Haul A** and Turn Left by Monte Dutton Read Free Book Online Page A

penalty.”
    —RYAN NEWMAN

    “You hit the wall head-on; it hurts … Some of the younger guys haven’t experienced at yet”
    —JOE NEMECHEK

    “Yeah, it’s a big track, and it’s actually easier to drive around than Daytona. At Daytona, you actually have to drive a little bit. Here it feels like it’s 99 percent car. Like in the old days when they sent a chimp up to fly a rocket around the world. I feel like the chimp. I’m sitting in a really good car that was prepared by really good people with a good engine.”
    —BORIS SAID
    on Talladega Superspeedway

    “I don’t claim to have any answers or know the answers. We pay good money for good people to come in and build these things, but I can tell you when it don’t run, and I can tell you when it does run, and that’s my job and I’ve tried to do it.”
    —DALE EARNHARDT JR.

R ace fans are particularly susceptible to bad weather simply because so many of them camp out at and near the tracks.
    In the wee hours of April 30, 2005, a storm that was almost biblical in nature ripped through the grounds of Talladega Superspeedway. That fans endured it is perhaps the greatest testimony to their persistence and loyalty to the sport.
    Tents flooded. Red-clay pools overran the bottomlands. The high ground at Gettysburg was no more crucial than in the sprawling lots of Talladega, where shirtless fans emerged to play tackle football in the muck. Then they donned T-shirts that made them vaguely presentable, loaded their coolers with frosty beverages, and made the slow march to the track, where they got rained on some more and kept their chins up, hoping to see a Busch Series race. Then they sat in the rain some more, finally watching a race that ended in virtual darkness.
    Early in the morning, track president Grant Lynch ha reported there were no weather-related injuries among the fans, although that may have changed had he waited for the muddy football games to commence.
    A press release issued the week before the race had quoted Nextel Cup crew chief Greg Steadman as follows: “Outside of when it is actually falling and you are sitting around waiting to get on the track, rain just doesn’t affect Talladega.”
    Tell that to the fans.

N ASCAR fans are sensitive to the criticism that they go to the races for the crashes. They read stories in which someone who’s never been to a race preaches about how race fans just go to see wrecks. And … the point is?
    What’s the big deal? Don’t people go to football games to see hits? Don’t they go to baseball games to see home runs? It’s not rational. It’s just something that attracts us.
    It’s more complicated than what the sport’s detractors claim. The great majority of race fans are responsible, law-abiding citizens, and they certainly don’t want to see people get hurt or killed. If you’ve ever been at a track when a serious crash occurred and you’ve watched the reaction in the grandstands while waiting for the driver to climb out of his mangled automobile, then you know that fans don’t want to see someone hurt.
    They don’t want to see death. They want to see death defied. They don’t want to see injury. They want to see injury defied.
    Man, d’you see that? How’d that fool walk away from that wreck? Climb outta that? You can’t even tell it was a car! Unbelievable, man. I gotta see me some more of this.
    It’s what we are. It’s how we live. It’s what we do. We want to see death defied. It’s one of the reasons we go to the movies, buy popcorn, and sit right up front, munching away and drawing Coca-Cola through a straw, while spaceships and airplanes and robots and extraterrestrials blow things and one another up.
    The movies aren’t real, you say? Well, just what is the difference, in terms of the spectacle and what’s being processed by all those synapses and neurons, between live and Memorex?
    Racing is exciting. Spectacular passes are exciting. Wrecks are exciting.
    Why do we go to