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Daytona 500 is the first race of NASCAR's season and the first race
in every stock car racing fan and driver's
heart. In the mythology of stock car racing, Daytona is Olympus.
This is where it began, with part of the race actually being run
on the beach. It has grown, good Lord, since then. They can put
more than 150,000 people in the stands at Daytona now and the money
is more than any of those early racers like Curtis Turner and Fireball
Roberts could have understood. But the thing itself, the soul of
it, hasn't changed. It is still men, racing cars, and each other.
For money, sure. But also for glory and for the sheer goddamned
hell of it.
It was a long time before the people who like to tell everyone else
what to think caught on to stock-car racing. Most of those people
live in New York, in an environment and a culture that is hostile
to cars. Those people won't be happy until we are all on foot or
riding in "mass transportation." Which is about as exciting as anything
else having to do with the masses. But out in America, people like
cars. Even love them. Especially in the South where the legendary
NASCAR drivers all came from. Working under a shade tree, they could
tear down and rebuild any car and make it go faster. And at night,
some of them used those same cars to run whiskey on the back roads.
That was a damn site trickier than running an oval with a bunch
of boys in the daylight. Junior Johnson ran whiskey and did a stretch
for it. He was one of stock car's early greats and about 40 years
ago Tom Wolfe wrote a wonderful magazine piece about him called
"The Last American Hero." Count on Wolfe to get out of New York
and find out what was going on in America.
NASCAR (which is the sport's sanctioning body and actually a private
enterprise) has become synonymous with stock-car
| “Clinton
is about as far in spirit from a NASCAR driver as you
can get. He lacks courage, his word is no good, and he
takes himself real damn serious.” |
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racing. It is also the fastest growing sport in America. NASCAR
fans love their sport the way the NBA wishes its fans loved basketball
— with a pure, irrational devotion. They love the racing, they
love the cars and above all, they love (and sometimes hate) the
drivers. NASCAR fans are as fierce in their hates as they are in
their loves. They booed Bill Clinton and booed him hard at Darlington
one year. Clinton is about as far in spirit from a NASCAR driver
as you can get. He lacks courage, his word is no good, and he takes
himself real damn serious.
NASCAR drivers are famously accessible. They will still sign autographs
and talk with the fans. They are recognizable people with personalities
that come through on the track. The sport has lived, for years,
on the personalities of its most celebrated, hard charging drivers
like Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts, Tiny Lund, Junior Johnson,
Joe Weatherly, Cale Yarborough, Donnie Allison, Darrell Waltrip,
Richard Pettty, David Pearson, and Dale Earnhardt who took over
as the sport's top driver after Petty retired.
Earnhardt was the genuine article. A Carolina boy, he was a high-school
dropout who loved fishing and hunting and driving cars. He drove
hard. Harder, maybe, than anyone in the history of the sport. He
relied as much on will and guts as he did on speed. If you got in
his way, he would knock you into the infield. But there was great
skill to go with the aggressiveness. He understood the draft —
the vacuum that is created by a race car and that can pull a following
car along — better than just about anyone. Other drivers said
that Earnhardt could "see air."
Earnhardt ran Daytona last Sunday like he always ran. He got into
other cars — swapping paint, they call it — and he got
up so close in the other guys' mirrors that they'd back off and
let him by. He was as good as his nickname — the Intimidator.
He ran near the front for the whole race and he was still up there
on the last lap when he got into another car and shot across the
track and into the wall, head on, at about 180 mph. Up ahead, his
son came in second to a car driven by Michael Waltrip (and owned
by Dale Earnhardt). Dale Jr. ran back across the track to where
his father was being cut out of his mangled black Chevrolet. He
rode in the ambulance to the hospital where his father was pronounced
dead. He was probably dead the moment his car slammed into the wall.
But you have to imagine that if Dale Earnhardt had been able to
utter any last words, he would have said what he said many times
when asked about something that had happened out on the track.
"That's just racing."
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