from the INTRODUCTION

   My first mistake was wearing a dress. Dresses, I learned, weren’t allowed in the NASCAR garage unless modeled by Miss Winston, Miss Mopar, Miss Mello-Yello, or whatever honorary beauty queen reigned that day, replete with tiara and satin sash across an ample bosom. But for women not born to ride atop floats, wearing a dress meant you didn’t get in.

   It was the first item on a long list of things I didn’t know about stock-car racing when I was sent to cover my first NASCAR practice in 1991.

   It was a geographical fluke that I drew the assignment, having landed in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a young sportswriter the previous fall. And it was a quirk of the era that it later became my beat—an era that saw major newspapers confront the reality that NASCAR, long derided as a fixation of a semiliterate southern fringe, had started commanding TV ratings that warranted broader coverage. The only thing I knew about NASCAR at the time was that Bruce Springsteen had once mentioned Junior Johnson in a song. I knew the lyrics to Cadillac Ranch” cold, but I wasn’t sure if Johnson was real or fictional, dead or alive.

   So I headed to Charlotte Motor Speedway steeled against the prospect of introducing myself to wild, crude, belching men whose only means of making a living, since they clearly lacked basic common sense and a job skill, was going around in circles at 200 miles an hour.

   The famed No. 43 driven by Richard Petty clearly lacked the muscle and grit to mix it up with the hellions up front in the early nineties, the waning years of the King’s career, but it was determined to turn in an honest day’s work, making one noncompetitive lap after another to keep the fans happy.

   The No. 23 Ford driven by Jimmy Spencer, known mockingly as “Mr. Excitement,” caromed around the track like a pinball in an arcade game, bouncing off walls and fenders before creaking over the finish line as crumpled as a discarded paper cup.

    And Dale Earnhardt’s black No. 3 was menacing and conniving, lurking back in the pack until it decided to charge to the front. And then, what a show it staged! It took 190-miles-per-hour shortcuts across the infield grass, knocked rivals out of its way, spun out cars by disrupting the air around them and never left a mark, its mastery of the aerodynamic draft was so supreme.

   The essence of NASCAR’s appeal resided in having an opinion about the drivers. And no place was as opinionated as Charlotte Motor Speedway, the home track for most of the race teams, where sell-out crowds of 150,000 brandished their loyalties with abandon, cheering drivers they loved and flipping the bird at those they loved to hate, as if convinced drivers could see their middle finger from forty rows away while zooming past in a high-speed blur.

   If it seems foolish, imagine a stock-car race that included Barry Bonds in a BALCO-sponsored car and Cal Ripken Jr. in a car with “Got Milk?” on its hood. Or imagine a last-lap duel between Al Gore in a blue Toyota and Dick Cheney in a red Chevrolet. Few would feel indifferent about the outcome. In its purest form, NASCAR was like that, tapping the core beliefs and passions of the audience. So I hardly blinked when the promoter at North Wilkesboro (North Carolina) Motor Speedway handed me a press release a few years later about a longtime fan from upstate New York who had just passed away. The fan asked in his will that he be cremated, and that his ashes be driven one lap around the track by Richard Petty before being scattered along the start–finish line, where they would be sent on to heaven by the forty-three-car field at the drop of the green flag.

   Petty complied.

   From the zeal of its fans to the carnival atmosphere of its venues, NASCAR’s eccentricities drew me in. It was as grand a spectacle as you could imagine, starting from the first time I drove my rental car through the tunnel that burrows under the fourth turn of Daytona International Speedway and opens onto the infield, where mechanics, racers, and reporters spend their workday on one side of a chain-link fence while the fans hang on the other side, cameras and autograph pens in hand, hoping desperately for a glimpse of one of their heroes.

   Steering your car into Daytona’s infield tunnel is like entering a darkened hallway that leads into a movie theater. Daylight disappears for a few seconds. And suddenly you pop up into a sun-drenched infield so massive you can’t take it all in. You’re transported into a new world smack in the middle of a hulking, banked oval that encircles you like the sides of a bowl. It’s as if you’re on an epic stage, surrounded by asphalt and grandstands twelve stories high, and nothing that happens on the outside matters.

   And no matter how early you arrive, scores of mechanics are already at work, sipping steaming cups of coffee while debating whether the sun is going to come out, which would dictate subtle adjustments to the springs and shocks. The grandstands are empty. Trash skitters over the grounds, and flocks of seagulls scavenge for crumbs.

    Soon the generators fire up. Then the engines—one rumble, then dozens. It’s so loud that everyone starts talking in hand signals. But you don’t really need ears to hear the roar; NASCAR engines spew so much noise that you can actually feel it rattle your insides.

   Most sportswriters, of course, didn’t know and didn’t care. I’d see them at NFL games, Final Fours, and college bowl games, and they’d laugh or snort as if I’d just delivered a punch line when I’d tell them I was covering NASCAR, and then stare with a look of pity or disdain, as if I’d been exiled to sportswriting’s most demeaning job. Fine enough. But who wouldn’t want to write about this, I thought to myself—part circus; part county fair. 

   In 1992, arguably the sport’s most riveting season, I covered the first night race held at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Fifteen years later I can still close my eyes and see the sparks that erupted on the thrilling last lap. That same year I covered Richard Petty’s retirement and Jeff Gordon’s first race. I once sipped moonshine made by the legendary Junior Johnson, who, I was thrilled to learn, was very much alive. It was called Cherry Bounce, and a Mason jar of the liquid fire was passed around at a party I attended. Years later I interviewed Johnson at his farm in the North Carolina foothills. As I was getting ready to leave, he offered me one of his ’coon dogs who kept rolling over at my feet. She wasn’t good for anything, he said, except getting her belly rubbed. It was the only piece of journalistic graft I’ve ever regretted turning down.

   In 1994 I got goose bumps walking into the garage at Indianapolis Motor Speedway for NASCAR’s inaugural Brickyard. The sign read “Gasoline Alley,” and for reasons I can’t fully explain, when I walked through the speedway’s gates I felt as if NASCAR and the whole stock-car racing press corps had been invited to an exclusive ball.

   In 1998 I was among dozens of reporters who committed the journalistic sin of cheering in the press box, rising to give Earnhardt a standing ovation after he snapped a nineteen-year jinx to win his first (and only) Daytona 500. Three years later I was in that same press box when he died.

   In the years I covered racing, I came to find there was no greater gulf between an athlete’s private and public persona than there was with Earnhardt. If NASCAR’s Intimidator wanted to come out from behind his mirrored sunglasses, he’d propose conducting an interview at his Iredell County farm. I got to know the landscape well, riding around in his truck and running my tape recorder as he fielded questions in between checking on his chicken houses, feeding the catfish in his pond, and showing off the new appliances in the rental house that he was fixing up for Dale Jr., who had just signed a $50 million sponsorship deal with Budweiser. On one of those rambles Earnhardt confided that his grandmother had taught him how to control a car that was on the brink of being out of control. Her house sat at the bottom of a gravel driveway, he explained, and she’d have to feather the throttle with just the right touch as she fishtailed her way onto the main road each day.

   It changes you, covering a sport in which death is among the possible outcomes. But no death changed me more than his.

   Linda Vaughn, stock-car racing’s longest-reigning beauty queen, once explained to me her system for packing her suitcase for race weekends. She put the big hair dryer on top to keep everything nice and pressed, with a black dress—“Just in case . . .”—folded at the bottom. It is something I have done ever since.

1. *  *    * 
   

    This is the story of the NASCAR that roars on, more popular than ever, having buried its heroes, pulled up its small-town roots, and teamed with Madison Avenue and Hollywood to reinvent itself not simply as a sport but as a multimedia marketing platform. And of the drivers and promoters who engineered that implausible transformation:

1. ❖ The racing families that spanned generations—the Pettys of Level Cross, North Carolina; the Allisons of Hueytown, Alabama; and the Earnhardts of Kannapolis, North Carolina, stock-car dynasties led by stubborn, humble, hardworking men who were convinced there was no finer way to make a living and who sacrificed far too much for the privilege.
   

2. ❖ The Frances of Daytona Beach, Florida, the sport’s founding family, who have ruled stock-car racing with an iron fist since NASCAR’s inception in 1947, and become billionaires under third-generation CEO Brian France.
   

3. ❖ The sports marketing executives at Winston-Salem, North Carolina–based R.J. Reynolds, whose expertise taught the Frances how to package their sport and hook an audience after signing on as the title sponsor in 1971, when the federal government banned tobacco advertising on television.
   

4. ❖ And of NASCAR’s uncommonly loyal fans, including those who couldn’t afford tickets but set out lawn chairs by the side of the road leading out of the speedway at Rockingham, North Carolina, just to wave at the race teams’ giant transporter rigs rumbling past.
   

   It’s the story of an era that spans the best of NASCAR’s past and the dawn of its future, heralded by the arrival of California’s Jeff Gordon, whose telegenic gifts redefined what a NASCAR driver looked and acted like, and whose driving talent recalibrated the paydays for the current generation of stock-car racers, millionaires all. And, on a much smaller scale, it’s a personal story in which I discovered an affinity for the sport, developed an affection for its personalities, grieved over the deaths of a half-dozen drivers, came to resent the rationalizations that invariably followed, and, more recently, settled on an arm’s length admiration for the business success it has achieved. But most of all, it’s the story of a once humble sport’s remarkable coming of age.

on RICHARD PETTY

    Petty embodied everything a fan or a corporation wanted in an athlete in his day. He was equal parts Andy Griffith and Elvis Presley, instinctively modulating between the two depending on the circumstance. He was the folksy, friendly, paternal Griffith when dealing with fans. But the moment he climbed in his racecar, he was Elvis—the iconic figure who took a quintessentially American art form and remade it in his image.

    If, for a time, rock ’n’ roll was indistinguishable from Elvis Presley, so too was NASCAR indistinguishable from Richard Petty. Other drivers knew they’d be fools to copy Petty’s style, but all took note of the way he treated fans. It set a garage standard. Petty, in effect, taught NASCAR drivers how to behave.

on DALE EARNHARDT    

   Sports physiologists have tried to pinpoint what makes a great racecar driver, searching for the defining characteristics with the

zeal of a geneticist trying to unravel a strand of DNA. They have measured drivers’ peripheral vision and pulse rates, hand-eye coordination and reflexes, lung capacity and adrenaline levels, ability to stay calm in the face of enormous pressure and ability to remain focused for hours despite withering heat.

   All of those qualities play a part. But Kirk Shelmerdine, a former champion NASCAR crew chief with a knack for reducing complexities to their essence, has his own definition.

   Selfishness.

   “You have to have an insatiable desire to be in front of the other car,” he says. “It’s such a childish, selfish thing. But a racecar driver is the most selfish thing there is. Otherwise, he’s not a good racecar driver because there has to be something inside you that craves that.”

   On this point—the insatiable hunger to be first—Dale Earnhardt had no peer. Yet Earnhardt was never driven by a sense of entitlement. He was fueled by its opposite: desperation.

    He dropped out of school after failing eighth grade. At seventeen he got a girl pregnant. At eighteen he was a husband and father, pumping gas and wiping windshields at a service station while watching the world pass him by. And by the time he finally got the chance to prove himself in NASCAR’s big leagues, his life’s accomplishments consisted of two broken marriages, three children, and roughly $16,000 of debt for spare parts and tires loaned by men who had faith that he might amount to something on a racetrack one day.

   The stakes were obvious. If Earnhardt didn’t make it in NASCAR, he’d be left with his choice of dead-end jobs and a life not so much lived as served out like a sentence for some undefined crime.

on THE INAUGURAL BRICKYARD 400

   [Jeff Gordon’s crew chief Ray] Evernham researched the track as if he were writing a master’s thesis, grilling Indy car veterans for their insights. He phoned Pancho Carter, who competed in seventeen Indianapolis 500s, and he spent

time with four-time Indy 500 champion A. J. Foyt. He asked every question he could think of. How smooth was the surface? How did the track respond to changes in temperature? In humidity? Then he designed a special car with trick features to exploit what he had learned.

   The key to going fast at Indy, he found, was “light, low, and left.” In other words, you wanted a racecar that was as light as possible, had as low a center of gravity as possible, and had the balance of its weight on the left side.

   Evernham learned that Indy’s surface was far smoother than the rutted, bumpy tracks on NASCAR’s circuit, so he added pans underneath Gordon’s car to increase its downforce in the front. He installed a sway bar in the rear so the car’s weight wouldn’t shift as it rounded the turns. He built special brake ducts that gave the car an aerodynamic edge. And he tweaked its front-end suspension to help it negotiate the corners more easily.

   The car proved so fast in the first practice of race week that Evernham skipped the final practice, fearing he might screw things up if he kept tinkering. The entire garage took note, with opinion split over whether Evernham was an arrogant idiot or a genius hiding a rocket.

    It wasn’t until race morning, when teams pushed their racecars onto the starting grid, that Evernham fully grasped the magnitude of the moment. There he was, a former Modified racer who had given up his dream of racing cars after confronting the fact that he had likely peaked in winning the track championship at Wall, New Jersey. And now, he was rolling a racecar he had designed and built and nurtured like a baby onto the track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

   “I walked up and down and saw all those people and the scoreboard and realized that we were at Indy, it really hit me,” Evernham said. “It choked me up because I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, we are at Indianapolis! We’re on hallowed ground. And we’ve got a shot of winning this thing.’ You almost feel like, ‘I don’t deserve to be here.’ ”

on NORTH WILKESBORO SPEEDWAY

   Every NASCAR track has a personality—not just a personality based on the sort of food it sells at the concession stand, but a personality that has a direct bearing on the competition. It’s no different from baseball parks or golf courses. Fenway Park, with its short left field, favors right-handed hitters. Yankee Stadium, with its short porch in right field, favors left-handed hitters. Augusta National smiles on golfers who can crush the ball 330 yards, preferably from right to left.

   Racetracks differ in obvious respects, including length, layout, and banking. At one extreme is Martinsville Speedway, just over one-half mile around, shaped like a paper clip and nearly flat (banked 12 degrees in the corners). Pocono Raceway is about five times bigger, 2.5 miles around, and shaped like a lopsided triangle, with three turns of different angles and pitch. South Carolina’s Darlington Raceway is in between,1.366 miles around, but more egg-shaped than oval, with no two corners the same. It also has a mean streak that no engineer can explain: a tendency to reach out and grab a car and slap it into the concrete wall.

   Within those variations, the same track can differ from one race to the next, one day to the next, and one hour to the next. Racetracks aren’t just slabs of asphalt or concrete. They’re living, organic beings whose characteristics change as they age and whose traits vary according to the amount of sun or cloud cover, humidity or wind.

   Typically, the older the racetrack, the more pronounced its quirks, especially in the South, where short tracks would often spring up at local fairgrounds or be carved in barren fields by a guy on a tractor who had no use for a blueprint. The terrain dictated the shape.

   North Wilkesboro Speedway fell into that category. It started out as a dirt track and was transformed to an asphalt oval in 1957. For racecar mechanics, it was a puzzle to be solved. Building a car that would be fast at North Wilkesboro was a bit like girding for a fight with a stubborn spouse. Outright victory was too much to expect; the best you could hope for was a compromise you could live with.

on THE AFTERMATH OF EARNHARDT’S DEATH 

   The next morning, stock-car racing awoke without its soul. Yes, the sun rose over Daytona Beach. Waves crashed against the shore, and locals with metal detectors trolled the sand in front of the high-rise hotels, scavenging what race fans had left behind. But fans who loved Dale Earnhardt, and those who had despised him, wept over his death.

   They started streaming to Daytona International Speedway before dawn, building a shrine composed of daisies, gladiolas, teddy bears, poems, Earnhardt caps, and Earnhardt photographs near the main entrance. Nearby, giant sheets of poster board were propped up on more than twenty easels. By midafternoon they were covered with hand-lettered messages to the driver whose death moved them so.

   “Show me the way, and I will race you to heaven.”

   “I wasn’t your biggest fan, but I respect the man. May God be happy with you.”

   And in the hand-lettered script of a child: “I am sorry you are gone.”

   All over the NASCAR circuit—in Atlanta; Bristol, Tennessee; Talladega, Alabama; Las Vegas; and beyond—thousands of fans gathered at racetracks just to stand at a place where Earnhardt had triumphed and to be with others who shared their heartbreak. The mourning wasn’t confined to traditional stock-car markets. It was much the same in office buildings, factories, churches, and bars throughout the country. At the Grammy Awards the next weekend, U2’s guitarist, the Edge, took the stage wearing a black No. 3 T-shirt.

   In Mooresville, North Carolina, the two-lane road that winds from Interstate 77 through the rolling farmland of Iredell County was choked with cars as a somber procession crept past Dale Earnhardt Inc. Several fans reported seeing a cloud shaped like the number “3” appear in the sky. They laid flowers and cards at the black wrought-iron fence in front of the racing compound, congregating in the same way that a generation had flocked to New York’s famed Dakota the night John Lennon was shot and mourners had flocked to British embassies worldwide upon learning Princess Diana had died.

   “To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me now if I never see another race again because my man is gone,” said P. J. Craven of Loris, South Carolina “That’s the only reason I watched.” Added her husband, Ricky: “He represented NASCAR. He represented the American people.”

   The scene was replayed for days afterward. The cars kept coming—from the Carolinas and from states hundreds of miles away. Members of the North Carolina Highway Patrol and Iredell County Sheriff’s Department were posted out front to maintain order, but there was little need. It was a somber, silent crowd.

   “I just loved him,” said Harold Eudy, sixty-four, as tears welled up in his eyes.

   “We came to pay our respects,” his wife added. “I loved him because he wasn’t a quitter.”

   For the millions of Americans who had never paid attention to stock-car racing, the magnitude of the shock and anguish triggered by Earnhardt’s death was a revelation. It opened a window not only on NASCAR’s iconic champion, but on a sport and, ultimately, a whole segment of the population that had been there all along, yet its passions, its longings, and its most fervent beliefs hadn’t necessarily been acknowledged.

on THE CORPORATE IMAGE OF TODAY’S DRIVERS

   Drivers’ personalities had become more muted as NASCAR’s popularity grew. As a rule, twenty-first-century stock-car racers were younger, better mannered, more carefully groomed, and more polished than their predecessors. And it was no accident. NASCAR drivers weren’t being paid just to race the car; they were being compensated (and handsomely so) to sell their sponsors’ products and sell NASCAR itself.….

   To Humpy Wheeler, the veteran promoter charged with filling the 160,000-seat grandstands at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, all the polish and perfection was cause for concern. “Perhaps the worst thing, and the most difficult thing, is that the drivers are losing a lot of color—that, and us not being able to replace Dale Earnhardt Senior,” Wheeler said. “We have lost a lot of fans because he’s not here. We lost the last workingman’s driver, somebody that the shrimp-boat captain, the mill worker, the common, ordinary man can pull for.”

   In Wheeler’s view, the irony was that if another Earnhardt came along, NASCAR would turn its back. Earnhardt’s exterior was just too rough for corporate CEOs to gamble on. NASCAR’s new wave of sponsors didn’t want a driver who looked as if he’d just crawled out from under a car. They wanted a driver who looked as if he’d just driven that car to the golf course.

   “There’s just too much homogenization for me,” Wheeler continued. “NASCAR has always been built around characters. But the problem is, we don’t have any! All these young drivers—they’ve all been racing since they were seven, and they’ve been brought up a certain way, and they talk a certain way, or they don’t say anything at all! Where is Muhammad Ali when you need him?”