Nascar Rules

The old cars ran part of the race on the beach and the race was cut short when the tide came in. Nowadays, they race on the big, oval superspeedway, but there is still a moist, fetid mood. Lots of sunshine with plenty of bare skin among the nearly 200,000 fans who come to watch and, just as important, party hard. You see flags flying at Daytona that say things like TO HELL WITH THE MOUNTAINS. SHOW US YOUR BUSCH. The women who follow Nascar get right with the program. Speed, after all, is an aphrodisiac and car racing is about speed and danger and money. But the racing is the thing and some of the best racing in Nascar history has been done in the Daytona 500. Fans still remember the 1976 race when David Pearson and Richard Petty got together at 180 mph, running down to the finish. Both drivers lost it, hit the wall and spun down into the infield. Pearson got on the clutch and kept his engine running, so he managed to limp to the checkered flag. Petty had to get pushed across the finish line. CBS had it on tape and millions of people who had thought of stock car racing as the sport of redneck primitives watched and became interested. Three years later CBS was live at Daytona when Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough tangled near the finish and, after the wreck, started arguing and then throwing punches, with Donnie's brother, Bobby, parking his car so he could join the fight.

Daytona is to stock car racing what Wimbledon is to tennis, the Masters is to golf and the Kentucky Derby is to Thoroughbred racing. Daytona is where Nascar started--50 years ago, as it happened. So 1998 is stock car racing's golden jubilee and this race its greatest festival and celebration. For racing fans, this is about as good as it gets.

And today, by God, in this particular race, it got better than that. The people here, in the stands, the luxury boxes and the infield--a lot of whom have been camped for two weeks, living off charcoaled meat and cold beer--would have cheered just about any finish to this race. But this is cheering of a different order. These people are cheering their brains out for a race close enough that a paint job is just about all that separates the first five cars--this baby is going down to the wire--because of who is in front now. If Dale Earnhardt, the man they call the Intimidator, can hang on and win, it will be just about the most sublime finish to this race any of them could imagine. Earnhardt, after all, is the custodian of all that the fans love about stock car racing.

But nobody is counting on Earnhardt's winning. Not with five laps to go and not with four. Nor three. Because Dale Earnhardt has never won this thing in 19 years of trying. If it had been the Daytona 499, he'd have won two or three of them. He's lost it just about every way there is to lose, including having a head-on collision with a seagull. Right now fans are most worried about the Chevy Monte Carlo with the number 24 painted on its side. Jeff Gordon's car.

Gordon is the blazing new star on the Nascar scene. He is 26 years old and looks like Tom Cruise. He was rookie of the year in 1993. In his dazzling career he has already won 30 races and two season championships--Winston Cups--to Earnhardt's record-tying seven. Gordon is clean and wholesome, a good Christian lad who gives thanks to Jesus for his victories. To the fans, it seems plain that Gordon is the inevitable future of stock car racing. Traditionalists couldn't hate him any more if he were a girl or an Arab. They know, to the bottoms of their souls, that Gordon is wrong for racing and every time he wins it is just more proof that something is going bad in their universe.

The first stock car racers, as everyone knows, were bootleggers. They outran the revenue agents at night and raced one another for sport on weekends. Americans have always had a weak spot for outlaws. Americans also love cars. Put an outlaw in a car--especially an American, or stock, car--racing against other outlaws in similar cars, and you have a nearly unbeatable combination. This is how stock car racing started out; with renegade drivers racing big American iron around little dirt tracks for the thrill of it and the money they could make on side bets. They ran fast, they collided and sometimes racers were killed.

At first, it was pretty much exclusively a Southern passion. Kids in the South worshiped drivers and grew up wanting to be Fireball Roberts and run at Daytona the same way kids up north idolized Duke Snider or Stan Musial and dreamed of playing for the Dodgers or the Cardinals.

Snider and Musial, of course, retired in good health. Roberts died because of a fiery car crash. Danger was an undeniable element in the appeal of stock car racing. And because it was a Southern thing, there was something exuberant, irrational and a little violent about the stock car racing in those early days. The racers would intentionally knock one another around on the track, which was close to attempted murder at those speeds. But everybody accepted it as just part of racing.

They were a hell-raising bunch, the drivers and the fans. And they didn't care. The rest of the country were Yankees and such trash as that and fuck 'em. And, eventually, the rest of the country came around, the same way it did to country music. Of course, both stock car racing and country music cleaned up their acts and smoothed down a few rough edges on their way to the mainstream. But you still see a lot of Confederate flags flying in the infield when you go to the track at, say, Darlington, South Carolina. It was there they lustily booed Bill Clinton. Even though he's from Arkansas he isn't one of them.

Back in late 1947 no one could have imagined the president attending a stock car race, especially in the South. Stock car racing was such a marginal sport (if it could be dignified with that word) that it practically did not exist.

There was plenty of racing, some of it ad hoc and some of it sanctioned by rival bodies with different rules and rankings. But there was no coherence to the sport. So a 6'5" dynamo named Bill France, who had been a garage mechanic, race driver and businessman, called a meeting in a Daytona Beach hotel and became the czar of the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing. He ruled his empire for 25 years, then turned it over to Bill Jr., who rules it today. Nascar was an obscure little outfit in the early days, but it has never suffered from lack of leadership or vision. Both the senior France and his son understood intuitively, with a kind of good-old-boy cunning, things the rest of American business and sports took years to get around to. What looked like county-fair hucksterism when they did it is now standard practice at Disney and the National Football League. Corporations will spend almost half a billion on Nascar this year. Ad images will be worth almost a billion. Nascar and its cousin, the International Speedway Corp., are $2 billion--a--year businesses.

One of Bill France's strengths--aside from the sheer force of his personality--was a sense of what his audience wanted. From the very beginning Nascar was run for the entertainment of the fans. "France saw that this was the entertainment business," says Parnelli Jones, one of America's greatest drivers. "It wasn't the engineering business and it wasn't pure sport. It was about getting, and keeping, the fans."

Which meant creating (and sustaining) the fiction that what the fans saw their favorite drivers pushing around the track at Charlotte was the same kind of car they could go out and drive themselves. Richard Petty says he can remember that when he was a boy, his father, Lee, was one of the early stars of Nascar. The family would get into the car and go to some track, where Richard would watch his father race the family car. Later, they would all pile back in and drive home. It was a happier ride if Dad had won.

The cars still look like production-built American cars, even if it is only sheet metal--and--decal deep. The Nascar mantra has been "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday," so the powers that be have made sure, through careful manipulation of the rules, that Chevy remains competitive with Ford and that Pontiac has a place at the table. Given the number of fans who show up at the track flying Chevy flags or wearing sweatshirts that read I'D RATHER PUSH A FORD THAN DRIVE A CHEVY, it is vital to keep the companies happy and in racing. If it were professional football, they would call this parity.

Nascar got the jump on its rivals in that department. You can't go out and buy Emerson Fittipaldi's Indy car. You can admire his work but you can't empathize with him the way you can with Rusty Wallace in his Ford Taurus. Which is just one reason Nascar has left Indy car racing behind and why there is no Formula One race in the U.S. Nascar rules.

Nascar also tumbled early to the value of sponsorship. It was just too expensive to run a team on prize money and those cars were like billboards with 100,000 pairs of eyes locked on them for two or three hours every weekend. Ever since Andy Granatelli paid to put the STP logo on Richard Petty's car in 1972, Nascar has been marketing products on those 200-mph billboards. They carry the colors and logos of everything from snuff to laundry detergent, cable networks to breakfast cereals, hamburgers to beer. Half the players in the NFL and the NBA may wear the Nike swoosh, but the rednecks from Nascar were there first.

But most of all, Nascar understood that the deepest longing of its most hard-core fans was not for speed, not for beer-soaked afternoons, not for crashes. It was for stars. Idols. Heroes. Nascar was onto the celebrity culture of the late 20th century early and big. And in this regard the sport was lucky. Ever since the days when they still ran part of the Daytona race on the beach, there have been charismatic drivers. Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts, Junior Johnson and Lee Petty in the Fifties and Sixties. Cale Yarborough, Richard Petty, Donnie and Bobby Allison, David Pearson in the Sixties and Seventies. (continued on page 76)Nascar Rules(continued from page 68) Rusty Wallace, Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt in the Seventies and Eighties. Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarett in the Nineties. Drivers with ice water for blood and piano wire for nerves. Drivers who would walk away from a crash that looked like a certain bone crusher and say to reporters with a shrug, "Rear end got a little loose on me out there in turn three and before I knew it, I'd got myself upside down." Nascar fans are loyal to their heroes and buy millions of objects that bear their images. Dale Earnhardt sells more T-shirts than the Rolling Stones do.

In Nascar, the rule is that if everybody does what he is supposed to do, everybody will make money. Anybody who doesn't want to play ball can take a hike. This applies to the drivers--who always knew their place or, if they didn't, learned quick. When Curtis Turner, one of the great stars of Nascar, tried in 1961 to organize the drivers and affiliate them with the Teamsters, Bill France kicked him out of Nascar and kept him out for five years. Nascar made sure that the drivers gave it back to the fans, that they signed autographs, did interviews, made appearances and conducted themselves like sporting stars should. What the NBA has learned about stars--that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson could carry the sport into orbit and Michael Jordan could keep it there--Nascar learned 40 years ago. Which is why no one thinks of it as a pastime for dumb rednecks anymore. And why there are no Barry Bonds in Nascar.

Only two drivers have ever won the Winston Cup (the seasonal championship) seven times. The first was Richard Petty, who was merely the King. Nobody ever won more Nascar races than Petty, who finished with an even 200 victories. He took his last victory on July 4, 1984 at Daytona, with President Ronald Reagan in attendance. Reagan had a fine, almost preternatural feel for the American character and so it was appropriate for him to give the command "Gentlemen, start your engines" from Air Force One, on his way down from Washington for the race.

Richard Petty was the great driver and great personality of stock car racing, the charismatic country boy from Level Cross, North Carolina, the man with the piercing eyes and the dazzling smile who brought racing into the American mainstream.

Like Petty, Dale Earnhardt has won the Winston Cup seven times. In a poll of Nascar drivers, he was voted, hands down, the toughest man on the track. Earnhardt is Clint Eastwood to Petty's John Wayne. Where Richard Petty was the cheerful extrovert, always talking and smiling, Dale Earnhardt is the other side of the Southern male personality: stoic and laconic. He has a worn, pitted face. It is striking, especially around the hard-set eyes, but nobody is going to call him handsome. When he is asked, after a race, what happened when somebody tried to pass him and wound up bouncing off the wall and down into the infield, Earnhardt will say, "That's just racing."

End of interview.

Earnhardt won tough. Some fans--millions, in fact--may even say he won dirty. Plenty of people come out to the track just for the pleasure of booing him. All over the South you see front license plates with an image of a boy gleefully peeing on a race car that bears the number three: Earnhardt's car.

But while there were millions of fans who hated Dale Earnhardt, there were also plenty who loved to hate him. He was one of them, a high school dropout from Kannapolis, North Carolina, the son of the 1956 Nascar Sportsman champion. Young Dale grew up hard, if not exactly poor. In the early days, he drove dirt tracks for groceries. These days he is a one-man conglomerate. He owns a farm and lots of land and when he isn't racing he is hunting deer or fishing for bass. He is just about the perfect champion for Nascar. As long as Earnhardt was winning, and Nascar was growing, everything seemed to be just like it was supposed to. The way God had meant for it to be when he called that meeting in Daytona and put Bill France in charge of stock car racing.

Then things started changing. Lots of things, actually, but the one that fans noticed, that summed up all the other changes, was that Earnhardt was losing his iron grip. The man stomping on his fingers was a choirboy from either California or Indiana (depending on how charitable you wanted to be). A kid who spent his time away from the track playing computer games instead of sitting up in a tree stand, waiting for a shot at a buck.

At 26, Jeff Gordon has shaken up his sport like Tiger Woods rattled the foundations of the PGA tour. Gordon is nothing like the legendary Nascar drivers. They were rough, Gordon is smooth. He doesn't drink and couldn't say shit if he had a mouthful of it. There are no bootleggers or jail terms in Gordon's past; his father bought him a go-cart when he was five and he has been racing, and winning, ever since. Jeff Gordon is as clean and wholesome as a Boy Scout. In 1995, in only his third year of driving for Winston Cup, Gordon beat out Earnhardt for the championship. Earnhardt, 47, who called Gordon the Kid, suggested that when the awards banquet was held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York they would have to serve milk instead of champagne for Gordon. Gordon made sure they did and toasted Earnhardt with a glass of the white stuff.

In 1996 Terry Labonte won the cup with Gordon coming in second and Earnhardt fourth. Then, in 1997, the stars fell out of orbit. Gordon won everything, starting with Daytona. He won the second race too. And he won eight others, including Darlington and Charlotte, which gave him three of the four prestige races (the other is the Winston 500 at Talladega). That earned him a bonus Winston Million, which only one other driver has ever won. The fans booed him passionately, and he said, with customary cheerfulness, "They always boo you when you're winning. Right now, I'm winning."

Gordon is the new face of stock car racing. The fans who loved the old days, when racing was as raw as young whiskey, took to it like Merle Haggard fans at a Shania Twain concert.

But Gordon wasn't the only sign of how racing might be losing its soul. More of the drivers were coming from places like California. Worse, more of the races were being run in some of those places. They have racing in New Hampshire, at Loudon. And they had built big new tracks--Taj Mahals, they were--in Texas and California. The California track was a Roger Penske operation and, like everything he did, it was first-class. But Penske was a name from Indy cars.

Racing at those new, elegant tracks meant canceling races at the old short tracks in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, where the sport had its roots. The new tracks came with skyboxes, condominiums, jet strips and helicopter pads. There still were grandstands and there still were infields where old, reconfigured school buses and RVs parked wheel-to-wheel and the people who drove them set (concluded on page 84)Nascar Rules (continued from page 76) up grills and tents with coolers of beer, but racing was more about the people with the money. It was slicker and slicker, just like the music coming out of Nashville.

As if all that weren't bad enough, Dale Earnhardt was looking as though he might be washed up. The 1997 season started with the wreck at Daytona. At Darlington, he had actually passed out in his car, wrecking it. Some people wondered if it might be all over for the man in black. He didn't win a single race in 1997, extending his winless streak to an unimaginable 59 races.

After the last race of the season, at Atlanta, while the man he used to call the Kid and now referred to as Gordon danced on the roof of his car and sprayed champagne to celebrate his second Winston Cup, Earnhardt brought his beat-up Monte Carlo back to the garage area and parked it in front of the transporter. He took off his helmet and eased nimbly out of the window of the car. There were about five reporters there to ask questions. He looked not just tired, but depleted.

"Tires," Earnhardt answered when one reporter asked him what had happened when he lost it and hit the wall. After a few more routine questions and nonresponsive answers, someone asked him, "What's next?"

"Go back home," he said. "Work on the car and get back to winning."

Racing people believe in the cold logic of numbers--they measure everything from tire wear to the surface area on the spoiler--but they also believe in omens. And, hey, hadn't John Elway just gone and won a Super Bowl after all those years of coming in second? Elway was due, you know, and if anybody was ever due, Dale Earnhardt was due to win the Daytona 500.

He seemed to think so himself, and told reporters, "You saw that look in Elway's eyes? Well, look in my eyes."

Earnhardt's eyes looked focused and hard. But, then, they always did.

His car ran well. He took one of the 125-mile qualifiers and said winning felt good after a long dry time, even if there weren't any points in it. He'd start the race up front, in the second row. The Labonte brothers and Sterling Martin were in the first row. Gordon was back in the pack, at 29th, because of a bad pit stop in the qualifier, but nobody thought he'd brought a slow car to Daytona.

It was dark Sunday, February 15, with a threat of rain, when the flag was dropped. The wind was blowing hard enough to push the cars around and that made passing tougher than usual. Most fans were thinking that conditions were good for a wreck, one of those multicar collisions that can ruin a good run, even when a driver is due.

Earnhardt ran fast and mostly out front in the early part of the race. He was leading when he went in for his first pit stop and running fifth when he came back out on the track. He had a good crew and they made a clean, efficient stop. But Gordon's crew, called the Rainbow Warriors because of their team colors, did better and Gordon was in the lead. A little shiver of dread passed among the thousands of fans pulling for Earnhardt when the scanner picked up a transmission of Gordon's. He told his crew that the car was perfect and that he didn't think anyone on the track could beat him.

Things did not look good for the legion of Anybody But Gordon fans. Jeff Gordon was out front, pulling a four-car or five-car draft. The famous draft can be an equalizer at Daytona. The lead car breaks up the air, which makes it smoother for the following cars. But the lead car also gets a push from the vacuum. Everybody gets help. Two or three cars in a row, running nose to tail, can outrun a car hanging out on its own. But you have to know how to work it and when to leave the draft to make your move and how to get help from others to gang up on the leader. Using the draft, along with his aggressive instincts, craftily, Earnhardt blew by Gordon on lap 123 of a race that looked like it might go the whole 500 miles without a wreck (on the track, anyway; there were some problems in the pit).

Then, on lap 174, when it was time to go in for the final pit stop, Richard Petty's new driver, John Andretti, got into it with another car and the yellow caution flag went up. The lead cars dove into the pits and the fans, who were beginning to believe it might be the Intimidator's time, held their breath for the time it took to change all four tires and pour in a few gallons of gas.

Earnhardt kept driving low, shutting off the passing lane. As each lap went by, the cheering grew louder. With three laps to go, Gordon was in third, lined up to make his move. But he lost power, fell out of the draft and finished 16th. Bobby Labonte and Jeremy Mayfield now had the last shot at Earnhardt. They banged away at each other through the straight as Earnhardt passed a lapped car and shut the door with help from the third caution of the race. He won it by being too tough to pass.

The cheering went on through the victory lap and as Earnhardt took his car through the pit, where all the crews from other cars lined up to congratulate him and to slap the hand he extended through his car window. Nobody could remember seeing anything like it before.

No one left the track, except for a few of the people in the skyboxes who had private jets waiting and big deals to attend to. This was for the hard-core. At his press conference Earnhardt threw a stuffed animal into the crowd of reporters. It was, he said, the "damned monkey" he had finally gotten off his back. He said all the things about how this was the best moment of his career. And then he made it plain that this wasn't some isolated, sentimental victory. He was back for the whole package. "We're looking for that eighth championship," he said.

One week after Daytona, while some fans were still celebrating Daytona, they raced at Rockingham, North Carolina. It was a tough race, with lots of crashes and lots of yellows, and, after fighting with a car that wasn't set up right and coming back from way behind, the winner was Jeff Gordon.

There is a phrase they use in racing. When you take a car off the transporter and put it out on the track and everything is just right and you don't need to adjust the carburetor or the chassis or anything, when the car is running perfect, blowing the doors off the competition, then that car is dialed in. This year's season is looking like it is dialed in. They'll move on to Darlington, the toughest and oldest of the big tracks. To Bristol, the best of the short tracks. Talladega, the fastest of them all. Richmond. Michigan. Indy. Charlotte for 600 miles on the same day they run the Indy 500. Phoenix. Atlanta. Thirty-three races, with razor-close finishes, multicar crashes, gallons of sunscreen, tons of charcoaled meat, oceans of ice-cold beer and hundreds of thousands of fans who just can't get enough.

Fifty years in and this has to be the kind of year Bill France had in mind when he got the whole thing going and gave the world racing, American style.

In Nascar, the rule is that if everybody does what he is supposed to do, everybody will make money.

Passing was tougher than usual. Most fans were thinking that conditions were good for a wreck.