NASCAR Crash Course

Twilight dissolves over the Alabama pinewoods. I wheel our third-rate motor home into the gravel parking lot outside Talladega Superspeedway and barrel toward where I imagine the infield to be–the site, legend has it, of an ancient Indian burial ground. It's also the biggest infield in all of NASCAR, a place whose atmosphere my friend Boudreaux, a great American poet, will later describe as a cross between Mardi Gras and a National Scout Jamboree, as administered by the Italian post office.

"That's the entrance there," says T.C., riding shotgun.

Behind us, Boudreaux, Googs and Norwood set down their beers and crane their necks for the first glimpse of track. We pass 400-odd RVs parked here outside turn three. In front of us is Michael Waltrip's hauler, a semi tricked out with a blue-and-yellow paint scheme similar to Waltrip's number 15 car.

"Who's 15?" Norwood asks.

"Deep down inside," Googs says, "we're all 15."

"Michael Waltrip," I say. I've been studying.

None of us has been to a race before. Until recently none of us had watched one on TV. None of us could fix a carburetor (I, for one, don't know where it is). Most of us have household incomes of more than $100,000. None of us votes Republican.

Two of us are Yankees, three Southerners. We're professors at Florida State University, except for T.C., who is married to one. Three of us are poets. Boudreaux, the most senior and accomplished of these, is from Baton Rouge and has volunteered to be our cook. Norwood, from Mississippi, used to date the runway-model sister of the Jenks twins (see the July/August issue of Playboy's College Girls Nude); now he directs our creative-writing program. The third poet, T.C., from New Hampshire, got his nickname on the way to Talladega–he served as navigator, and just as he was mock seriously claiming "total credit" for getting us there, he got us lost. Googs is an Atlanta native and a psychologist whose research on why people kill themselves has won him, among many other honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship. I'm a novelist from Ohio. I did spend the first seven years of my life in a trailer, but don't get the wrong idea. It was a double-wide.

Waltrip's hauler rolls across the track toward the distant garages.

"Boys," I say, "we're goin' in."

"You can't go in," says the guard.

"We've got credentials," I say.

"Nobody but drivers and crew can go in this way until six A.M. tomorrow."

The guard points. The parking lot reveals itself as a queue 400-odd RVs long. We take our rightful place at the rear. No one seems to be laughing at us, but for the rest of the night I don't see another vehicle make the same mistake we did.

"We're the stupidest people here," I say.

"A lot of the latest research on the human mind," Googs says, "is pretty counterintuitive."

We wait. We make friends with Bill, an oil-field worker from Galveston who has parked his luxurious fifth wheeler beside us. I can't see how he could afford this rig until I realize he lives in it. He has his family with him. "I'm a Gordon fan," he says, tugging his Jeff Gordon cap, "in a trailer full of Junior lovers."

"Counterintuitive," says T.C.

"Damn straight," Bill says.

"Uh-oh," Norwood says, standing over our tiny grill, where Boudreaux is making us some kick-ass marinated chicken. "My beer's on fire."

Everyone has heard that NASCAR is not just for rednecks anymore, but who believes that?

Sure, its top circuit, sponsored for years by a tobacco company, is now called the Nextel Cup Series. Of the top 50 drivers this year, only 16 are from the former Confederacy. Nine of those are near retirement.

NASCAR has studies showing that it's the fastest-growing sport among blacks and Latinos. That indicate its fans make slightly more money than Americans as a whole. That 40 percent of its fans are women. That they are distributed geographically about the same way all Americans are: 20 percent in the Northeast, 24 in the Midwest, 19 in the West, and 38 in the South. That its per-event TV ratings are second only to the NFL's.

NASCAR's second-largest TV market is New York City–which may soon host a race. A NASCAR race has as much economic impact on its host city as the Super Bowl. Except that most NASCAR cities host two races a year. Every year.

Who are these new fans? I didn't know a single one.

On a whim I typed NASCAR into Amazon.com and bought the first two books that came up: NASCAR for Dummies and Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul. I began watching the races on TV. When I told friends and colleagues I'd started following NASCAR, some said they'd been meaning to check it out and see what the fuss was all about. But the typical reaction, said with incredulity or revulsion, was "Why?"

It's just a bunch of cars going in a circle, they'd say. Dismissive turds.

"Ever been to a race?" I'd ask.

As Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul predicted, they'd always say no.

I'd tell them I was planning a trip to the biggest, fastest track: the 2.66-mile, 33-degree-banked oval at Talladega.

"Count me out," said a literary critic I work with. (I hadn't considered counting him in.) "I can't think of anything more miserable."

(continued on page 144)NASCAR(continued from page 86)

That may have been the moment I became a NASCAR fan.

•

At 5:30 Thursday morning, a wake-up horn sounds. A newspaper is delivered to our windshield wiper. Boudreaux makes a pot of coffee so strong my fillings pick up a satellite zydeco station.

A man named Scooter knocks on our door. "Inspection!"

We show him that we aren't hiding anyone in our tiny bathroom and produce our tickets. There are two; Boudreaux, Norwood and I have credentials.

"Got 'em on you?" Scooter looks like a runty linebacker newly launched on a lifetime of going to seed.

We tell him we have to pick them up, and as he probably knows, the credentials trailer doesn't open for three hours.

"Don't matter," Scooter says. "Nobody gets in without a ticket or a pass."

He says we can't even walk in, without the motor home, even with passes. Scooter tells us to stay put until he talks to somebody about our situation.

We ignore him. He never comes back.

T.C. rubs his hands in manly glee and climbs behind the wheel. He and Googs get to drive over the actual track to our space in the red zone. We wave. We nurse our coffee, homeless. A woman with the same job as Scooter tells us we'll be able to walk in after all (though the entrance she specifies will turn out to be the wrong one). We stand in a long line and finally get our credentials—Cold Passes, which get us into the garage and pits but only between races. A Hot Pass gets you in most anywhere, anytime. I'm not sure where the fabled Hard Card gets you, but I'm guessing that to glimpse such wonders brings the risk of being turned to stone.

As we walk around the outside of the speedway, we hear the day's first race car.

The sound!

TV can't capture it. That guttural, pistol-shot Doppler howl freezes us in our tracks. Then I practically break into a sprint to get inside.

At a tram outside the proper tunnel, we're told we can't get on, where-upon a driver boards it and takes us inside. We then have to transfer to a different tram. We ask three different track workers where the red zone is and get three different answers, all of them wrong. We circle the infield twice before we find it.

I see no one as confused as we are.

By now a dozen cars are buzzing around the track. They're from the Busch Series—more or less the triple-A circuit, except that a lot of the Nextel Cup drivers race in it too, mostly to go to school on the track. The Busch time trials are today. Tomorrow will be the Cup time trials. Saturday: the Busch race. Sunday: the main event.

We stare fascinated at the practice session, not trying to divine meaning from it—that's best left to the drivers, crew chiefs and squadrons of aerodynamic engineers—but just soaking up sound and sensation. TV also doesn't give you a clue about how fast these cars seem when you're only a few yards away.

•

When practice stops we amble down to the pits and witness a big reason NASCAR has become such a phenomenon.

The garages are swarming with hundreds of gape-mouthed, camera-toting fans stroking tires, stealing lug nuts and seeking autographs (stacks of free eight-by-10-inch trading cards sit outside each driver's hauler just for this purpose).

This, in effect, is the locker room for the cars. In other sports' locker rooms, ask for an autograph and mean people will seize your credentials. And heaven help you if you speak to someone doing any work at all, even stretching. But here, while crews clamber around fresh-from-the-track cars, idiots like me can come up to a uniformed mechanic and ask what a certain doohickey is. He'll answer politely.

Other than NASCAR's fan-friendliness, here, for (and from) the novice fan, are its charms:

•

It's simple. It's like chess: You couldn't master its intricacies in 10 lifetimes, but you can learn the basics in 10 minutes. Plus, each race has only 43 drivers, less than half of whom seem to stand a chance of winning. The drivers' careers tend be long, and career-ending injuries are surprisingly rare (though when they happen, they're doozies). Because there are so few personnel changes, following NASCAR closely is arguably less time-consuming than following one NFL team casually.

• It's American sports (and maybe America) in a nutshell. It's loud and fast, and it smells like money. It's both an individual sport and a team sport. It's more of a gladiator sport than football—the drivers are in helmets and fire suits, unknowable, genuinely risking death—yet still has the appeal of sports such as golf, tennis and post-steroidal baseball, in which the athletes look like slimmed-down versions of their fans. The cars are ostensibly models from Dodge, Ford and Chevy that regular schmucks can afford.

•

Dale Jr. He's news whether he wins or finishes last. He has almost single-handedly broadened the sport's appeal. (Give an assist to his father's ghost.) He's had success, but several active drivers have been more successful. His legions of fans love him because he seems so real, though his image may be as shop-built as his car. But hell, whose isn't?

•

Sunday naps. As with basketball, all you need to see is the fourth quarter. Like golf, it's on TV almost every weekend. But golf, restful as it is, can't compare to the televised white noise of race cars.

•

You know those crappy sport coats nice restaurants lend to underdressed slobs to embarrass them? That's our motor home. It boasts a huge decal on the side with a smiling family in a meadow and a toll-free number underneath.

Unlike most of the RVs here, ours has no sound system, no captain's chairs, no TV and no ladder so we can get up on the roof. The converted school buses—which also put us to shame, even the rusty ones—have big party decks assembled on their roofs, complete with railings. The whole infield experience is about being up on the roof.

As qualifying starts, an identical motor home pulls into the spot next to us. Five guys from Missouri who went to college together. One's in banking, one's in computers, two are in real estate, and one has just finished law school. "Nice RV," says the new lawyer, nodding our way.

I presume he's commiserating. "I can't believe there's no ladder," I say.

He nods. "Fuck that."

He and the banker produce two-by-fours and a saw. Ten minutes later, they've fabricated a ladder.

"Boys with blocks," Googs says. He's talking to all the guys at all the campsites, the ones with the margarita machines and outdoor plasma TVs, the ones tooling around on motorized bar stools and the ones firing up portable barbecue pits—everything here that comes in handy and provokes even minor pangs of envy. Or major ones, like what's provoked by the millions of dollars' worth of hot rods we're all here to see.

I watch our neighbors carrying chairs and beer up to their roof.

At least we have Boudreaux. He's grilling steaks.

The race cars are now zooming by one at a time, trying to qualify, their fine gradations of speed inscrutable to the novice. Even so, even from my lousy ground-level lawn chair, I'm transfixed. And also beer-buzzed.

There's a Boudreaux's Butt Paste car driven by Greg Sacks, who used to race regularly on both of the top circuits but who has been mostly absent since a 1998 wreck in Texas. The paste is for babies. Sacks clocks the 42nd-fastest time.

"So he's in?" our Boudreaux asks.

"So you'd think," I say.

"Don't 43 cars make the field?"

"They do." I explain that many drivers make the field automatically, either because of where their team is in the points standings or because they've won a cup series championship.

Boudreaux pokes at the steaks. He's done his homework too, but only what he can read in The New York Times, which covers NASCAR in the same defeated way it covers Christian publishing. "So because NASCAR is a privately held company owned by one family," he says, "they just make up the rules as they go?"

"I'm sure it's fair," I say, "if we understood the sport better."

"Or at least," Norwood says, "it's what the people want."

"If we understood the people better," Googs says and hands us each another beer.

•

Maybe you've been a NASCAR fan for years. You're a car guy. You're irked by the new fans who don't know NASCAR lore or what a crankshaft is. The sport's growth makes you feel affirmed yet invaded—not that you'd use a Dr. Phil word like affirmed. (Dr. Phil, by the way, once took a ride in Gordon's car and almost crapped his roomy gabardines. So I'm guessing he's a NASCAR fan.)

Maybe you go back to the days of bootlegger turned champ Junior Johnson (or to the 1965 article Tom Wolfe wrote about him for Esquire). The creation myths of rock and roll and stock car racing both feature men their mamas named Robert Johnson, whose otherworldly gifts emerged from the dark roads of the South. How can you be a fan of one loud American pastime and not the other? Resistance is futile.

Or maybe it was another ex-bootlegger who caught your imagination: Tim Flock, who not only has the best winning percentage in NASCAR history (21.2 percent) but also ran several races with a rhesus monkey along for the ride.

Maybe for you it goes back to the 1979 Daytona 500, the first to be televised live on a broadcast network. The race received terrific ratings, perhaps the product of a blizzard that socked the Northeast.

That, plus the spectacle of the race's aftermath.

Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough, dueling for the lead on the final lap, smashed into each other. Racing legends Richard Petty, A.J. Foyt and Darrell Waltrip, half a lap down, found themselves in a mile-long sprint for the win, which went to Petty. It was also Dale Earnhardt's first Daytona 500; he led 10 laps and finished eighth.

As Petty took the checkered flag—his sixth at Daytona—Allison and Yarborough leaped from their ruined cars, shouting at each other. Then Allison's brother Bobby pulled up and got out. Helmets and fists flew. Greatest day in NASCAR history.

Or maybe you tuned in for the 2001 Daytona 500, the first race of the first entirely televised season on the broadcast networks. Maybe you saw a popular victory—the first ever, in 463 starts, for gangly, lovable Michael Waltrip, in his first ride for team owner Dale Earnhardt— become the worst day in NASCAR history, when Earnhardt, in third behind his son and the streaking Waltrip, slammed into the wall on the final turn of the race and was killed instantly.

Maybe, like me, you weren't watching but were later bewildered by the scale of the grief Earnhardt's death triggered. You saw all the #3 stickers and the van murals and couldn't help being intrigued by what a strange thing had happened. Babe Ruth didn't end his career by dying on the field while playing in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series.

•

Friday would have been Earnhardt's 54th birthday. Talladega is the site of his final victory. He was 18th with five laps to go when he ran up the middle of a three-wide pack, rubbing steel and drafting his way to victory.

Dale Jr. has ruled this place of late. In the previous seven races here he's won five and finished second twice, including last fall, when Gordon won under a caution flag. Junior's army of outraged fans—and the related army of virulent Gordon haters—carpeted the track with trash.

Junior's been having his problems all season, though, especially in qualifying. The pole goes to Kevin Harvick; Gordon is second. Junior qualifies a dismal 36th.

•

We spend the better part of the day in the garages.

For a long time we tag along with a crew from EA Sports, the video game company, there to film little inserts to drop into a new game—real two- or three-lap situations that put players behind the wheel to try to equal or improve on a driver's performance, with advice from the real racers they're pretending to be. The drivers are enthusiastic interviewees because their questioner is Kenny Wallace, a journeyman driver known more to casual fans as an engaging host on the Speed Channel, and because the game is so accurate in its details that a great many drivers use it as a training tool.

Drafting along in EA's slipstream, we even get into the private RV lot, where Wallace has come to interview Greg Biffle. The lugubrious Biffle has two sweet-tempered boxers that look a lot like him. At the age of 36 Biffle is having his breakout year, with a chance to win every Sunday for the whole season, too.

"When you gonna spend the million five?" Wallace points at Biffle's motor home, teasing him about going rock star on all their asses.

"Never," Biffle says.

Wallace laughs. "Good for you," he says, then interviews him about all the things he did to hold off "a hard-charging Jimmie Johnson" in a race earlier this year.

Outside Waltrip's hauler, Waltrip and Wallace put on a tall guy–short guy comedy routine, and the anticipated video game player is asked if he can "change history" and—unlike Waltrip's result last week—outduel Kurt Busch and win the race in Phoenix. Waltrip looks at the camera, pretends to be near tears and mouths, "Please!"

We get to the alley behind Gordon's hauler. He steps outside only when he's assured that people are blocking him from view. Still, a mob gathers. Gordon is the only racer who has sat in for Regis Philbin and hosted Saturday Night Live. He's tiny, built more like a poet than my poet friends. As he's finishing, two imperial storm troopers duck into his hauler. "Gordon's on the dark side!" yells a man in a #8 hat.

"Hey, he's got Yoda on his hood," a Gordon fan retorts. Which is true for this race—the new Star Wars opens in a few weeks. "Yoda's got the Force with him."

"Yoda's a fag," says the Junior fan.

As Googs said when we drove onto the parking lot, deep down inside, we're all 15.

•

Talladega is the fastest track in NASCAR, though we won't know how fast. In 1988, after the lap record reached 212.809 miles an hour and Bobby Allison brutally crashed into a retaining fence, NASCAR began putting a restrictor plate between the carburetor and the intake to limit the cars' horsepower—and with it, the chances that they'll sail like missiles into the grandstands.

Because of the plates the cars are almost identically fast, which means racing here is about drafting. Drivers can catch or lose a slipstream and gain or drop 10 places in the blink of an eye.

Toward the end of such races, as drivers gun for the win, someone almost inevitably makes a tiny mistake, moving an inch beyond the line he should be driving within, and there comes a massive, horrible pileup known as the Big One. No one will say—even when very drunk—that he comes to see the Big One, but when a dozen or so drivers bite it, nobody turns away.

•

I am admiring strangers' decks. I give out low, envious whistles. These men are only too happy to give me a look-see.

"Ever seen the Big One?" one bus owner asks me.

"It's my first time," I say.

He shakes his head. "Go on up," he says.

The paint scheme replicates that of Dale Jr.'s car. The man tells me—as every bus owner does—about the auction where he got his bus and the things he's done to trick it out.

"It's a work in progress," he says. Every bus guy says that, too.

Up top, I marvel at the view. This, as usual, gets me an invitation to come back and watch the race from here. "I may take you up on that," I say, intending to.

But back at our campsite T.C. and Norwood are on the roof of the rental next door. On its other side is a motor home full of federal agents. Googs and Boudreaux have bonded with them. They have two huge satellite-fed TVs on a table outside, one tuned to a Braves game, the other to the NBA playoffs.

It's as if a switch were thrown and everyone had become very special new friends.

Boudreaux passes out Dominican cigars. Everybody takes one.

The shaved-headed alpha male among the agents points out a table laden with food and several coolers full of beer. "You want something, take it." He loops a muscled arm around me. "Don't ask. It'll piss me off if you ask. Just take."

"They're going to let us use their ladder!" Norwood calls down.

The guys from Missouri nod in agreement. We'll always have a buddy around to move it back and forth.

At a certain point we rise, lock up and move en masse to Talladega Boulevard—the access road that runs lengthwise through the middle of die infield—where the real party supposedly is.

It's a low-rent Bourbon Street with a similar 80-to-20 ratio of gawkers to exhibitionists. Unless flashing is the only way you're able to see in-person breasts for free and you're therefore willing to elbow through a mass of bead-wielding drunken men, this is more trouble than it's worth. But, you know, Godspeed and all that.

One question, though. Men with cameras are everywhere. The web sports a zillion Mardi Gras and spring-break flashing sites, but how can none be devoted to NASCAR infields? Is it because NASCAR is a privately held company that somehow makes up the rules for this, too?

•

Saturday we suffer torrential rains and 40-mile-an-hour winds—only a fifth as fast as the cars but plenty stiff when you're cowering inside tents and RVs, recalling images of flattened trailer parks.

We distract ourselves with beer and the delicious pasta dish Boudreaux whips up. Googs reads a biography of Faulkner. I'm reading an oral history of porn.

"Shitter's full!" says T.C., doing his best Cousin Eddie.

"Old black water, keep on rollin'," Norwood sings.

Our water and sewer tanks are tiny. We've been using public toilets and taking a tram to the cinder-block building where the unheated showers are. But die storm has kept us in.

The infield is a little city, rain or shine. Women come by pulling red wagons full of daily newspapers. ATVs tow carts stacked high with bags of ice. Flatbed pickups with thousand-gallon tanks of potable water can fill you up for $20. Happily, a diesel honey wagon, also for $20, relieves us of both our gray water and our black water.

Late in the day the rain stops, and the Busch race takes place after all. The first eight laps are run under the yellow to dry the track.

"That track's not dry," Norwood says as the race goes green. "This can't be safe."

A few laps later, while I'm looking through my binoculars at the cars in turn one, my friends slap me on the shoulder, and I look up to see the aftershocks of Big One, a 16-car pileup in turn one.

The race is stopped for about 20 more minutes.

When it resumes, one of the severely damaged cars, driven by Martin Truex Jr., goes on to win the race. It's a popular victory; Truex isn't just last year's Busch champion but also Dale Jr.'s boon pal.

After the race we wander down to Talladega Boulevard. Bless the hearts and First Amendment rights of every party animal who chooses to dress like a penis and beg strangers to let the puppies breathe, but before long I decide to go see how the other half lives. I head toward turn three, over the track and outside to the vast acres of satellite campground.

The scene is an homage to decamped Confederate troops on liberty (well, except for the presence of women, canned beer, horseless carriages and Skynyrd tunes). Thousands of hot, filthy, sopping-wet true believers huddle around bonfires, too drunk to know how miserable they are and, even if they do know, too committed to care.

Men in flooded campsites race empty coolers across shallow ponds. Bets are laid, but no one makes it across.

•

Sunday is a perfect day for racing, or so I hear someone say on the scanner I've rented. It comes with big dorky headphones—just like the crew chiefs wear!

On TV you see a shot of the race and you don't particularly question it. If it's a lousy shot, moments later there's a replay of what you missed. But to be at a race, at least for the first time, is to feel at all times as though you're looking at the wrong thing. Wherever you're standing, whatever you're watching—however compelling it is—you are dead certain there's something to see or do that's better.

For example, as the fans are herded out of the pits, I return to our motor home to haul provisions to the roof. Boudreaux, however, ducks into the Weber grill hospitality tent, where he finds himself standing next to the winningest driver of all time, Richard Petty. Petty tells Boudreaux to get himself a T-bone. "Is that okay?" Boudreaux asks.

Petty shakes his head. "But nobody'll say nothin'." Petty walks off eating a medium-well steak with his bare hands.

I could have been there.

The scanner won't fix problems like that, but it may keep me from looking the wrong way when the Big One comes. For about 50 bucks I'm able to hear the radio broadcast, the TV feed and the radio transmissions of every driver in the race. I don't have to listen to what the Man wants me to either. The choice is mine, all mine!

It's hard to imagine why Major League Baseball is too stupid to put microphones on the managers and let the fans hear what gets said. Scramble the feed to the other dugout if need be, but let the fans in on the game! Or the NFL,the fan-unfriendliest of them all—why doesn't the No Fun League let us hear the plays called? I refuse to believe it's impossible. Other sports just don't love you the way NASCAR does.

•

By about one, most of us are so awash in anticipation (tempered by the metaphysics of ice-cold Sunday-morning beer) that when Miss America butchers the national anthem nobody boos. In his invocation a racetrack preacher tells us the Big One is coming.

Then Adam Sandler, the grand marshal, overemotes his command for the gentlemen to start their engines and says he's off to get himself a turkey leg.

Soon the pace laps start.

Watching on TV, I'd thought the only reason to have more than one pace lap was to create a commercial for the pace car. But in person, each time the cars roll by in formation, our hearts beat faster. After the third one my building desire to unleash the horsepower circling around me is so strong that I'd have used it for pure evil.

The green flag comes out, and presumably the crowd roars. I can't hear it. It's the biggest crowd I've ever been in, but the throaty rebel yells of 155,000 race fans are no match for the 30,000-horse-power thunder of 43 race cars, a sound that drills into you and fills a place in the white-hot center of your being. For 60 percent of NASCAR fans, that place is up inside you, due north of your nut sack.

With Yoda's lightsaber leading the way, Gordon takes the lead, pulling the tightly bunched pack behind him,as the engineer of an unstable, three-wide, 14-deep, 190-mile-an-hour about-to-blow locomotive.

Soon I'm scanning from driver to driver so compulsively that surely madness will follow me the rest of my days. I feel at all times as if I'm listening to the wrong thing, but I'm too far behind the velvet rope, too happy, to care.

The sudden reversals of fortune caused by restrictor-plate racing reveal themselves early. By lap nine Brian Vickers has caught a seam and shot from 37th to ninth. By the 11th I hear Kevin Harvick, who started on the pole, tell his people he needs to "get some air"—which apparently means the car is running hot and needs to be out of traffic—which he accomplishes by slipping all the way back to last place. Eighteen laps later he's fighting his way toward the lead.

Dale Jr. also charges up through the pack and by lap 47 is battling Jimmie Johnson for second place. Tony Stewart comes up and chivalrously rams into the back of Junior's car, bump-drafting him past Johnson and Gordon. On hundreds of metal roofs, thousands of Junior's red-clad fans go ape shit. Gordon retakes the lead seconds later. Wadded-up Bud cans sail skyward from the frustrated hands of the Dale Jr. faithful. Norwood uses the distraction as cover and, so as not to trouble anyone to move the ladder our way, quietly urinates into a Bud bottle. By the time he's finished, Junior has fallen to 35th.

Gordon has mild tire woes, and Harvick takes the lead. Junior seizes on a couple of good grooves and a great pit stop and on lap 90 passes Harvick. Two laps later Gordon's back in front.

Then, on turn one of lap 132—racing four-wide smack-dab in the middle of the lead pack, dead-bang in my line of vision—I see Dale Jr. bump Mike Wallace's car from behind, swerve almost imperceptibly and bam: It's the Big One.

In an eyeblink, 25 cars—more than half the field—plow into one another, sending up plumes of acrid white smoke followed by an eerie postcrash relative silence. Crippled cars slither down the high-banked track toward the muddy infield grass like wounded animals looking for a shady place to die. Sirenless ambulances rush to the scene. A Fox News helicopter hovers menacingly over Alabama's newest junkyard.

We're looking at 2 million, maybe 3 million bucks' worth of damage.

Ten drivers are taken to the infield hospital.

"Shit," Norwood says.

"Freshly farted fucking sons of whores," Boudreaux says.

"Shit," Norwood marvels, laughing the way you do when you narrowly miss being in a wreck yourself. He's a fan now too; I can tell.

NASCAR stops the race. Crews begin removing the cars and debris and making battlefield repairs to the energy-absorbing outer wall.

I ask Googs if he's seen enough racing to have an opinion about the relationship between people who kill themselves and those who drive these cars.

Googs purses his lips, then takes a long pull from his Natural Light. "NASCAR drivers and people who die by suicide are the same," he says, "in that they've both developed the ability to stare down death. Suicidal people do it with previous, less serious self-injury. Drivers do it by driving. Suicidal people develop that ability because they want to use it; they feel so much a burden on others that they want to die. The drivers develop the same ability, but they do it for fun and of necessity. They develop it because they don't want to die."

On an official NASCAR channel I hear that none of the drivers is hurt.

After a 42-minute delay the green flag comes out. Soon Gordon's in front again. On lap 182 Waltrip and Harvick draft their way past Gordon, who's hung out to dry and seems in danger of falling back into the pack. I dial up his channel. His crew chief says there's plenty of time. Gordon marvels at how good his car is. The next time it goes past me it's a fucking bullet.

On turn three Gordon ducks low around Harvick and immediately swerves high toward the wall and around Waltrip.

He'll lead the rest of the way, a victory sealed on lap 186 when, coming out of turn two, a Less Big One KOs Gordon's most serious challengers, including Johnson, Harvick and Dale Jr., who seems to have caused it. After the race I listen on my headset as he calls Johnson an idiot and blames him for both big crashes.

An eventful race but nothing compared with one in 1973, when racing legend Bobby Isaac swung his car into the pits while leading the race and, with tears in his eyes, told his crew chief to find another driver. A quiet and apparently sane man, Isaac claimed he'd I heard voices. "Get out of the car," the I voices said. Isaac obeyed. He never said the voices were from the Indian burial ground, but he was part Native American, and when he wouldn't talk about it, others did. He never returned to Talladega.

Unlike us. By the time I take back the scanner my pals are getting ready to queue up on Talladega Boulevard, eating Boudreaux's chili and waiting for the track to cool down so we can leave. But they're already talking about coming back in October, when with any luck some other new fans will assume the roles of the stupidest people here.