SUMMARY

    From its raw beginnings on southern dirt tracks, NASCAR smacked of a slightly depraved spectacle, as if nothing but trouble could come from the unbridled locomotion of a V-8 engine. By the time it  roared into the 21st century, it had grown into a billion-dollar sports and marketing colossus—its races attended by hundreds of thousands from mid-February through mid-November, watched on television by the second-largest viewing audience in sports, and bankrolled by the marketing largesse of the Fortune 500’s elite.

  “One Helluva Ride” is award-winning motorsports writer Liz Clarke’s account of stock-car racing’s high octane coming-of-age. Part chronicle, part analysis, part memoir—it explains how NASCAR transformed itself from regional obsession to national phenomenon.

    In covering the sport for more than 15 years, Clarke has developed a strong rapport with NASCAR’s drivers, team owners and fans. Through her reporting we get to know the public and private sides of NASCAR’s most iconic figures—including seven-time champions Richard Petty, who set the standard for treating fans with respect, and the late Dale Earnhardt, whose bullying tactics wreaked havoc on the track but whose heart was as big as Daytona’s infield.

   The sports world stopped in its tracks the day Earnhardt was killed on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. Some feared that NASCAR’s soul would die with him. But it has roared on, steered by visionary promoters, the all-controlling France family, who founded the sport, and the next generation of drivers to stir fans’ passions: Dale Earnhardt Jr., son of the NASCAR legend and now, like his father before him, the sport’s most popular driver; Jeff Gordon, the polished corporate pitchman who was reared to be a champion from age 5; and Kasey Kahne, a reluctant heartthrob whose confidence derives entirely from an accelerator pedal.

    Clarke also brings us inside NASCAR’s most triumphant and tragic dynasties: The Pettys, the Earnhardts and the Allisons—and reveals how faith, family and a deep-seated love of their sport helps them cope with grief and loss.

    As the sport gears up for its 50th Daytona 500, Clarke shows stock-car racing to be at a crossroads. In pursuit of a broader audience, NASCAR has severed it sponsorship ties to Big Tobacco, abandoned racetracks in small markets in favor of speedways near glitzy major cities and welcomed Japan’s Toyota into a sport traditionally restricted to American-made sedans. As NASCAR races toward mass appeal, some suggest it is leaving its roots behind. To others it has boldly extended its reach from the Southern workingman to every man, woman and child in the world.

   Whether you’re one of the diehard NASCAR faithful or a casual follower, nobody brings you closer to the sport and the business of big-time stock-car racing than Liz Clarke.

   This book, like the phenomenon it profiles, really is One Helluva Ride.