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NASCAR Nation: One journalist's journey of discovery
National Review, Nov 10, 2003 by John Derbyshire
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.
