Haul A** and Turn Left (3 page)

The thing is, when Edwards says something, despite the fact that it’s sickeningly wholesome, it’s impossible not to believe him because, well, he delivers the goods, whether it’s executing a backflip off the roof of his car or an otherworldly pass of the most productive NASCAR driver of recent vintage.

Anyone other than Edwards would be laughed out of the room. Somehow, in an age when all the various and sundry icons—Mark McGwire, Martha Stewart, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, maybe even Jeff Gordon—are being brought to their knees, Edwards lifts us up with his wide-eyed charm and makes us believe in the aforementioned truth, justice, and the American way again.

And that backflip! Edwards almost slipped up at Atlanta, completed as it was just a day after the one he wowed a smaller crowd with after his first Busch Series victory.

“The first time I saw him do it, I thought it was luck,” said Jack Roush, the owner of Edwards’s number 99 Ford. “I went over and said, ‘We’re going to be doing this a long time, and if you keep doing that, and rely on luck to do it, it’s not going to work.’

“[Edwards] said, ‘Don’t worry. When I was in college, I had a girlfriend who would help me with it, and I was in a padded room, and I fell a lot, but now I won’t fall down. I can do it.’ It’s not bragging if you can do it, and he’s been doing it really well.”

That observation could be made both of Edwards’s backflips and his driving, but, of course, he doesn’t brag about either. He even credits Tyler Walker, then a sprint car driver but now in the Busch Series, with giving him the idea for the celebratory backflips.

Heck, Edwards even thanked the media: “I just want to thank you guys because you’ve written some really nice things about me … and I know it won’t always be good. There’ll be times when you have to write bad things about me, and I’ll be grateful for that, too.”

That alone ought to be enough to make NASCAR officials dock him twenty-five, or even fifty, points. Thank a sponsor, okay, but thank the media? Them’s fightin’ words.

“Not to discredit them in anyway, but NASCAR has become this black hole sucking up sponsorship, fans, TV viewers, and all the things that make racing work. It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner. So how everybody gets along with reduced crowds, reduced money, and reduced ratings to me is the real issue. Look at what many others perceive as the crisis in open-wheel racing; a lot of that has to do with NASCAR just taking over the audience.”

—DAVE DESPAIN

host of Speed Channel’s
Wind Tunnel

“I couldn’t tell what was coming out of that little ‘yap-yap’ mouth of his.”

—RICKY RUDD

referring to Kevin Harvick, after a post-race altercation at Richmond in 2003

“I was about to get fired and Bill was getting old.”

—JEREMY MAYFIELD

asked why his and teammate Bill Elliott’s performances improved late in the 2003 season

I
’ve never understood why there seems to be some innate compulsion to ask journalists to predict things: races, games, champions, political outcomes, etc. No one should expect us to play Nostradamus. What I’m trained to do is write about what’s already happened. I don’t have dreams of the future. I don’t keep tea leaves handy. Normally, supernatural visions do not hover above my bed when I awaken in the middle of the night. Nature is usually what beckons when I awaken at such times. When someone—sadly, it’s often another journalist—asks me to predict the winner of the Nextel Cup championship, I do it but I don’t attach any particular importance to it.

I have, however, thought about it, and what I’ve concluded is that picking the champion under the current system is patently ridiculous. It’s like deciding which numbers to select on a lottery ticket. Once the race-offs begin, it’s kind of a crapshoot. It seems to me, though, that a more valid assessment would be to pick which ten drivers will have a chance to win that pulse-quickening, spine-tingling, maddeningly unfair “Chase.”

Getting in the top ten after twenty-six races is what counts. Then it’s a matter of getting hot, keeping the fenders uncrumpled, and hoping a rod doesn’t fly through the cylinder wall. In 2004, Jimmie Johnson won four of the final ten races, but that wasn’t enough to win the championship because Kurt Busch finished in the top ten in nine of them. Busch’s persistence and tenacity were admirable, but it didn’t hurt that, when the right front tire flew off his Taurus in the season’s final race, it conveniently did so at the mouth of pit road and the tire itself continued rolling down the frontstraight, thus bringing out a caution flag, while Busch was guiding the car three-wheeled into his pit stall.

Making all the right moves isn’t enough. It takes a little Stardust.

“It’s like you’re sitting in a parking lot, a lot of times in the middle of a parking lot … This parking lot just happens to be going really, really fast.”

—KEN SCHRADER

on racing at Talladega Superspeedway

“It was too crazy for me, and I’m ’bout the craziest one out there.”

—DALE EARNHARDT JR.

after a Talladega race in 2003

“If the Romans had any sense, they would’ve built Bristol instead of the Colosseum.”

—O. BRUTON SMITH

chairman, Speedway Motorsports Inc.

A
merican sport has no more ambitious a leader than NASCAR chairman Brian Z. France, but the youthful leader of this still-burgeoning sport is not without his eccentricities. When he is speaking in front of an audience, France’s hand gestures can be metaphorically linked to a fifteen-car Talladega pileup.

France, the grandson of NASCAR’s founder, makes frequent use of the old Bill Clinton thumbs-up gesture, but he has cultivated his own variations. Comparing the ex-president’s mannerisms to France’s is like comparing a triple-pump reverse dipsy-doo to a standard slam dunk. France is fond of firing the left thumb off to the side, making it appear as if he is referring to someone or something that invariably isn’t there. Sometimes he fires one hand jauntily while karate-chopping with the other. The words are fraught with euphemisms, but the hands are charismatic.

When France steps up to a microphone, he sounds almost like he’s starring in an infomercial. NASCAR exists, he says, “to showcase the opportunities for the best drivers in the world to do their thing.” Those very same drivers invariably “step up to the plate” and “the more there is on the line,” the better they perform.

Occasionally he misspeaks. In 2004, he noted that “it reeks [did he mean ‘wreaks’?] of the whole industry to be able to absorb that many changes.” Perhaps this was because “with momentum comes anticipation.”

Shortly after he said this, a bus that had been provided for the convenience of journalists covering France’s momentous remarks returned from NASCAR’s Research and Development Center to a nearby hotel. As the bus neared the hotel, one of the writers pointed to the roof of another hotel, where a windblown stick figure was gyrating just about as wildly as Brian France. Apparently it was atop the hotel because of a business conference being held there.

“The answer, my friend, is Brian in the wind,” the writer said.

“When you’re looking at me, you’re looking at NASCAR history.”

—RICHARD PETTY

who won two hundred Cup races, nearly twice as many as anyone else

“You know how you get in shape to drive a race car? You drive a race car.”

—DICK TRICKLE

R
oad racer Boris Said learned some lessons in his first Daytona 500.

“I love this kind of racing,” he said, “[but] these guys sure change their personalities in race mode. They’re like Doberman pinschers with a hand grenade in their mouths.”

J
oe Gibbs is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who may well wind up in the NASCAR equivalent one day as well. He’s won NFL championships as a coach and NASCAR titles as an owner.

“The Coach” considers the most notable difference between pro football and stock car racing to be the immediacy of the fans:

“This sport is so unusual in that aspect,” he says of NASCAR. “I think that’s what I love the most about it. In football, the players have very little contact with the fans. You take a bus to the stadium, you warm up, you play the game, you get back on the bus, and then you’re gone. Where else can you have contact with your favorite athlete on the day of the event? It’s not unusual for these guys [in NASCAR] to sign autographs and interact with the fan on the day of the race.”

“You’ve got to be at least five feet tall and have a briefcase full of cash under both arms.”

—DAVID PEARSON

who won 105 NASCAR races, asked what it takes to be a race car driver today

“It was wild out there, like cannibals chasing a deer.”

—JERRY NADEAU

after a race at Atlanta Motor Speedway

“Short-track racing is like walking through a minefield. You have to watch every move and be completely aware of what’s going on around you. If you give the guy in front of you some room, you’ll get booted from behind. You can get bit by a lot of things you didn’t have anything to do with starting.”

—DALE EARNHARDT JR.

T
here are no more anxiously awaited Nextel Cup races than the two held annually at Bristol Motor Speedway. While a ticket to the August night race is a bit tougher to procure than the Sunday afternoon race in the spring, both are sold out well in advance. Fan polls invariably rate Bristol as the circuit’s most popular track.

Yet the imposing short track in the Tennessee mountains doesn’t seem to get the credit it deserves. It’s amusing when national magazines touch on the subject of “tough tickets” and intimidating venues without mentioning Bristol.

Think the ACC basketball tournament is tough to see in person? If you want to attend that event—or at least most of it—just hang out at the exits when the fans of first-round losers are returning to their vehicles. Getting a ticket at face value for the rest of that affair is no problem. Bristol, on the other hand, will draw more than 100,000 for a Busch Series undercard. Many fans will roll into town with no assurance of seeing the Cup race, and they won’t be too disappointed if they have to settle for one live and the other via television. A Yankees-Red Sox ticket is tough to finagle, but neither Yankee Stadium nor Fenway Park has 156,000 seats.

The retired car owner Bud Moore once described Bristol disparagingly as “a damn pinball machine,” adding, “It ought to be against the law to have more than two dozen cars running around that place at the same time.”

But forty-three cars take the green flag, many of which won’t last too long at the track where Sterling Marlin described the racing as “jet planes in a gymnasium.”

There are too many cars going too fast in too small a space. That, in a nutshell, is what makes the fans love it.

“It’s one of my favorites,” says Tony Stewart, “but Bristol is a track that’s feast or famine. If you have a really good day, it’s a lot of fun, but if you have one little problem, it normally makes for a very long day.”

Stewart speaks from experience. He’s won there, but a graph of his finishes could’ve been charted at a seismic lab.

“You just don’t have time to relax,” he adds. “Everything happens so fast. At the end of the day, when the race is done and your adrenaline wears off, you’re worn out, but when you’re in the car and the adrenaline’s pumping, you don’t get in that smooth, calm rhythm like you do at a place like Michigan or California, where you’ve got big, sweeping corners and long straightaways.

“You don’t get that luxury at Bristol. It’s standard short-track racing.”

Standard short-track racing? It’s more like standard bedlam. Winners have crossed the finish line sideways or backward. Imagine roller derby with four skates. Imagine bobsledding with engines.

You want crashes? They occur inevitably on the tight concrete ribbon. On the one hand, the level of excitement would seem to suggest that the likely winner is the one lucky enough not to have three or four cars spin out in front of him. On the other, the results seem to indicate that some drivers have an otherworldly knack for staying clear of trouble.

It evidently takes some mystical brand of skill to succeed amidst the dizzying action at a track that is breathtakingly fast, incredibly small, and surrounded by grandstands banked even more steeply than its turns.

“When I saw the wall coming through the car, I knew I was in trouble.”

—Busch Series driver

MIKE HARMON

after walking away from a gruesome crash at Bristol Motor Speedway in 2002

“When I was coming along, if we went to the veteran drivers, it was for advice and because we looked up to them. I’m not sure that’s the case in this day and time. A lot of young drivers come in with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder, thinking that’s the way that they have to be … There’s a little lack of respect, but it’s not just in this garage area or not just within auto racing. It’s in our society, period.”

—DALE JARRETT

“I look at it the same way any weekend. If you play it too aggressive, it’s going to get you in trouble. If you play it too conservative, it’s going to get you in trouble. It doesn’t matter where you’re at.”

—JEFF GORDON

“It’s pretty nice, actually. I got a little confused a few weeks ago. I needed to go to the mall about the time the race started, and got there and thought, what are all these people doing here? I thought everybody watched the race. I’m learning there’s a whole new world out there.”

—TERRY LABONTE