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.
7:15 AM
I’M SITTING AT AN INTERSECTION in one of the world’s largest parking lots, watching an impatient crossing guard cope with the early stages of one of the world’s largest traffic jams, which is forming in front of the Texas Motor Speedway, one of the world’s largest racetracks. The guard has a long shift ahead of him; today’s race won’t begin for six hours and forty minutes. Plus, it’s spitting rain. He finally turns toward me and begins yelling and pointing at the track, and I lurch forward into a tunnel that runs underneath it, emerging into the open air of a gigantic walled city.
As on a Sunday morning in any big city, some residents have a clear sense of purpose, while others clearly have none. Outside the locked gates of a parking lot that holds the drivers’ luxury buses, fans are already waiting, digital cameras out and Sharpies ready, just in case a famous racer decides to leave his warm bed and wander into the cold. The speedway’s infield has been converted into a camping area, home this race weekend to 10,000 people. Giant luxury motor coaches with tinted windows and expandable living rooms park next to scrappy little campers with awnings set in the gravel and hand-painted buses with homemade scaffoldings on their roofs. American, rebel, and Lone Star flags fly next to banners waving the numbers of honored NASCAR drivers: 3 (the late Dale Earnhardt), 8 (his son Dale Earnhardt Jr., known to all as Junior), 20 (Tony Stewart), 24 (Jeff Gordon). Beer cans and plastic bead necklaces lie smashed on the ground, clues to the ferocity of the previous night’s partying, and now, in the cold light of a cloudy morning, men and women walk slowly along the lanes between the campers, dazed looks on their faces. A few climb up onto their roofs for a view of the empty gray track, which mirrors the sky. It is November 5, the Dickies 500, the eighth race in the Chase for the Nextel Cup, and 43 race cars will soon be driving really, really fast for 500 miles. If the rain holds off, 215,000 people will crowd into this former cow pasture north of Fort Worth to watch them, and for an afternoon or so, the Texas Motor Speedway will be the eleventh-largest city in the state, measured by population. Measured by other values, those of human devotion, corporate satisfaction, and skull-rattling noise, it’ll be number one.
7:45
Though the rain has stopped, talk in the pressroom is bleak: There’s a 30 percent chance of more today, and rain means no race. Stock car tires have zero tread, so even the least bit of moisture on the track can spell disaster. Journalists sit at their laptops and read their papers. Some of these guys have been covering the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing long enough to have seen it go from regional Southern sport to national craze. NASCAR likes to brag that it now has more than 75 million fans, or one in 4 Americans, which is probably an exaggeration, and that 275 million watch on TV, which again is a bit of a stretch. But somebody’s watching: ESPN, ABC, Fox, and TNT are paying $4.48 billion to televise NASCAR races for the next eight years. Seven million people turn out for the season’s 36 races, held from February through November at 23 speedways all over the country, from Fontana, California, to Dover, Delaware. The race weekends are three-day festivals, many beginning on Friday night with the Craftsman Truck Series, continuing with the Saturday afternoon Busch Series, and culminating in the big-daddy Sunday afternoon Nextel Cup Series. Of course, you don’t have to be a race fan to know that NASCAR is huge. You see the drivers every day, on cereal boxes, in magazines, on TV: Stewart selling Banquet chicken potpies, Junior selling Wrangler jeans, Ken Schrader selling Little Debbie snacks.
Let me begin by saying that I, however, have never been a NASCAR fan. Not only have I always been annoyed by the overt commercialism of the sport (why, for God’s sake, should I buy a certain brand of chicken potpie because some guy in an orange-and-black jumpsuit tells me to?), I’ve never really gotten stock car racing. What’s the deal with driving in a circle for four hours? Like a lot of Americans, I’ve always found deep and special meaning in the throwing of an ellipsoid followed by the violent bringing to earth of the catcher of said ellipsoid: I love football. That said, it was while watching Monday Night Football one night long ago that I heard Howard Cosell say something about racing I’ve always remembered. He was debating his partners about which sport featured the best athletes. Don Meredith or Frank Gifford offered something obvious, like football or basketball, with which I, of course, agreed. Cosell, always the contrarian, said, no, it’s auto racing, and he backed it up (in my memory) by explaining that the drivers had to have superquick reflexes and that they had to maintain a level of mental and physical focus for hours at a time—one false move and it’s not an offsides penalty. It’s death.
Okay, maybe. But if Cosell were here today, I’d say, “Look at these guys: doughy Stewart, rail-thin Junior, diminutive Gordon. Some of the younger drivers in NASCAR still have pimples. These are the world’s best athletes?”
So I’ve come to the Texas Motor Speedway not just for the drivers but also for the cars and the crazies, the life and the lifestyle, the thrill of speed and the agony of watching a bunch of guys turn left for four hours straight. The things that millions of my fellow Americans live for almost every single Sunday.
8:23
Actually, I’ve been to the Texas Motor Speedway before. Along pit road, a series of large parking spaces on a kind of exit ramp off the track, the crews are spreading out tools and bringing up stacks of smooth tires on the very piece of ground where, two months earlier, I’d donned a fire-retardant suit and climbed through the window of a Chevy Monte Carlo SS. I wasn’t alone that afternoon; four dozen other mostly middle-aged men, many of them in “Junior” T-shirts, had also paid the Team Texas High Performance Driving School hundreds of dollars to see what it was all about—to drive a real race car. After a brief lesson, we were strapped into a five-point harness, one with a collar connected to our helmets so that if we drove into the wall, our skulls wouldn’t snap off our spines. The inside of the car was cramped and cage-like. My co-pilot’s name was Steve. He flipped a switch and started the engine, and we were consumed by sound and rattling fury. A four-wheeler pushed us out onto the track, seventh out of seven cars, and I lumbered into that first turn like a tank. But on the straightaway I tapped the accelerator, and we suddenly surged ahead, like Michael Vick in the open field. It took me a while to figure out how to “drive the line”—NASCAR-speak for finding the best trajectory going into the turns and onto the straightaways, staying as close to the wall as possible, cutting the gas to ride the curve of the infield border, then progressively accelerating until you slam the pedal to the floor on the straightaway and hug the wall again. The other drivers, it might be needless to say, were better at driving the line than I was. In fact, by the eighth time around the mile-and-a-half-long track, every other driver in my group had passed me. Two laps later, as we slowed into the pit lane, it all of a sudden became very important to me to know that I hadn’t really driven like a guy who owns a Volvo station wagon, and I asked Steve about my top speed. “We went one hundred fifty on the next-to-last lap,” he said, clearly trying to make me feel better. It worked, at least until I figured out later, through a humbling viewing of the $45 videotape, that I maybe—maybe—topped out at 125.
I learned more about what racers go through from riding along with a professional driver a few minutes after my drive, in a dense pack of six other cars also piloted by pros. We got faster and louder, and by the first straightaway we were absolutely flying. “WOOOOOOOO!” I found myself yelling involuntarily. The driver barely decelerated on the turns and hit the gas again while we were still curving. I was certain we were going to fly off into space, but then we went even faster and it got even louder and I held on to the cage bars tighter. At 160 miles per hour, the drivers gave us paid customers a show, weaving in and out of traffic, violating the driver’s ed two-second rule, scaring the hell out of us. At one point I looked over and the car next to us was so close I could have touched it—if I could have peeled my hands away from the bars. The hardest part was the curves, where the banking was so high (24 degrees) and the g-force pressure so hard that by the third turn I felt like the guy in those pictures of early acceleration experiments, whose face is blowing back over his skull. My eardrums screamed. It felt as though a very large person were sitting on my head.
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