The Best American Travel Writing 2011 by Sloane Crosley Read Free Book Online Page A

straightaways, slung us down for an extra burst of speed. As we screeched around in that tight oval, I struggled just to remain seated upright. The exertions of the engine and the shifting gears made it sound as though the undercarriage was being torn apart. I could see almost nothing of the track in front of us, nor could I see the stands looming overhead, nor the pit, nor the infield. The only thing I had a clear view of from my backseat perch was the wall to my right, which, with every turn, leaped out, a concrete blur only inches from the door.
    Bodine spoke casually into the microphone, narrating his actions for Lang while fiddling with a transmitter. "Here's a hard brake to get into turn one. Put the throttle down in the middle of one and two. Now we're accelerating down the back straightaway."
    Unlike athletes in other professional sports, a NASCAR driver is blessed with no conspicuous physical gifts—neither great height nor strength nor explosive quickness. The thing he does so well most of us do every day on highways and back roads. The car he drives even looks like a sedan, like the cars we drive. So it's less of a stretch for fans to imagine that they could be a race car driver than, say, a guard for the Chicago Bulls or an Olympic gymnast. And over the years, the diehards regularly showed up or tuned in because of that easy identification with the drivers, that alluring mix of reverence and familiarity. Richard Petty, known as "The King," would sign autographs for hours and was said to have the "common touch." Dale Earnhardt Sr., for all his success as a driver and a brand, was always thought of as working class. By contrast, a recent HBO documentary meant to reveal the real Jimmie Johnson, who has now won the sport's top prize an unprecedented four straight years, showed him flying on his private jet, drinking healthy smoothies, and hanging with his wife, a former model, in the kitchen of their largely vacant mega-mansion.
    Between turns one and two, to demonstrate how our speed had offset the gravitational effects of the track's steep banking, Bodine brought the car to a full stop.
    "I'm standing on my head! I'm falling out of my seat belt here!" Claire B. Lang said, her voice rising animatedly at the end of each word. Instinctively I leaned in the opposite direction, as if to keep us from tipping over. After Bodine got the Ford whipping around the track again, he reminded us that in a race forty-two other cars would be fighting us for position. One of the most repeated sayings around NASCAR tracks, a phrase coined in the 1990 Tom Cruise film
Days of Thunder
, is "rubbin' is racin'." Although specially designed for high speeds, stock cars have fenders and are meant to "trade paint." Bodine said to try to imagine those other cars bumping and pushing us around a bit. Although I'd like to say that I was able to envision myself as a badass NASCAR driver, that the only thing separating Brett Bodine and me was where we sat in the Mustang, I couldn't entertain the thought of a single car driving within twenty feet of us—not without seizing up.
    Â 
    NASCAR has always been defined by its wrecks, by thrown helmets and thrown fists. Indeed, NASCAR's wider popularity beyond the South and Midwest can be traced to a fistfight at the conclusion of the 1979 Daytona 500 between Cale Yarborough and the Allison brothers, Donnie and Bobby, that was caught live on national television. And the crash that killed Dale Earnhardt Sr., on the very last turn of the 2001 Daytona race, not only ushered in NASCAR's more stringent safety regulations but also propelled the sport into pop culture ubiquity. With all the added attention, new fans flocked to NASCAR, chasing an icon and an experience that were already gone.
    Humpy Wheeler, one of NASCAR's most illustrious promoters and recently the president of Charlotte Motor Speedway, explained to me that this craving for violence was act ually embedded in NASCAR's backwoods Southern