The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Page 5

  According to Humpy Wheeler, someone like Dale Earnhardt Sr. was so appealing to the core audience because he was a "John Wayne character, a kind of Civil War hero, a Confederate soldier." But Wheeler also agreed that the sport could gain traction in the big urban markets if it fielded a diverse group of drivers. He ran down an imagined lineup of multicultural all-stars, envisaging diversity as an ensemble cast in a Hollywood caper—an immigrant ex-cabbie from Long Island or Queens, an Italian driver from Chicago, a Hispanic kid from East L.A., with tattoos, a ring or two in his nose, who had been caught speeding forty-nine times in his rice rocket but was now sating his need for speed on the racetrack. What NASCAR really could use, Wheeler insisted, was a dramatic new star pitted against someone who was his opposite. He cited one of the young drivers on Max Siegel's Revolution Racing team, a New Jerseyan of Syrian descent named Paul Harraka. Then he had me consider the potential in setting Harraka—an Arab American, a northerner, a student at Duke, which Wheeler called "the wrong part of the South"—against an up-and-comer named Jordan Anderson. Anderson was a dirt-track racer from South Carolina, still a kid, whom Humpy Wheeler liked to call "Preacher" for his ability to quote anything from the Bible, Old Testament or New, but who in an instant could turn "Scots-Irish red, absolutely vicious." Wheeler said, "See, the contrast creates the rivalry."

  Max Siegel said that NASCAR's decentralized ownership model actually made it less exclusive than other professional sports. There was no league, no franchises, no old boys' club barring entry. Anyone with the $30 million or so to own and operate a car could start a team and enter a race. He felt minority-owned businesses and black professionals needed to look very closely at NASCAR simply for the economic opportunities it offered. In North Carolina alone, motor sports had a $5-billion-a-year impact.

  We were speaking by phone, and Siegel suddenly interrupted himself. "Right now I'm at the barbershop in Indianapolis," he said, "at Fresh Kutz, on Sixtieth and Michigan Road, where I grew up in the 'hood. And there's a dude getting out of a car right next to me—the guy's got on an M&M's NASCAR jacket. It's just ironic."

  Ricky Stenhouse Jr. would not lead the rebel yell or rise up as NASCAR's fiery new star. He was a chubby-cheeked twenty-two-year-old from Olive Branch, Mississippi, who started racing when he was six—first go-carts and then open-wheel cars on dirt tracks for his dad—and he answered just about every question with a "Yes, sir" or "No, sir." "When I raced up north, in Indiana and Ohio, I always got that I was polite. That's just the way I am. That's how my dad taught me," he said. Ricky Stenhouse Sr. built race-car engines for a living. He worked on customers' cars during the day and then stayed up through the night to build engines for his son. Racing is an incredibly expensive pursuit for a kid, costing around $10,000 a year for anyone serious about it, but the father's job made the burden a little more tolerable. Ricky Jr. grew up playing baseball and football and riding skateboards, but he stuck with motor sports, winning the go-cart races and getting noticed on the circuit. In 2007 Roush Fenway Racing, one of the sport's top teams, signed him to run Fords for them. It was Ricky's first time racing stock cars, and now he was in his first full season in the Nationwide series, the JV to the Sprint Cup's varsity.

  For Saturday's Nationwide race at Bristol, I sat on the "box," the perch overlooking a team's pit area, in a chair directly behind Ben Leslie, Ricky's crew chief. While Ricky and the other forty-two drivers on the track followed the pace car for their parade laps, Leslie looked past me to see that his spotter, Mike Calinoff, was in position, binoculars in hand, atop the track's roof. It was the spotter's job to guide the driver, to explain what was happening on the track around him. "When he says there's a hole," Ricky told me later, "you gotta get in it. Things happen so quickly."

  I was wearing headphones tuned to the communications between Ricky, Leslie, and Calinoff, an ongoing conversation concerning strategy and car condition that was available to any fan via scanners they could purchase at the track for $110. Leslie told his driver, "Protect yourself. Protect your equipment. Race hard. Race smart."

  "Yes, sir, got it. Race hard. Race smart," Ricky repeated. And the cars were off, zipping around the track, the entire crew watching Ricky pass in front of them and then in unison craning their necks to see the big monitor displaying the cars speeding down the front stretch, then turning back around to see him pass again before their eyes, each revolution completed in fifteen seconds.

  Bristol was only Ricky's thirty-second stock-car race, and his goals for the day were modest: to avoid getting hung up in a wreck and to gain as much "seat-time" experience as possible. Fifty-five laps into the three-hundred-lap race, Leslie decided to bring Ricky's Ford in for a pit stop, sooner than most other cars on the track. The vehicle was driving loose, its back end sliding sideways as it came around each turn. Leslie announced that the car would get four new tires, the gas would be topped off, and the car's track bar, which adjusted its suspension, would be tightened a notch. The seven members of the pit crew, in fire suits, knee pads, and helmets, waited with legs flexed against the top of the short wall separating them from pit road. They were all basketball tall and lean and broad-shouldered. Although they are called upon only two or three times over the course of a race, pit crews practice their highly choreographed routine dozens of times each week. It might take twenty laps for a driver to pass a car in front of him, but that same position can be gained in the pit by sending a vehicle back out onto the track a second faster.

  The men pounced over the wall and onto pit road, jumping and sliding around to the passenger side, the car lifting, tools whirring. Old tires were flung off, new ones secured. A man carrying a seventy-five-pound swan-necked gas can inserted it into the tank, while another crew member ripped a plastic screen from the windshield. Ricky dumped the clutch, hit the gas, and was gone, leaving discarded tires, scattered lug nuts, and splashed gasoline in his wake.

  Ninety laps in, a wreck halted the race, and when it started again ten minutes later, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., previously stuck in the middle of the pack, had moved into fourth place. Later, after Leslie pitted the car a second time, Ricky reentered the track in eighteenth place. But Leslie could see that Ricky had fresher tires than all but one car in front of him and was running each lap faster than most of the competition. With nearly 150 laps to go, Leslie told Ricky to follow the No. 3 car, which, he said, would win the race and Ricky would come in second. "You're doing a whale of a job. You're handling it like a man," Leslie said.

  Another yellow caution prompted several cars with less fuel and older tires to enter pit road. Suddenly Ricky—the rookie from Olive Branch, Mississippi, who was angling only for a decent amount of seat-time—was in the lead. Leslie's pit strategy had paid off. Everyone on the team perked up as the cars, in a double-file line, prepared for the restart. The green flag was waved and the cars took off. But Ricky shifted into third gear too quickly, then tried to compensate by letting off the brake entirely on a turn, almost hitting the wall. In a few seconds he had dropped to seventeenth, then eighteenth, then twenty-third. At lap 250, Ricky tried to maneuver around the No. 15 car, passing underneath it, and his front end hit the other car's back bumper. Ricky's Ford ricocheted off the top wall. Leaking water and needing a new radiator, the car was sent to the infield, where the crew tried desperately to repair it.

  During the race season, Ricky rents an apartment in Charlotte, a three-hour drive from Bristol. He didn't get home from the Nationwide race until 2:30 A.M., so late, he told me when I called him, that he missed church the next morning. Sunday afternoon he headed over to a friend's house, where they watched supercross, the Sprint Cup race, and bull riding. On Monday he had a 7 A.M. workout at Roush Fenway. He didn't have many days off, and he raced more than thirty-five weekends a year. It was a job, he said, but at least it left him time to play golf and listen to country music and even take the occasional vacation. Soon he would go snowmobiling in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He wasn't too beat up about the Bristol race, about the
wreck that busted his radiator. "The spotter felt the 15 came off the wall more than he had to," he said. "It's not that big of a deal. I was just trying to gain a position, and he was trying to keep a position. That's just racin'."

  Early on Sunday morning, the day of the Sprint Cup race, the teams were working on their cars out on pit road, portable lights set up around them and generators whirring. Groups of five hovered beside the cars, one or two with a head under the hood, others polishing tires and doors or measuring dimensions or pouring gasoline or standing a few feet back drinking coffee or leaning against the pit wall smoking, looking like they could be just about anywhere. There was no sense of panic. The men consulted sheets of paper affixed to the cars' windows, checking off the list of things to inspect and glue and ratchet. Grills were already fired up in the infield, behind the team haulers, and men ate breakfast burritos and yogurt with fruit.

  I wandered onto pit road, walking up and down the line of parked race cars, transfixed by their cartoon colors. They looked almost like township art, aluminum cans taken apart and reshaped into boxy metallic toys, each one emblazoned with its chief sponsor's name and corporate colors. There was the Energizer car, the Cottonelle, the TaxSlayer, the ExtenZe, the Denver Mattress, the U.S. Census, the Prilosec, the Kleenex, the Little Debbie ("AMERICA'S FAMILY BAKERY FOR 50 YEARS" read the ad on the side panel). Dozens of other insignias from secondary sponsors also decorated each car like a smattering of bad tattoos. In their press conferences, some drivers shilled for their patrons. Jeff Gordon, PEPSI writ large on his chest, held a Pepsi can in his hand, logo facing out. Asked how he spent the week between races, Kurt Busch did not neglect to mention that he enjoyed a couple of ice-cold Miller Lites, and he raved about the Dodge Challenger, "the best-looking car out there." It has long been known that NASCAR fans are among the most brand-loyal of consumers, that they are said to be five times more likely to buy products advertising with the sport. Officials from Ford told me on several occasions that of all the people planning to buy new cars in the next year, 40 percent are race fans, and 84 percent of them follow NASCAR. In these lean times, Ford, Chrysler, Dodge, and Toyota all told me they maintained racing programs to sell cars, period.

  On pit road, I inched up to the No. 48, the Lowe's-sponsored Chevy driven by the vanilla superstar Jimmie Johnson. Despite fans' numerous frustrations with NASCAR and with Johnson's dominance, everyone I spoke to about the recent decline in popularity firmly believed that the actual racing on the track was better now than it had ever been. In the past, races were won by laps; now they are won by seconds, with each contest including dozens of lead changes and at least as many different possible winners. In the era everyone now romanticized, five, maybe at most ten drivers had a real chance of entering Victory Lane. Like Southern identity itself, NASCAR was overrun with nostalgia: its fans and participants pined for bygone days that—at least in recollection—now seemed so much more alive and fulfilling. So even while detailing the superiority of today's competitive races, the people I interviewed slipped into reveries for a truer time of Southern aggression and defining peril. After praising Jimmie Johnson, Darrell Waltrip couldn't help but compare the present crop of drivers with his cohort. "We were just tough guys," he said, suddenly solemn. "We could take it and dish it. There's no way we'd fit in today, with all the rules and restrictions. Back in the day, men were men."

  I leaned in closer to Johnson's blue and white car and saw that a crew member was applying duct tape to the inside of the front bumper. As high-tech and pristine as Johnson's operation was, his team employed the sort of garden-variety solution I might use. I moved in for a better look. Suddenly the car burst to life, its 900-horsepower engine thundering so loud that the ground actually quaked.

  Fifteen minutes before the start of the race, I saw drivers accosted by autograph- and photograph-seekers who had paid a bit extra for the freedom to wander about Bristol's crowded infield. No other big-league sport makes its stars available to the public in this way. Fans positioned themselves just behind pit crews, within arm's reach of the stacks of Goodyears, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment. Some fans lingered beside the vehicles lined up for their final inspection, while others simply cut between the queuing cars on their way to different infield sites. As 4 Troops, an a cappella group of former military personnel, sang the national anthem, drivers stood stoically beside their vehicles, their wives or girlfriends accompanying many of them in these final moments before they would don helmets and slide behind the wheel. I was on pit road as well, just three feet in front of a solitary Mark Martin, who leaned against his No. 5 Chevy, squinting nobly into the distance, his fifty-one-year-old face creased and weathered. He looked like a wizened jockey from a Hemingway story, a grayed hero unwilling or unable to quit, and all the more so because he was outfitted in a fluorescent lime-green jumpsuit with the name of his sponsor, GoDaddy.com, splashed across his abdomen.

  At Bristol, drivers made their dramatic entrances by stepping out from a cupola of sparkling pyrotechnics and onto the flatbed of a Ford F-150 pickup truck that then slowly circled the track. With all the access afforded fans, I didn't think it too bizarre when I was given a seat in the bed of one of these F-150s. My sole companion back there, a young Wisconsin woman named Karen, had paid $1,900 in a charity auction for the privilege of riding in the truck with her favorite driver, Kasey Kahne. I asked what she liked about Kahne, who hailed from Washington State, and Karen explained that she had been a fan of the legendary driver Rusty Wallace, but when Wallace retired in 2005 she started looking for someone new. "I'm a Dodge person. And Kasey drove a Dodge then. He's also young and brash. And he looks a lot like a neighbor of mine. After I saw that he shares my birthday, that was it." When Kahne finally joined us in the Ford, waving beauty pageant–style to the grandstands above, Karen turned to me with a look of shock and said, "I'm going to shit."

  We rounded the track, the fans lined up on the lowest steps of the bleachers, waving back, yelling, banging on the fencing. Viewed from the bottom of the bowl, the stands seemed to rise into the heavens, an arena of Babel echoing with the din of a hundred thousand screams. Karen handed over her camera, asking me to snap a few shots of her and Kahne. Side by side astride the ambling F-150, they were like the king and queen of the parade. Karen beamed, her two grand well spent.

  When our trip around the track ended in the infield, the MC was already talking up the impending race. "Who thinks we're going to see some retaliation today? What do you think, guys? Are we going to see some retaliation?" He drew out the last word heavy-metal style, enunciating every syllable in a kind of lascivious battle cry. Ree-tal-ee-ayyy-shun! Ron Ramsey, the most conservative of the three Republicans then running for governor of Tennessee (during the campaign, he suggested that religious freedoms did not apply to Muslims living in the United States), delivered a plea to the "God-fearing, NASCAR-loving, red-blooded Americans" in attendance. He asked them to vote for him and to spend lots of money at the track. Kahne and the other drivers hopped out of the truck beds and headed to their cars, some of the classier ones stopping to shake hands with the drivers of the F-150s, all employees from nearby Ford dealerships. I went to help Karen down from the truck, reaching over to release the tailgate. She dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder, shunted me aside, and, with surprising nimbleness, swung her body out and over to the ground below, landing with a solid dismount. She walked off, pausing only to look partly over her shoulder and spit out, "I have a truck at home, buddy."

  I watched some of the racing from one of Bristol's 179 skyboxes. At that height, the cars appeared to revolve in a single band of multicolored light. The effect was beautiful, a bit hypnotizing, and abstract. When I spoke to Freddie Hayter, a local who had been to every NASCAR race in Bristol's forty-nine-year history, he said he didn't like the skybox suites. "A race fan needs to be in the middle of the crowd. He needs the sound, the smell. The people in the suites are not true race fans; they're corporate people. That's not a place f
or someone who has been to ninety-nine races in a row." Hayter was certainly an authority, so I descended to the grandstand, to a spot midway up a section named for Darrell Waltrip, just above turn three.

  Officially, Bristol announced that the speedway had fallen 22,000 tickets short of selling out. But that figure was likely far greater. Following the race, a headline in Sporting News would ask, "Empty Seats at Bristol a Sign of NASCAR's Apocalypse?" And in the ensuing weeks, almost every track experienced its lowest turnout in years. At the Dover race entire sections of the grandstand were closed off and covered in giant advertising banners. Although some 140,000 fans showed up for July's Brickyard 400, in Indianapolis, twice that number had attended the race three years ago.

  The fans who sat in pairs and groups around me stirred a bit when a driver attempted a pass, or they lifted their beers together in a salute and drank each time a favorite driver rounded the track. But only when there was an accident of some sort would they stand up and cheer. While the race was under green, I could feel the rumble of the forty-three engines, even from my seat hundreds of feet from the track, and it was far too loud to carry on a conversation. Besides, almost everyone wore headphones, either listening to a radio call of the race or using a scanner to tune in to a team's transmissions. Others, like me, had stuffed foam plugs deep into their ears.