The Sound and the Fury

If there was a 'least likely to attend a motor sports event' category in my high school yearbook, I'd have been more of a shoe-in that the Ugly Dog winner. I did go to a demolition derby last summer, and loved it, but mainly I'd rather watch commercials than any race you'll find on TV. Televised coverage of NASCAR is like watching a video game I have no controller for, and I really can't stand it.

I'm not complaining, it keeps me from wasting days in front of the TV.

But I've been struggling in my novel with a character who is, has to be, a NASCAR fanatic. So without ever having been to a race, it was hard for me to get a handle on the specific things that would really appeal to him about it. My friends who are NASCAR fans aren't much help. I've cornered them with NASCAR broadcasts on the tub and said, 'Splain this to me.' The best they ever come up with is that I just have to see it to understand. In person.

But it's a damned expensive proposition. I'm certainly not going to squander my meager resources traveling to Talladega, Darlington, Daytona or any other Southern hellhole and spending hundreds of bucks on tickets. I love football, but I never even buy tickets to see the Kansas City Griefs, and that's comparatively affordable.

Kansas Speedway, built at great expense by the taxpayers of the People's Republic of Wyandotte County, doesn't even sell single event tickets, they want you to buy the whole season or fuck off. That's roughly $300 per person, way out of the question.

So then the United Way sent around an e-mail offering tickets this weekend to people who would spend a few hours selling raffle tickets for this pretty truck.

Not only a ticket to the race, but to the hospitality village where I had access to free food and beverages, so it was the perfect situation. I got to satisfy my curiosity while doing something I ought to do anyway but would normally find a million excuses to get out of.

For NASCAR fans, this weekend really wasn't the real thing. October is when the Busch and Nextel Cup races are coming here. I find it curious that a group of people who take brand loyalty in auto manufacturers, beer, etc., to a level of chauvinism are so blase about the Winston Cup being renamed after a cell-phone manufacturer. But I guess it makes sense, as the Winston Cup was just ahead of its time in selling the name of a trophy to a corporate sponsor. Baseball and football arenas have started doing the same, so I suppose it's a matter of time before Vince Lombardi gets knocked off and the Super Bowl prize becomes the 'Verizon Trophy.'

For that matter, when people walked up to enter the raffle and found out it wasn't a free drawing, that it was $10 a chance or three for $25, more than one threw down the pen and said, 'It's a fucking Ford.'

I guess it's easier to blame the United Way for raffling off the wrong brand of truck than to just admit, 'I'm cheap!'

Some more honest fellows said they had to save their money for beer. At $7 a round, I suppose that's either understandable or utterly mad.

Speaking of trucks. This weekend featured the 'Craftsman Truck Series' race, where they race these very un-truck like things.

I think it's cute how they've kept the styling of the grills reminiscent of the 'trucks' they are supposedly 'stock car' versions of. Not that you could haul anything in one of these things, the bed is closed up, and besides, they rind millimeters of the ground, so if anything heavier than the driver gets in, it'll bottom out. You could high-center these 'trucks' on a pencil.

Not that the NASCAR 'Taurus' has even DNA in common with an actual Taurus. I ran into a chap hauling Matt Kenseth's car. Well, one of them. I couldn't decipher the name of the circuit the car was for, but he indicated Kenseth only drives it about four races a year. He let me come in the trailer and check it out, and I asked him how much of it is actually a stock 'Taurus,' and he laughed and said not much, if anything. He couldn't think of a single part that would actually be interchangeable with a showroom Taurus. When I asked him what the differences were in this car and the Nextel Cup car Kenseth drives, or the Busch series cars, ARCA cars, etc., his answers were in the form of incomprehensible compression ratios and weight limits.

Speaking of cars that are a lot like those Nextel Cup cars, the second Saturday race was for ARCA cars, which are visibly faster and louder than the trucks, but fans assured me were not nearly as incredible as the Nextel Cup cars.

They look just like the 'big league' cars to me, and in the stands, I definitely had to wear earplugs. The seats I had were very good, 21st row of the lower section, so the grandstands acted as an amphitheatre for the 30-odd unmuffled engines. You can actually smell burning rubber and fuel odors that close. The Doppler of approaching cars and escaping cars creates an effect similar to a hive of bees hooked up to the Grateful Dead's outdoor concert rig.

Which reminds me, during the truck race, I noticed this girl a few rows in front of me, maybe a year old or so, with no ear plugs. Her parents weren't wearing them either, so I guess they didn't think the trucks were as loud as I did. And the girl seemed happy, if sweaty.


Speaking of which, before the races, I took the pit tour, which is where a lot of these photos came from, and got a good close up of the pace car. I thought Fau Lobster would be tickled at it, on account of her enthusiasm for Mustangs, but she complained that it wasn't black.


While on the pit tour, they were qualifying the IRL cars for the Sunday race, and since I hadn't heard the trucks in concert yet, just one car running the track seemed incredibly loud. The Indy car is probably the most impressively engineered car. Danica Patrick (on the PA, sounds like 'Danna Kirkpatrick') took the poll with a speed of almost 215 mph. This on a tire the thickness of a credit card. Which of course made her the darling of the track, or the enemy of the people, depending on who you asked. I had to root for her just because I can't believe it's taken this long for women to break into auto racing at the top levels. A Y chromosome gives you some advantages in the strength department given the same age and training, but in an event where endurance, skill and nerve are the keys to success, I can't see where guys would have any advantage. If anything, maybe the opposite.

Unfortunately, the car that took the poll in Saturday's qualifying had mechanical problems on Sunday and she finished 9th. Which points out the narrow difference between the best and worst in that pack. The car who trailed almost the whole race, and was even lapped once, was basically struggling to catch a pack going a couple of miles an hour faster. Probably less than 1% at those speeds.

Did I like it? Will I go back?

I'm not likely to go buy tickets, but I wouldn't pass up the chance to see the spectacle on similarly frugal terms. Auto racing definitely televises poorly. The exception would be the wrecks. Every time I went to pee, it seems, I came out to find them running under caution, cleaning the track. I was afraid a correlation would be made and I'd either get barred from the track or forbidden to leave the grandstands. With no instant replay, I missed the majority of the mishaps that happened on the track.

It was also instructive to see three varieties of racing. The trucks were easily the slowest and quietest vehicles. But the trucks knocked each other about a lot more than the ARCA or IRL racers. The fenders are probably part of that, though the ARCA cars also have closed wheels. And rubbing another driver with fenders an inch from your tires is probably just as likely to cut your tire as anything, so I suspect it's more a matter of driver skill and the handling limitations of the truck platform.

The IRL cars ran the cleanest (see also loudest, fastest, closest together). This is probably because there's no such thing as a minor mishap in such a fragile car at such high speeds. They're probably also the most skillful drivers, they almost have to be.

And for any wet blankets who think we could end oil imports if we knocked off the racing business, a lot of the fans were grumbling that race fuel is actually very cheap, about a buck a gallon. I'm sure this is in part because it's not taxed as aggressively as your gallon of unleaded. But it's also almost pure ethanol. I guess that stands to reason for a sport that grew up as a sideline to moonshining...

Okay, that was intentional redneck baiting, but I couldn’t resist. The redneck contingency is actually a smaller percentage of the crowd than what I saw at the demolition derby last summer, and that crowd had a lot of white collars in it.