The NASCAR Red State
YATES, BROCK
BY Brock Yates consequences. When the late William H.G. ("Big Bill") France gathered a small group of Southern dirt track promoters at Daytona Beach's Streamline...
...While George W. Bush has remained linked with the NASCAR crowd, it was Ronald Reagan who first appeared among the vox populi as the President of the United States...
...NASCAR and its publicly traded sister, International Speedways Corporation (ISC), are models of American enterprise-multi-billion-dollar operations that grow in power and popularity by the year, especially in the Red State heartland where the high-speed, fender-bashing action of the thundering stock cars contrasts mightily with the so-called "stick and ball games" that remain popular in the more urban centers of the nation...
...Slowly, thanks to the brilliant promotional skills of Big Bill, his son, Bill Junior, and now his grandson, NASCAR left its backwater roots and entered the great, glittering world through a network of 23 super speedways, located in 19 states from California to New Hampshire...
...Superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr...
...Big Bill") France gathered a small group of Southern dirt track promoters at Daytona Beach's Streamline Hotel in December 1947 to form the National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing (NASCAR), little did he realize he was creating one of the greatest sporting dynasties in history...
...Why do you ask...
...When anti-racing northern congressmen and liberal newspapers began to bleat that his race cars wasted unconscionable amounts of gasoline, France countered by producing data that a chartered Boeing 707 hauling an NFL football team or Major League Baseball club between New York 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 B R O C K Y ATE S and Los Angeles consumed more fuel than an entire field of NASCAR racers running 500 miles...
...Understanding that a NASCAR appearance was de rigueur among his constituents, his flunkies arranged for him to wave the green starting flag for the Atlanta, Georgia 500-miler...
...Over the years NASCAR has been accused of manipulating the results, either by giving certain The stars and bars waved everywhere...
...Entering the garage area where the teams housed their race cars, Clinton toured the grounds seeking the drivers...
...Brock Yates is the author most recently of NASCAR Off the Record (Motorbooks International) and Against Death and Time (Thunder's Mouth Press...
...Rebel yells filled the grandstands and "Dixie" was sung in drunken reverie...
...Sixty years later the massive Nextel Cup Series rivals the National Football League and Major League Baseball in terms of television ratings, commercial revenues, overall fan attendance, and popularity...
...DURING THE RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN of 1996, Bill Clinton and his retinue of political scholckmeisters appeared at the aforementioned Darlington Raceway for the Southern 500...
...It was a day that NASCAR fans will never forget...
...In many cases they have simply ignored the race nuts, while others have appeared at the tracks with limited results...
...As Carter ascended the starter's platform, which was suspended over the high-banked speedway, he was greeted by NASCAR's chief starter, the late Harold Kinder-a small, puckish man with a noted sense of humor...
...The rise of great champion Richard Petty and the fall of superstar Dale Earnhardt, whose death in the 2001 Daytona 500-the centerpiece race of NASCAR-was witnessed by tens of millions of television viewers worldwide, were but two of scores of seminal moments that raised NASCAR from its Piedmont Plateau roots and its whiskey-hauling bootlegger drivers to international prominence...
...This is red-state-race country...
...Photographs must still exist of the future President of the United States, his face creased with fear, flagging off the race with his legs crossed and his left hand firmly gripping his crotch...
...drivers extra-large, illegal engines or by increasing the competition by throwing yellow flags for debris on the track to tighten the field into a mass of freeway-like, high-speed commuters...
...THAT OF COURSE HAS CHANGED as stock car rac ing has radiated across the nation...
...Good heavens, Governor, it's the suction...
...The stars and bars waved everywhere...
...To a man, the stars of the circuit hid out in their motor homes, refusing to be seen with the Man from Hope...
...If nothing else, Thurmond confirmed that NASCAR was a hard-shell Southern sport...
...The infield at Darlington was a notorious center of prerace Southern style hell-raising-so violent and liquor-soaked that the area was fenced off and even the police would not enter for anything less than a shooting...
...Understanding he was not welcome, Clinton left the track in a huff...
...Big Bill France remained highly attuned to the Washington atmosphere and twice during the OPEC gas crisis of the 1970s responded with cleverness and alacrity...
...Worth Texas Motor Speedway as governor and the 2002 Daytona 500 while literally dozens of Southern and western senators, congressmen, and local pols consider attendance at major NASCAR races a major element of any campaign...
...Rebel yells filled the grandstands and "Dixie" was sung in drunken reverie...
...BY BROOK YATES ALIT ABOUT UNIN'I ENI)EI) conse quences...
...This may have been true in early days, but Jeff Gordon's third triumph in the recent Daytona 500 41 0 ~i3 Ift a 01- - . '. Its origins were pure redneck...
...Puzzled by the question, Carter responded, "No...
...Finally the NASCAR officials, fearing reaction from a surly press corps, pleaded with ace driver Mark Martinan Arkansas native-to perfunctorily greet Clinton...
...The oldtub thumper was selected to give a speech before the start of the 1961 Southern "500" at Darlington, which by then had become a major center of white supremacy and anti-civil rights advocacy...
...Yet the major teams, housed in multi-million-dollar, palatial shops, remain based around metro Charlotte, North Carolina, with nearby Mooresville the epicenter of the operations that employ hundreds of skilled engineers and technicians to tend to the automobiles...
...The crowd went mad...
...This data silenced his critics, although during the height of the crunch, France craftily cut the distance of his races ten percent to defer to the national emergency...
...But it was at Darlington where politics, Southern style, first bubbled to the surface, thanks to the late, crusty segregationist and Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond...
...When these cars pass underneath us at 200 miles an hour, they create a vacuum so strong that it can suck a man's testicles clean out of his scrotum...
...In the background can be seen Kinder with a broad smile on his face...
...Speeds on these high-banked ovals exceed 190 miles an hour as teams backed by major auto manufacturers contest for victory and the adage, "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday...
...France's close friend, Alabama Governor George Wallace, had the state fund a special super highway linking the Talladega high-banked super track to the nearest Interstate when it was constructed in 1969...
...But politics remain in play, for the most part dominated by Republicans who link to the dominant red-state sentiments...
...George W. Bush attended a number of races at the Dallas Ft...
...And if necessary, it will the be the first to secede in 1961...
...Prior to the start of the race Thurmond grabbed the microphone and announced, "In 1861 South Carolina was the first to secede from the Union...
...With the President in the press box and the immense tail of Air Force One visible from the airfield behind the Daytona International Speedway, Reagan watched Richard Petty-the sport's most popular driverwin his unprecedented 200th race during the running of the July 4th, 1984 Firecracker 400...
...The year was 1975 when the then-governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter was suiting up to run for president...
...Warning to future Democrats and liberals of all stripes: attend a NASCAR race at your own risk...
...Kinder frowned and shook his head with mock concern...
...April 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15...
...As the field of powerful race cars snorted out of the pits to form up for several pace laps, Kinder handed Carter the green flag and asked, "Governor, did they give you a jock strap...
...is a classic Southern good ol'boy, while others like Jeff Gordon come from California and numerous northern states...
...Big Bill France, a Washington, D.C...
...Its iF t . I s a • -• 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 21105 THE NASCAR RED STATE will produce limited results for Chevrolet, considering that his Monte Carlo coupe is not only a slumping brand model, but so exotically modified for competition that it more resembles a jet fighter than a normal passenger car...
...native who emigrated to Daytona Beach in the 1930s to operate a gas station and promote races on the city's famous beach, was a political conservative whose allies included the hard-scrabble South Carolina Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, who was instrumental in helping to create the Darlington International Speedway-the first so-called "Super Speedway"in 1949...
...While Reagan and Dubya remain beloved by the hard core NASCAR crowd, Democrats have not fared as well over the years...
...laki, V f . great early drivers, like Petty's father Lee and Tom Wolfe's immortalized "Last American Hero" Junior Johnson, learned their craft hauling moonshine across the Carolina hills in souped-up Ford coupes that, for entertainment and a few extra dollars, they raced on Sundays on rut ted ovals carved out of the red clay of the Southern cotton field and piney woods...
...There was a time when the press cynically described this as the presence of a mythical French driver, "Pierre DeBris...
...Guns were fired...
...Yet no politician, from the president on down, ever equaled the farcical performance produced by the greatest clown act ever to occupy the White House...
...Today it is suspected that many yellow flags are employed to permit the blocks of television commercials to be aired without interfering with the competition...
Vol. 38 • April 2005 • No. 3
