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

DNA. Whenever he speaks to young drivers at NASCAR's annual rookie seminar in Florida, he always recommends that they read Senator Jim Webb's book about the Scots-Irish,
Born Fighting.
"If they can understand what makes that culture different and interesting—the meanness in it, why fellas love to fight, how they 'turn red' and completely lose it—then they'll understand the South, country and western music, and stock-car racing," Wheeler said. Darrell Waltrip, who in his prime in the 1970s and 1980s won eleven times at Bristol, now was a broadcaster on Fox and owned a car dealership not too far from my home in Nashville. He told me there was no denying that the sport was "blue-collar, Middle-America, shotgun-in-the-back-window. That's our fan base. You can't make a dog meow."
    But even as NASCAR was making every effort to satisfy these "traditional" fans, it was also trying to become more inclusive and reach new demographics—to coax other sounds out of that figurative dog. Its Drive for Diversity program was developed six years ago to put more people of color behind the wheels of race cars, with the hopes that fans of more varied backgrounds would fill the grandstands once they saw drivers that looked like them. Currently no African Americans race in any of NASCAR's top series, and Wendell Scott remains the only black driver ever to win a Cup Series event, a feat he accomplished back in 1963. A woman, Danica Patrick, did come over to NASCAR from Indy racing this season, with great fanfare, but only to enter a handful of lower-level races. Apart from Juan Pablo Montoya, a Colombian and former Formula One driver, everyone in NASCAR's top Sprint Cup series was a white guy. Drive for Diversity included eleven young drivers, all of whom competed in the equivalent of Single-A and ten of whom trained together as part of an independently owned team called Revolution Racing. Marcus Jadotte, NASCAR's managing director of public affairs, didn't think there was any conflict between the several diversity efforts he headed up for NASCAR and the sport's attempts to return to its "roots." "NASCAR isn't rolling anything back," Jadotte asserted. "The language of 'boys, have at it' speaks solely to the rules on the racetrack. It's about increasing competitiveness and modifying driver behavior. It's not about who's watching in the stands."
    Max Siegel, a former sports and entertainment lawyer who once ran a major gospel label, is the primary owner of Revolution Racing. Siegel recently had the idea of turning the trials and triumphs of the drivers on his team into a reality television show, a series he sold to Black Entertainment Television. The first episodes of
Changing Lanes
appeared on BET this summer, and Siegel told me that a sneak preview shown to NASCAR executives, corporate sponsors, and groups of students brought in from historically black colleges was a hit. He knew that the sport's perception and history were huge obstacles, but he believed they could be overcome. When he was hired to be president of global operations at Dale Earnhardt, Inc., the race team owned by Dale Sr.'s widow, he was the organization's first black employee. "I started looking at the sport, saying, 'Okay, what do I have in common with these people? How do we break down barriers and move forward?' If you grew up in the trailer park or the projects, like me, there's a lot that's the same." I asked him whether I would be surprised by the amount of diversity at Bristol. He paused for a moment, as if picturing the track and its environs. "If your expectation is no people of color, and you look very carefully at the pit crews, the officials, and the fans, you'll see some participation. You might see more if you were at the tracks in Atlanta or Chicago."
    I did look carefully, and still I spotted far more Confederate flag bandanas at Bristol than black and Hispanic people. The speedway employed a hype man named Jose Castillo, whose job it was to talk