CULTURE SHOCK

I have raced my Chevy through a straightaway of barren oaks, high into the curve past the Chick-fil-A, past porch swings and splintered basketball goals and a yard sale with fork lifts.

I have sprinted through rolling hills and reproducing Cracker Barrels directly into the middle of one-half mile of red clay, in the shape of an oval, like that stretched and frayed collar on the white T-shirt around the neck of Roger Hamrick.

“You’re from where?” he asks.

I’m from the part of the world that thought it understood.

I’m one of those people who dismissed stock car racing’s popularity as a cult, until this week, when the national attention and grief surrounding Dale Earnhardt’s death showed us we had no idea.

Not cult, but culture.

That culture was born on the moonshiner’s back roads in the hills north of here. It can still be found in the cluttered garages and neighborhood tracks that fill this region like taco stands fill ours.

Hamrick’s beard-stubbled jowls and yellowed smile is another place.

“We just like racin’,” he says with a shrug.

Says it like that, like everyone says it here, ending the word with an apostrophe instead of a consonant, with a fishtail instead of a stop.

Then he describes it.

“ ‘Bout eight years ago,” he begins . . .

Coming down the dirt backstretch at tiny Cherokee Speedway, he drove over someone’s rear bumper and flew off the track and into the nearby trees.

Literally.

“My car was wedged between two trees, ‘bout 10 feet up,” he recalls.

Because he weighed 300 pounds at the time, he could not get out of the car, so he stayed suspended above the track for three hours while rescue workers worked into the night.

They removed him by cutting off the roof. They removed the car by chopping down the trees.

“Seemed like more than three hours to me,” he says.

Then there was the time that Hamrick ran his late-model stock off the course and into a nearby water tower.

“Looked up and thought it was rainin’,” he says.

In 15 years at this track just across the state line in South Carolina, the dump truck operator has won more than 400 races. But his most memorable include the one where he didn’t even finish.

A rival driver spun him into the wall on the final turn. The men jumped from their cars and began fighting, even while the rest of the field was speeding past.

Soon they were joined by several dozen other people from the pits. At this point, Roger Hamrick remembers his loving wife.

“She ran out on the track, grabbed my helmet, and threw it at somebody,” he says.

Independence. Fearlessness. Family. Racin’.

“Goin’ fast,” Hamrick says, shrugging. “Getting on wit’ it.”

*

The first stock car racers were the last rebels.

In the 1930s and 1940s, they were moonshiners trying to outrun federal tax agents in the North Carolina hills.

“Them boys were always trying to see which car was fastest,” explained longtime small-track announcer Walter Faulkner. “So one day, somebody got the idea to carve a little track out of a cow pasture.”

The first official NASCAR race was in 1949, on a dirt oval at the Charlotte Fairgrounds. The first winner, fittingly for the moonshiners, was disqualified because he rigged his car.

Today, it has become a billion-dollar industry with worldwide appeal. The death of its most famous driver last Sunday in the Daytona 500 was not only sports news, but front-page news.

The White House sent a representative to Earnhardt’s funeral. A national cable network ran a 12-hour special on his life.

But Earnhardt’s popularity was based in the notion that the Kannapolis, N.C., native was forever one of those small-track moonshiners.

Shortly after arriving here, I climbed in my Chevy and sped off to see another one.

Barreling down narrow lanes surrounded by rolling farms. Swerving around a Bojangles and dueling mini-marts. Screeching into an asphalt oval at the end of a field that houses what looks like a rotting moonshine shack.

It’s the Concord Motorsports Park, just outside Charlotte, one of a dozen smaller tracks within an hour or so of here.

I was late, so by the time I arrived at the quarter-mile oval in the back, my subject was already spinning his mini-stock car around the track.

“Looking good, looking fast,” said car owner Bill Crowder of DP Connections Inc. as the little black car whirs into a straightaway going as fast as 80 mph.

The car pulled up and the driver popped out, unzipped his black fire suit, his earring glistening in the afternoon sun, his feet burning from working the gas.

“I never lifted it,” he said with a smile.

His name is Willy Evernham, and he just turned 11.

“I know, I know, I hear it all the time,” said his mother, Barbara. “But you know, kids can get hurt riding a bike.”

Willy is the nephew of Ray Evernham, the crew chief who helped make Jeff Gordon famous. His father, Willie, works for car owner Chip Ganassi.

“Like everyone says, this is a sport about family,” Barbara said.

So instead of toppling that bike over a tree stump, Willie has run a race car into a wall. The first time he was in a race car. At age 8.

“I over-corrected on a turn,” Willy said.

He has since been in several scrapes, but never injured, and is currently considered one of the rising stars of a sport that permeates these parts like Pokemon.

“We even saved a piece of that first car he wrecked,” Barbara says. “We had him autograph it. We put it on the mantel at home.”

*

Next stop, Race City USA.

At least, that’s what they just painted on the Mooresville water tower.

But after speeding 30 minutes up the interstate from Charlotte, past silos with crosses and billboards with Earnhardt banners, I find something else entirely.

The image of this town, billed as the center of the stock car racing universe, implies rows of garages filled with famous grease-stained mechanics working with famous golf-shirted drivers.

But instead of the Daytona 500, you get Fortune 500.

Indeed, there are the garages here that house the cars of such famous drivers and owners as Earnhardt, Ricky Rudd, Rusty Wallace and Mark Martin.

But they aren’t really garages. They are gleaming office buildings along a couple of streets, one of which is very inappropriately named Gasoline Alley.

There are no gas stains, or gas fumes, or grime of any kind outside the racing shops in Race City USA.

“It’s all changed,” said Chris Bowman, a manager for a truck team. “The places are immaculate. It’s not any corner shop. It’s corporate America.”

He is sitting inside the Rockin’ N Racin’ bar, a mechanic’s sort of place with balloon replicas of the famous cars hanging from the ceiling and an auto racing show on the television.

If only car owners and even crew chiefs didn’t routinely pull up here in limousines.

The only place this paradox makes sense is down the road, in the largest of the shops, a huge gleaming office structure known as, “The Garage-Mahal.”

That would be Dale Earnhardt’s shop.

On this day, the formality of the gates and glass are overwhelmed by the intimacy of 150 feet of flowers and cards and tears that have been laid on the front lawn.

Some have written poems. Others have enclosed pictures.

Many were like the cardboard heart that read, “Dale, we will miss you dearly . . . The Barnetts . . . David, May, Sarah and Andrew.”

As if he were an uncle or old friend. As if he were one of the family.

To understand why Earnhardt was so loved is to understand why stock car racing is so cherished.

“Everybody hates the traffic on the small roads down here, everybody likes the challenge of getting around that truck,” said Sam Walker, one of several hundred people crowding the gates at sunset Friday. “Dale Earnhardt was a guy who, on the track, would take that challenge. He was never too far from his roots.”

To understand the scope of the late driver’s support is to also understand the scope of his sport.

Walker, 30, a food service director, was dressed in khakis and tasseled loafers. On his belt were a cell phone and pager. He held an expensive camera.

“Want to see something?” he said suddenly, pulling up the cuff of one of his pant legs.

On this yuppie’s ankle were tattooed the numbers and signatures of Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

*

Easy to see how Earnhardt was never too far from his roots. The road from Mooresville leads directly south to the same type of clay once driven upon by the moonshiners.

Speeding to Cherokee Speedway, located about 50 minutes from Charlotte, was the easy part.

Actually finding it, located over a bluff with no sign on the narrow entrance road, was the challenge.

A sign, hanging from a wall on the aging main building, confirmed it.

“Welcome to Cherokee Speedway. The Place Your Mama Warned You About.”

A mill worker named Keith Holland seconded it.

“The beautifulest place around,” he said.

If beauty can be found in the nurturing of the roots of a rowdy tradition, then this place is gorgeous.

This is the place where a kid who crashed into the wall was dramatically rescued by a one-legged man hopping down the side of the track.

This is the place where action once stopped while everyone watched a reckless driver being chased across the track and into the nearby woods by half the pit area.

On this Saturday afternoon during practice, with red dust filling the air like little storm clouds, one car speeding past the makeshift concrete grandstand read, “Outlaw.” Another read, “Unclaimed Furniture.”

This was also the place where a veteran driver once dressed up like a woman in an attempt to win the Powder Puff race.

He was disqualified at the starting line when officials opened his helmet to discover he had forgotten to shave his beard.

*

I climbed out of the Chevy. I climbed into something-really-cramped-and-scary.

“You can’t leave here without getting a taste of the thrill,” said Crowder, the owner of the prodigy’s car. “Go on, get in.”

I wanted to tell him that simply navigating the geography around Stock Car Country was like driving in a race. Shortly after some guy passed me underneath a yellow light from a left-turn lane on a narrow street in front of a crowded church, I got it.

But he insisted. So I climbed into one of his cars for a spin around the Concord quarter-mile track.

The hardest part, of course, being the climb.

My body barely squeezed into the kidney pads. I could barely breathe beneath the helmet. The five seat belts made me claustrophobic.

“I can’t move!” I shouted.

“You don’t wanna move,” Crowder shouted.

And off I went, pushing the clutch, pulling back the shift, shaking into the first turn, wobbling into the second turn and then . . . I felt it.

The wind coming through the screen. The power beneath my legs. A freedom like flying.

That awful whir sounded like a purr. That sour smell became roses.

I was speeding now, into a second lap, flashing a thumbs-up just like the stars, finally rolling into the pits exhausted but exhilarated.

“I get it,” I said excitedly.

“You got it,” Crowder said.

I walked back toward the Chevy feeling a little braver, a little smarter, a lot more understanding.

“How fast was I going?” I asked a pit guy.

“About 25 mile-an-hour,” he said.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.