The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (6 page)

But even as NASCAR was making every effort to satisfy these "traditional" fans, it was also trying to become more inclusive and reach new demographics—to coax other sounds out of that figurative dog. Its Drive for Diversity program was developed six years ago to put more people of color behind the wheels of race cars, with the hopes that fans of more varied backgrounds would fill the grandstands once they saw drivers that looked like them. Currently no African Americans race in any of NASCAR's top series, and Wendell Scott remains the only black driver ever to win a Cup Series event, a feat he accomplished back in 1963. A woman, Danica Patrick, did come over to NASCAR from Indy racing this season, with great fanfare, but only to enter a handful of lower-level races. Apart from Juan Pablo Montoya, a Colombian and former Formula One driver, everyone in NASCAR's top Sprint Cup series was a white guy. Drive for Diversity included eleven young drivers, all of whom competed in the equivalent of Single-A and ten of whom trained together as part of an independently owned team called Revolution Racing. Marcus Jadotte, NASCAR's managing director of public affairs, didn't think there was any conflict between the several diversity efforts he headed up for NASCAR and the sport's attempts to return to its "roots." "NASCAR isn't rolling anything back," Jadotte asserted. "The language of 'boys, have at it' speaks solely to the rules on the racetrack. It's about increasing competitiveness and modifying driver behavior. It's not about who's watching in the stands."

Max Siegel, a former sports and entertainment lawyer who once ran a major gospel label, is the primary owner of Revolution Racing. Siegel recently had the idea of turning the trials and triumphs of the drivers on his team into a reality television show, a series he sold to Black Entertainment Television. The first episodes of
Changing Lanes
appeared on BET this summer, and Siegel told me that a sneak preview shown to NASCAR executives, corporate sponsors, and groups of students brought in from historically black colleges was a hit. He knew that the sport's perception and history were huge obstacles, but he believed they could be overcome. When he was hired to be president of global operations at Dale Earnhardt, Inc., the race team owned by Dale Sr.'s widow, he was the organization's first black employee. "I started looking at the sport, saying, 'Okay, what do I have in common with these people? How do we break down barriers and move forward?' If you grew up in the trailer park or the projects, like me, there's a lot that's the same." I asked him whether I would be surprised by the amount of diversity at Bristol. He paused for a moment, as if picturing the track and its environs. "If your expectation is no people of color, and you look very carefully at the pit crews, the officials, and the fans, you'll see some participation. You might see more if you were at the tracks in Atlanta or Chicago."

I did look carefully, and still I spotted far more Confederate flag bandanas at Bristol than black and Hispanic people. The speedway employed a hype man named Jose Castillo, whose job it was to talk animatedly to fans during lulls on the track, the exchanges shown live on the Jumbotron planted in the center of the infield. He said he had never come across any racism there. "I'm Jose," he added, pointing to the name stitched into his shirt pocket, "and no one ever said a thing to me. Don't get me wrong, the fans are rednecks. But that's not a socioeconomic thing. Guys worth millions could be camping out next to people who scrape for this one trip."

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.