Notes from the Draft

I couldn’t be happier that racing is finally upon us.  I took a
pretty good beating today in my various fantasy NASCAR leagues, but the
Daytona 500 was so incredible, it was definitely worth it.

Almost everyone I know, including about half of my family, just doesn’t
get it.  In fact, they get a trapped, “Get the fuck away from me,”
look on their faces if I even bring up the subject of NASCAR in
conversation.  I can certainly understand that someone wouldn’t
enjoy watching people drive in a circle for 4 hours on a Sunday
afternoon, but it’s almost as if you either actively hate the sport or
are rabidly feverish over it… there seems to be no grey area.
There is no such thing as a mildly interested NASCAR fan.

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I think a lot of it has to do with the company that NASCAR keeps.
Despite how vastly complex and technologically oriented the sport has
become in the last 20 years, NASCAR is stuck being associated with the
vast population of Bubbas in this country… and rightfully so.
Anyone attempting to watch their first race on television will be
assaulted with enough patriotism and American, flag-waving, propaganda
to make them want to move to Russia.  You’ll hear country music
and all the commentators have thick Southern accents.  Any NASCAR
broadcast oozes the South.

But, still, what “sport” doesn’t have a bunch of morons associated with
it?  I watch football on Sundays and have to see obnoxious
touchdown dances or wide receivers thanking Jesus for that 40 yard
catch.  It doesn’t diminish how incredible the catch was to me,
but it’s off putting.  I watch basketball and see a bunch of
showboating, self-important assholes beating the living shit out of
unruly fans and I… well, I really actively hate basketball.  At
least the NBA.  March Madness kicks serious ass though.  If
I’m English and watch soccer, 10 people die in a riot every game, but I
still buy tickets to the season opener next year.  Honestly,
what’s the difference?  In fact, I’d argue that it takes more
intelligence, skill and technical knowledge to complete a NASCAR race
and finish in 10th place than it does to win any game in any of the
sports I’ve mentioned above.  Where’s the love?

NASCAR is evolving.  25 or 30 years ago, it was still incredibly
popular, but its participants were mostly farm boys who grew up
tinkering with their cars when they weren’t working shit jobs.
Then came the early 90’s.  The dawn of a new era in NASCAR
racing.  Everyone found themselves hating this pretty boy Jeff
Gordon fella who hailed from the West coast.  He was totally clean
cut, had no discernable accent of any kind and was a mere boy compared
to the other drivers.  Couple that with the fact that, for the
first 2 years of his career, he quite unexpectedly kicked the asses of
everyone in the series on tracks across the country and won multiple
championships. He garnered serious hatred.  Serious, Southern,
fundamentalist hatred.  String-you-up-on-a-tree hatred.  Many
people still hate him for being a pretty boy Yankee.  They spread
rumors about him being gay or just actively hate him, not knowing
why.  Confront a Gordon hater about their hatred, and most likely
you’ll get, “He’s a faggot,” or something along those lines, in
reply.  Personally, I believe that it’s because he’s one of the
first people who began taking the sport away from the Southeast.
He, much like Tiger Woods, signified a new era and an end to the good
ol’ boys club that was the old school NASCAR.

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www.nascar-info.net/nascar_history_1.html The Earl  has this to say about the origins of NASCAR:

During the Prohibition era of the 1920’s and early 30’s, the
undercover business of whiskey, or “moonshine”, running began to boom.
More of a problem than secret manufacture of moonshine was the secret
transportation of it. The common term for moonshine runners was
“bootleggers”. Bootleggers were “men who illegally ran whiskey from
hidden stills to hundreds of markets across the Southeast. These men
were the real Dukes of Hazzard, only there was nothing funny about
their business. Driving at high speeds at night, often with the police
in pursuit, was dangerous. The penalty for losing the race was jail or
loss of livelihood.”

As bootlegging boomed, the drivers began to race among themselves to
see who had the fastest cars. Bootleggers raced on Sunday afternoons
and then used the same car to haul moonshine Sunday night. Inevitably,
people came to see the races, and racing moonshine cars became
extremely popular in the backroads of the South. Bootlegging continued
even after the end of the Prohibition era, because of the huge tax
placed on whiskey upon repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933.

In the summer of 1938 a man named William H.G. “Bill” France organized
a race on the wide, firm sands of Daytona Beach, Florida. The winner
received such items as a bottle of rum, a box of cigars, and a case of
motor oil (precursors to present-day sponsor involvement in the sport)
– NASCAR history had begun. France was a visionary; he realized for
stock car racing to grow, an official organization had to exist to list
champions, keep statistics, and memorialize records and record-holders.

The outbreak of World War II brought stock car racing to a halt. The
drivers went to war and the production of new cars ceased. At the end
of the war, some drivers came back and ran occasional, haphazard races
at places like the beach at Daytona.

By 1947, Bill France realized it was high time for a national
sanctioning body to govern stock car racing. On December 12 of that
year he gathered promoters from the Southeast, Northeast, and Midwest
to the Ebony Bar atop the Streamline Inn at Daytona. Over the next
three days rules were drawn and specifications agreed upon. The name of
the organization would by NASCAR- the National Association for Stock
Car Auto Racing.

It was then that NASCAR first began to become an actual “sport”.
These were the formative years during which it would come into its own
as a true sport.  While its participants played the role of both
owner and driver, these guys now had an organization they were
affiliated with.  In its fledgling years, drivers would frequently
drive their stock cars, replete with stock radios and stock air
conditioning, to the tracks and then race the very cars that had gotten
them there.

Gradually, it became more and more technical.  Eventually, tending
to the cars, making them faster, and competing in races became a
full-time job for most of the drivers.  More money was required to
compete effectively, more specialized mechanics and automotive
knowledge was needed to keep the cars running well.

By the time the early 90’s rolled around, it was virtually impossible
to own and race a car.  As a result, you began to see drivers come
together and form teams like Dale Earnhardt Incorporated and Roush
Racing.  They were coming to the forefront to sponsor and fund
multiple drivers.  Almost all the participants involved were part
of a larger team that financed the whole effort.  It’s estimated
that the cost of running a competitive NASCAR team these days is in the
tens of millions of dollars per year; hundreds of thousands of which
are dedicated to time in the NASCAR Research and Development Center’s
wind tunnels in the off-season, refining curves on the bodies of the
cars.

The technical aspects and team element added a whole new
dimension  to the sport because now, instead of having a bunch of
psychopaths bent on winning the race and accentuating machismo, these
psychopaths were bound together as teammates.  Instead of winning
at all costs, we’ve started to see people actually having to work
together to win races.  Now, almost as much as performance and
skill, winning a race is a matter of staying on good terms with the
drivers you’re stuck in a pack with.  Any given NASCAR race is a
wonderful collision of team work, physics mastery and personal skill at
high speeds.  It’s very common now to see two drivers on the same
team pair up to win a race.  One extra second in the pits, one
minute detail forgotten, is all that separates first place from sixth
or eighth or twenty first.

Ultimately, it’s this complexity and shift towards teamwork and loyalty
that killed Dale Earnhardt four years ago at the Daytona 500.

As the race ended, he tried to fend off the rabid pack of racers behind
him so that his teammates, Michael Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr.,
could put Dale Earnhardt Incorporated in the 1 and 2 positions at the
end of the race.  Had he found himself in the same spot 10 years
before, he’d have been concentrating on winning the race himself.
As it happened, he was able to help his teammate and his son win the
race at the cost of his own life.  He was put into the wall of
turn four on the last lap of the Daytona 500, killing him
instantly.

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These days, it’s becoming less and less “redneck” to be interested in
or participate in the sport, and that makes me happy.  Jeff Gordon
even made it onto Saturday Night Live in 2002 as a host.  Surely
this signifies that larger, more mainstream audiences are out
there.  Overwhelmingly, we’re starting to see NASCAR as an
organization put down its ten gallon hat, oversized belt buckles and
wreckless abandon in hurling drivers through turns so that it may
instead adopt a more European, more refined and more precise approach
to racing.  The focus is shifting to speed and efficiency, rather
than twisted metal and glory.

I suspect that even if I’m teased for the rest of my life over my love
of the sport, it won’t diminish my enjoyment of it.  For me, the
things that really draw me to it are almost exclusively sensory.
The speed, the finesse, the sound and the subtle nuance of watching
someone who is truly gifted take that car 500 miles to victory is just
a wonder to behold.  I’m absolutely in awe of the mastery of
physics and teamwork it takes to win a race these days.  The petty
drama is fun to watch as well, I’ll admit.  At times, it’s like The Sopranos
with cars.  I see a dispute arise between two drivers one week and
I just cannot wait to see how it plays out the next.  I can barely
drive my car close to a concrete barrier in a construction zone on the
interstate without cringing a little, yet these guys are 6 inches apart
on 40 degree banked turns and they’re pushing 190mph… Jesus Christ, I
can’t get enough of it!  I live for it.