NASCAR: It’s Not Just for Rednecks

It is an early spring evening in Birmingham, sticky and warm as NASCAR rookie Steve Park limps painfully in the dusk down a parking-lot embankment at a suburban auto dealership.

The East Northport, N.Y., driver is still hurting from multiple injuries suffered six weeks earlier in a spectacular crash and faces another three months of rehabilitation, but Park works his smile as hard as the wooden crutch under his arm as he hobbles into the showroom along with various racing luminaries for a three-hour charity autograph session. A line of fans, many who have waited for more than eight hours, winds from the celebrity row in a serpentine arc throughout the lobby, out the front door and past a colorful display of exhibition stock cars, merchandise booths and a twanging country band before disappearing around the corner. “Let’s get this show on the road,” Park says softly, to no one in particular.

But, as he already knows: When it comes to the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, the show never really ends -- even if your fractured right leg stiffens in agony with every signature and handshake offered.

“How many times do you see pro baseball and football players doing this?” said driver Todd Bodine, who joins Park, Kyle Petty, Steve Grissom, legendary brothers Donnie and Bobby Allison and Miss Alabama, Doree Walker, in greeting supporters. “If they paid them a million dollars, they might do it, but not if they didn’t.

“Access is what made our sport what it is.”

What NASCAR is today is the United States’ fastest-growing spectator sport, an arenaline rush of fiery rock and rollovers and business savvy that will cover 17 states, more than 46,000 miles, 33 races and three exhibitions this year alone, including a sold-out showcase in Japan next fall. From Sonoma, Calif., to Pocono, Pa., the circuit’s Winston Cup and Busch Grand National competitions routinely draw more than 100,000 per event, with Winston Cup telecasts second only to the NFL in ESPN’s ratings.

On July 4, NASCAR, celebrating its 50th anniversary, will hit prime time with the Pepsi 400, a night race, televised by CBS from Daytona International Speedway in Florida. Before the year ends, more than six million fans -- an average of more than 180,000 per race weekend, are expected to attend Cup competitions.

The pedal-to-the-metal growth of the industry has taken place under an umbrella of unapologetic corporate loyalty married with a dedication to fans unrivaled by any other sport. Drivers are at once walking billboards, plastered cap to shoe with sponsors’ patches, and humble ministers for the masses, laying hands on the faithful who are encouraged to approach with little fear of any Albert Belle retaliation.

“You can stop a guy after practice,” said longtime race analyst Jerry Punch, a familiar face on ESPN broadcasts. “As good as Michael Jordan is about people, you can’t stop him after a shootaround. You can with Dale Earnhardt.”

Advertising surveys have shown that NASCAR fans are the most brand loyal in sports, with apparel, souvenir and collectible sales expected to total almost a half a billion dollars this year, a staggering leap from the $60 million raked in eight years ago. Additionally, supporters can identify each driver by his sponsor, the car he drives (Ford, Pontiac or Chevy) and its number.

At the autograph party, held to benefit the Alabama Head Injury Foundation, the drivers patiently sign photos, die-cast toy cars, collector’s cards, baseball caps, posters, flags, T-shirts and magazines. Park, injured only three races into his ballyhooed stint as the driver for the legendary Earnhardt’s new racing team, soaks in an outpouring of affection for his predicament. “I’m just out there, the cars are going by and I’m just leaning with ‘em,” he tells one couple. “It’s been pretty miserable.” Another woman holds up her broken left wrist, encased in a blue cast. “I know how you feel,” she says. Park, who suffered a fractured femur, collarbone and shoulder blade, along with two chipped teeth, in a March 6 wreck at Atlanta, nods patiently. “I’ll bet you do,” he says.

Wildly successful drivers such as Jeff Gordon, Earnhardt or Darrell Waltrip can earn well into seven figures per season, and the scramble to land - and keep - rides with lucrative sponsorships is as furious as the action on the tracks from Dallas to Loudon, N.H.

The route to reaching the Winston Cup level involves moving up from backwoods tracks in the Southeast all the way up through New England, where Park drove everything from open-wheeled modifieds to truck races before Earnhardt came calling less than two years ago. He native was the Busch Grand National Rookie of the Year last season and found himself an interested spectator the day after his Birmingham appearance when the BGN DuraLube 300 begins at the massive Talladega Super-H speedway.

Six laps into the race, five cars become entangled in a 150-mph collision, with the hood of David Green’s auto spinning a full 100 yards straight up and his windshield spiraling into the Turn 1 grandstands. Fans, electric with excitement, let out a throaty roar as Green emerges safely from the car. The hood, appearing relatively undamaged, floats like a sparkling leaf on a pond as the crowd passes it around hand-over-hand.

It’s not always that way. “If you miss a putt in golf, everybody sighs,” said Park’s publicist, Drew Brown. “You miss a turn in racing, they send the ambulance.”

Park, sitting on a railing atop the Earnhardt team’s bright-yellow Pennzoil trailer, understands this and watches impassively as the smoking cars are hosed down. “It’s a part of the sport,” he says with a shrug. “If somebody broke a leg, I’d go talk to them about it like Kyle Petty did to me.” By early Sunday morning, hours before the Die-Hard 500, the expansive acreage around the super-speedway has been converted into a teeming gypsy village of U-Hauls, tents, recreational vehicles and mobile homes populated by race fans with license plates from as far away as Ohio and Texas. Beer flows, music blares and geared-up drivers brazenly weave in and out of the glacial traffic like the heroes they follow. The numbers and colors of Earnhardt, Gordon and two-time Cup champion Terry Labonte, among other popular drivers, flutter from flags and banners, are stitched onto jackets or painted onto bodies.

Hot-air balloons advertising barbecue sauce and various brews float on warm breezes over the super-speedway, while planes buzz higher overhead trailing other advertisement banners. Only moments before the race, the ninth of the season, hundreds of lucky fans with passes prowl the pit and garage areas, some venturing out onto the 2.66-mile banked asphalt oval as the drivers are introduced to a mix of cheers (Earnhardt) and boos (Gordon) in front of the main grandstand.

The gathering of fans is predominantly white male, and seems to mirror the redneck reputation that still dogs the circuit. But, officials and drivers insist, that is changing, pointing out that research shows that 30 percent of 1997 race fans earned at least $50,000 annually and 55 percent had attended college.

“It used to be in NASCAR that if a roar went up from the crowd, either a woman took her top off or Earnhardt walked out of his trailer,” one official says, pleading anonymity. “It’s not that way anymore.”