to drive three laps around the speedway.
Directly underneath us, 192 suites lined the top of the grandstand, with 64 seats in each one. “Companies pay sixty to eighty thousand dollars a year to show their clients a good time,” said Krampitz. “This puppy is a money-making economic-development engine. Street & Smith’s said one of our big weekends is the economic equivalent of the Super Bowl. The return to the city is huge.” He looked down on the track and the giant logos of companies sponsoring the TMS: Dickies, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Radio Shack, Samsung, UPS, Time Warner Cable. “Obviously, if we have a piece of flat surface, we’re gonna sell it. That’s the name of the game.”
No sport is more heavily subsidized by outside money than NASCAR. “Money buys speed,” as TMS president Eddie Gossage is fond of saying. Corporate sponsors make NASCAR’s wheels go round, much to the supreme consternation of anyone (like me) who’s ever (for example) felt proud of the Chicago Cubs for keeping their outfield walls commercial-free. How can anyone take seriously a sport in which both car and driver are covered in ads? How do you cheer for DuPont?
“Loudly,” Jeff Gordon, driving the DuPont Monte Carlo SS, might say. It costs $15 million to $20 million to build and maintain a car, as well as pay the crew and the driver, so team owners go to corporations for sponsorship help. Right now, the 250 companies involved in the business of NASCAR spend about $1 billion annually. Each team generally has one or two primary sponsors, which pay anywhere from $3 million to $15 million a year in return for getting to put a big logo on the hood and possibly on the roof and doors (if there is more than one primary sponsor, they will alternate taking the hood logo, race by race). Teams also have many associate sponsors, which pay anywhere from $72,000 for twenty-inch decals on the doors and fenders to $1 million for the rear spoiler or the trunk space (called the TV panel because it fills the screen when the camera in the following car is trained on it). In the early days, it was all motor oil and chewing tobacco. Now you see logos for Nicorette, Ragú, M&M’s. Women make up two fifths of the fan base now, and much of the advertising is aimed at them. Two seasons ago female Busch Series driver Kim Crosby had a sponsorship deal with Boudreaux’s Butt Paste, a diaper rash ointment.
Corporations love NASCAR because the return on investment is excellent. Studies have shown that the “exposure value” to a corporation of having its logo on a car and driver exceeds the money spent putting it there by as much as five to one. Think about it: Even if viewers TiVo a race and fast-forward through the commercials, they still see nothing but ads. NASCAR fans are more white-collar and middle-class than fans of other sports and they’re extremely brand loyal. Budweiser sells a lot of beer because of Junior—and Drakkar Noir sells a lot of cologne. In the first year after he began doing ads for the fragrance, sales shot up by 46 percent.
In return for the millions of dollars, drivers become marketing tools for their corporations, doing TV commercials, making personal appearances before or after every race, and giving interviews in which they constantly drop the names of their primary sponsors. Drivers find themselves gushing over band-saw blades and pipe wrenches, as Jeff Burton did at a Friday press conference when his team announced that Lenox Industrial Tools would be an associate sponsor in 2007: “We have all high-quality products on our car. We have all quality names that people notice. Lenox is a wonderful addition to that.”
There’s a great scene in Cars in which Lightning McQueen, a shiny, arrogant race car, reluctantly makes his obligatory post-race personal appearance in front of the adoring rusty heaps waiting at the tent of his sponsor, Rust-eze Medicated Bumper Ointment. “I hate rusty cars,” he says to his handler, then gives his rote speech: “You know, the Rust-eze Medicated Bumper Ointment team ran a great race today.” Yes, maybe stock car racing is an authentic sport and NASCAR drivers are authentic athletes, but if they didn’t spend so much time selling soap, I’d be more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
11:30
The basic strategy of stock car racing is pretty easy to understand: Go fast, turn left, drive the line. Advanced strategy, or “racing hard,” is where things get interesting. The Nextel Vision screen shows some good examples of this sort of thing as it plays a video to the tune of AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”: cars nudging one another, smashing one another, putting one another into the wall. Drivers “trade paint” to intimidate, to retaliate, or just because they feel like it. Mostly they do it to get the other guy out of the way or make him spin out, especially on the turns, when the cars are at their most unstable. This is called the bump and run. Dale Earnhardt was a master of it. He did whatever it took to win and bullied his way to seven Cup championships; Junior, the consensus is, doesn’t, and has won none.
Sometimes a racer doesn’t even have to bump; if he speeds up right behind another car, he can trap air underneath his opponent’s back end, causing it to lose its grip on the road and spin out. But often what cars are doing when they’re speeding along behind one another is “drafting,” or riding in the other’s slipstream. Drafting is mostly used at bigger tracks like the Talladega Superspeedway. This year, on the very last lap there, Stewart, in third, was drafting behind Johnson, who was in second, when he gave him a push to the inside of Brian Vickers, who was in first. Both sped past him, Johnson won, and Stewart came in second. As NASCAR fans say, that’s racin’.
12:14
The rain stops. Eight large blower trucks roll out, like racetrack Zambonis. As they make their way around, the band Van Zant begins playing on the main stage. The crowd is polite until the guitarists knock out the first notes of “Sweet Home Alabama,” at which everyone in the place goes crazy. It’s a greatly appreciated nod to history—not so much the band’s (the two singers are brothers of Ronnie Van Zant, long-dead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd) but NASCAR’s.
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