NASCAR: Babes, Bordeaux & Billy Bobs

Forget the race, creed and color thing. There is no sharper distinction among the citizens of the world than this: those who care passionately about cars and those who barely know a Buick from a bagel. Just so you know up front, they picked the wrong guy to write this story. Did not take auto shop in high school, never bought a can of STP, never watched a car race. And here I am on my way to Tennessee for the first of three NASCAR races in four weeks. The mission is to meet Jeff Gordon, the 27-year-old stock-car-racing superstar who sells everything from toothpaste to soft drinks on national television, and find out why so many racing fans loathe him.

Also, to answer one of the great riddles of our time: What’s the big deal with racing? Essentially, 40 extremely mobile billboards circle a track for three hours, driven by men in jumpsuits that make bowling apparel look sharp. And yet car racing continues to be the hottest, fastest-growing sport in America, generating $2 billion in revenues and drawing gazillions in sponsorship money. In TV ratings, NASCAR racing blows away every major sport but pro football. With California-born Gordon as its poster boy, NASCAR is expanding beyond its Southeastern roots, going after the wine-and-cheese crowd, and even Donald Trump wants to get in on it. He plans to build a speedway near New York City, where there’s a word for people who tailgate at high speeds: cabbies.

FOOD CITY 500 Bristol, Tenn.

My biggest fear is that I won’t be able to speak the language. Gordon is going to say something about a carburetor adjustment, and I’ll remember going to the auto-parts store for my father and being asked questions that made me feel like the dumb kid in class. How was I supposed to know what size the engine was or that “medium” wasn’t an acceptable response?

The first surprise in Bristol is the Woodstock-on-wheels scene. Race fans converge from hundreds of miles away, arriving in motor homes as early as Thursday for parties, concerts, qualifying rounds and a junior-circuit Saturday race called the Busch Series. The local newspaper estimates that race fans will drop nearly $70 million into local pockets, and the money starts flowing at a Friday-night fund raiser for local children’s charities. About 300 people have come to eyeball their racing heroes and bid on auction items like hats, uniforms and a Jeff Gordon jacket.

The evening allows me my first glimpse of Gordon and gives me my first hard evidence that racing fans don’t come within 500 miles of normal. These may even be the same people who think Elvis is alive. “Oh, my God!” a woman quivers when she spots Gordon in a shower of camera flashes. (Women tend to like him more than men, many of whose development seems to have stalled in the towel-snapping phase. Gordon isn’t manly enough to be their spiritual leader.) “He’s so handsome.”

He’s got a twinkle in his eye too. But at 5 ft. 7 in., he looks like a stray from the Mickey Mouse Club. He’s kind of bashful and aw-shucks looking when bidding begins on his jacket, a rainbow-colored affair bearing the name of his main sponsor–DuPont automotive finishes. Bidding starts at $500 and ends at $10,000, and I am stunned. Not by the price but by the idea that someone might leave the house wearing such a thing.

Nearly every Sunday from February through November, 40-some drivers climb into their cars and drive just like those cabbies for 500 miles, stopping only for major accidents or if the engine spits out a part. In 33 races last year, Gordon won 13 times, tying a record set by Richard Petty, who retired in 1992 but is still known as “the King.” They keep standings from race to race, and Gordon has won driver of the year three of the past four years, the youngest ever to win three times. His earnings last year from race winnings, sponsorship deals and the sale of everything from hats to toy cars were $14 million.

For this, he is appropriately loved and hated, as are all the rich and famous. We’ll get to the hate part. As for the love, it means this: from the moment he arrives at a track on Thursday until the moment he leaves on Sunday, he cannot take two steps without drawing Billy Graham-style crowds. People want to touch him, be photographed with him, have him sign their hats, their shirts, their children.

The amazing thing about this scene is that fans can get so close. It’s the equivalent of walking on the field at Yankee Stadium during batting practice and asking Derek Jeter if he wouldn’t mind posing for a photo with your three kids. DuPont might invite a few hundred car dealers, body-shop owners and other clients to a race, and they’ll all get special access. Yet Gordon will climb out of his car after a practice run, and a growing swarm will be waiting to walk him to his trailer. Some of them will tug at him and shove things under his nose for autographs. In my first brief chat with Gordon, I ask if he’s ever tempted to flick backhands at the jackals. “No,” he says politely. “It’s just part of the job.”

Not that there isn’t some grumbling among drivers. “These are the best of times and the worst of times,” says Darrell Waltrip, a former champion who’s hanging on at age 52 because the popularity and the money make it too hard to leave. “But it used to be just you and the race car. Now it’s too big a business, and everybody wants a bigger piece of your time.” In the old days, says Waltrip, “Richard Petty used to be able to win a race and sit up on the wall for an hour, sign all the autographs and go home. You sit up on that wall now, you’ll get killed.” Bill France, whose father started NASCAR 51 years ago, puts it this way: “We have the world’s largest locker room.”

Accessibility has always been part of the marketing plan, and you can begin to see the simple genius of it. These are souped-up replicas of real Pontiacs, Fords and Chevys–not open-wheel, Indy-type cars–and nearly everyone in America has a car. Nearly everyone has driven too fast too. At a NASCAR race, you can meet someone who gets paid stupid money to drive too fast. And chances are, he won’t cry about his multimillion-dollar contract or go on strike, both of which have turned off fans of other sports. If a NASCAR driver doesn’t keep his public happy, no sponsor will back him. And if he doesn’t have big-time backing (it costs up to $10 million a year to keep a racing team going), he isn’t going to win.

Blood drained from the faces of baseball purists earlier this year when someone suggested putting advertising on the sleeves of players’ jerseys. But NASCAR covers every square inch of a driver’s uniform and is proud of it. The right side of Gordon’s Chevrolet is plastered with more than 40 logos, and fans say they go out of their way to buy the sponsors’ products.

On race day in Bristol, 120,000 fans walk into the stadium wearing roughly half a million racing-related logos. The Winston people are giving away cigarettes. The cars are burning fossil fuel. The noise is obscene. There’s a Remington firearms car, a Winston No Bull car, a Skoal car. The smells of raw horsepower, burned rubber and expectorated snuff are cooked by a wicked sun.

This is the most unapologetic, politically incorrect, crassly American spectacle I’ve witnessed since my last trip to Vegas.

I’m beginning to see the appeal.

Unfortunately, I still don’t know the first thing about racing. What’s the driver got to do with it, for one thing? Isn’t it the car that wins? Ray Evernham, Gordon’s crew chief, helps me out a little. Every track is different, so the preparation of the car, and the strategy, changes from week to week. During a race, he and Gordon talk by radio. A half-pound of air pressure in one tire, added or subtracted during a pit stop, can tighten handling and make the difference between winning and losing.

“Jeff has a good car and a good crew, which is a big part of his success,” Evernham says. “But he also has something extra, like Michael Jordan and Mickey Mantle had. He has a different sense of time than you and I. He can slow the race down in his mind, see things coming around and react before the next guy.” The key in a race, Gordon says, isn’t to drop the hammer “but to tell yourself to be calm, be calm, be calm. And just have a lot of patience to let the race unfold.”

At the Daytona 500 earlier this year, the entire field tried to gang-tackle him, deliberately closing off the passing lane, so to speak. But near the end of the race, Gordon sensed his moment and pulled a spectacular stunt, diving down off a banked turn to the apron of the track to limbo around two other cars. He won with Dale Earnhardt as close to his bumper as a license plate. Gordon says he drives without fear and that there is a point in every race when “desire overrides everything, and if you really want it badly, special things happen.”

Nothing special happens to Gordon in Bristol. He gets into a minor wreck and finishes in sixth place, with his car literally duct-taped together. The week after that, in Goody’s 500 in Martinsville, Va., he stays close enough to win but finishes a frustrating third. For the first time in four years, race fans who despise him are smiling.

My notion that the drivers’ 750-h.p. days at the track would be followed by even faster nights ends up a wreck too. There’s a traveling ministry on the NASCAR circuit, and drivers and their families attend Sunday services in a makeshift chapel near the pits. Gordon and his wife Brooke, a former Miss Winston, are often the first two people at Saturday-night Bible study. On race day she’ll give him a verse from Scripture, and he’ll tape it to his steering wheel.

When drivers aren’t praying, they’re fasting. Who knew they were an offshoot of the Franciscan monks? As I’m talking to Kyle Petty, the ponytailed shaman among NASCAR drivers, he goes into the refrigerator of his trailer for an energy bar and makes sure it has the right ratio of protein to carbohydrates. “In the trailer park where all the drivers live in their coaches, if you’re out of skim milk or tuna, you know what door to knock on, because you know who’s on what diet.”

Mark Martin, the health freak who got other drivers to hire personal trainers to keep up with him, lifts weights at 5:45 every morning. “I used to drink too much, and I lived on cheeseburgers and French fries. But the new generation of race-car drivers is going to have to be athletic.” On a hot day, a driver can start to fade at 400 miles. “Being in shape could make the difference not only between first or second place but between living and dying,” Martin says.

If there is a traditionalist left in racing, it has to be Earnhardt, whose nickname is the Intimidator. I tell him Martin’s pre-race meal is tuna with brown mustard on wheat bread. If Earnhardt says he eats the same thing, I’m going to cover golf. “My pre-race meal is steak and potatoes,” Earnhardt says. “And when Mark’s f______ tuna runs out on him at 400 miles, my steak will just be kicking in.”

I’ll give the story another week.

DIEHARD 500 Talladega, Ala.

It has not come to the attention of eastern Alabama that the Civil War ended. The track infield has so many Confederate flags flying that it looks like a Klan picnic. When NASCAR senior vice president Brian France tells potential sponsors that “our fans are much savvier than people give them credit for,” it is to counter this very sight. NASCAR is apoplectic at the thought of racing’s being labeled a racist sport, and it’s desperate to escape an image of the race fan as a redneck with his gut hanging out.

Speaking of which:

“This is a white man’s sport,” a 38-year-old landscaper from Auburn, Ala., tells me. “Blacks have taken over all the other sports. Not that I have anything against the blacks.”

“I do,” says an 18-year-old friend who came to the racetrack in a converted bus and erected not one but two Confederate flags atop it.

“But how often do you hear about a white guy involved with drugs or something like Darryl Strawberry?” the landscaper goes on. O.K., we won’t remind him about the Packers’ Brett Favre–the celebrity starter for the Daytona 500 who had to beat a prescription-drug addiction before he beat the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

NASCAR likens car racing to ice hockey in its appeal–mostly white, yes, but diversifying. NASCAR has a handful of black crew members and drivers, and one team is owned by basketball legend Julius Erving and former pro-football star Joe Washington. “Whether you’re selling soft drinks, snack foods or a sport, all good marketers know it is important for every single person to want to buy their product,” says France. “It is no different for us.”

The track at Talladega is so big–2.66 miles–that between 20,000 and 30,000 fans can set up their campers on the infield and watch the race from there. It’s like a small city, with good neighborhoods and bad. Guys with pickups spin doughnuts in the mud, then stand an Ellie May or a Daisy up in the back and drive slowly through cheering throngs. When the girl collects enough Mardi Gras beads from slobbering Bubbas, she answers their obscene chant with a lift of her shirt. Fights break out. Sirens wail. It’s like spring break, except nobody came from college.

There’s even a gated community called the Front Runners Club, which charges $500 per motor-home parking space. It’s in this section that I find two black guys and tell them they must have taken a wrong turn, because racing is a white man’s sport. Cloyd Nightingale, 46, turns to his friend Johnny Hill, 52, and they bust out laughing. “It’s a white man’s sport,” Nightingale repeats to his friend. They’re both truck drivers from Memphis, Tenn., and big race fans. “The flags don’t bother us,” says Hill. “It’s not like the world is any different here than it is at home, in school, at the office.” Says Nightingale: “Tell them black people love racing too.”

So what’s not to like about Jeff Gordon? “He kind of looks gay,” says Doris O’Bryant while selling $10 Fans Against Gordon T shirts outside the Talladega racetrack. The acronym is like something of an inside joke, and one suspects the wink it produces leads to an inevitable flatulence joke or two.

The T shirt has a little sketch of Gordon’s car upside down and the words THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. Just up the road, Doris’ husband Todd is making a sale to a Missouri man who says, “He’s a little cocky, but he’s from the north.”

And that is clearly a big part of it. NASCAR didn’t go national until a Yankee became its star, and resentment is the breeze that keeps those rebel flags flying. “I’m not one of those redneck hillbillies,” Todd O’Bryant says. “I just think Gordon needs to be a little more down to earth.”

The object of this scorn walks into his trailer, where I’m waiting to put a magnifying glass on him, and says, “Hey, what’s up?” in a slight Midwestern drawl. Gordon grew up in California, but his parents moved him to Indiana at 14 because he’d been racing midget cars since he was a five-year-old, and there was more action in Indiana.

I tell him I saw people selling Fans Against Gordon T shirts outside the stadium and stopped to talk to them, and he’s curious to hear what they had to say. All the usual stuff, I tell him. He’s too pretty for NASCAR. He’s from the north. He’s rich. He always wins. He married a gorgeous woman. If there is a more American urge than to want everything, it’s to take down the guy who gets it. “All I can do is try to earn their respect by being who I am and doing what I do,” Gordon says.

Good Lord, I want to grab this kid and shake him, mess up his hair, maybe get him to take up cussing. He admits, in the course of 90 minutes of insufferable evenhandedness, that the pressure, obligations and spotlight are overwhelming. “But if you had said, ‘Hey, you’re never going to have a personal life; you’re constantly going to be traveling…talking to sponsors and signing autographs every day for the rest of your career,’ I think I’d still say, ‘O.K., I’ll take it.'”

You hear some private mutterings from other drivers about Gordon’s success and about how all the money translates into a better car, a bigger advantage and ever more exposure. “But when Jeff goes on the Letterman show, he takes all of us with him,” Petty says. “His success has been great for NASCAR and every one of us.”

Gordon sometimes wishes he’d gone to college or that he’d had time to make closer friends. But he’s trading nothing because he has the only two things he wants: time with Brooke, who travels with him to every race, and time behind the wheel. “Even when I’m in a street car, driving down the road, it’s like I’m in a race car. Not speedwise. It’s just that I’m constantly paying total attention to everything around me, constantly clocking myself from one point to the next.”

The one clue to what’s under Gordon’s hood is the story of his 1994 split from his mother and the man who raised him and introduced him to racing. Carol and John Bickford, Gordon’s mother and stepfather, say they still don’t know exactly what happened. But to Jeff it was obvious. As much as he loves them and believes they put him where he is, he wanted to be more involved in managing his life and career, and they were too controlling. “I was growing up, I’d met a woman I was just head over heels with, and I wanted to be a man,” he says. “I wanted to show her that I could be a husband. That I could take care of myself and take care of her, and I felt like I was almost being treated like a little boy.”

All three talk occasionally; all three say they’d like to patch it up. But Gordon’s unreachability, to his own parents or to the next reporter who comes along and tries to break him down, isn’t surprising. He is the dog who runs ahead of the pack and doesn’t know why. His world begins at 200 miles an hour, and when he is out there, it’s a safe place where no one knows him.

On race day private jets hover over the racetrack, waiting in heavy traffic to deliver high rollers to the nearby airfield. Al Copeland, 52, founder of Popeye’s chicken, is up there waiting to join his family. Copeland is such a racing nut that he bought five race cars for his family and his 26-year-old girlfriend, and he rents out racetracks for private races.

On the infield, John Gregorian, 37, and four buddies from the Chicago Board of Trade light up $8 cigars in their rented 22-ft. Tioga Flyer. And Randy Holmes, 41, an ironworker from Orlando, Fla., climbs on top of his rickety $4,000 motor home and turns on his scanner to hear the chatter between drivers and crew chiefs. Holmes saved up for two months to come to the race with his stepfather, two sons and a nephew. He doesn’t know it, but 75 yds. away in a somewhat more elaborate rig, Texaco CEO Peter Bijur is getting ready to root for Kenny Irwin in the Havoline car.

Fifty laps into the race, Gordon wrecks his car and finishes 38th. It’s his fourth washout in a month, and he begins to wonder, for the first time in his career, if the magic is gone. Earnhardt, running on steak and potatoes, wins the race with Martin on his tail, a nickel short with that lousy can of tuna he had for lunch.

CALIFORNIA 500 Fontana, Calif.

It’s a long way from Dixie to Hollywood. Whereas they spun doughnuts on the infield at Talladega, you can get a massage and a manicure on the infield in California. And there’s white wine and Brie instead of beer and pork rinds. You can have your choice of suite sizes too. The single, 20 ft. by 21 ft., goes for $40,000 for two racing events. The double is $80,000. Two years after the speedway opened, all 75 suites are booked, there’s a waiting list, and 28 new super boxes are coming.

“The concierge service is a California nuance,” says Walter Czarnecki of Penske Motor Sports, which owns the speedway. The service is located in the vip motor-coach area, and when I arrive, super-stud driver Rusty Wallace is emerging from a massage. “I never thought I’d be getting a massage in the infield of a racetrack,” he says. And just when you think it can get no fluffier, he sits down for a manicure.

“This sport has gone to hell,” I tell him.

On race day, Gordon begins strong and gets stronger, hypnotizing everyone else into a trance. The magic is back, the slump is done, and he leaves everyone in the dust. It’s his third win this year.

As for me, I can’t say I’ll be sitting in front of the Sony Trinitron every Sunday in a neon Earnhardt or Gordon T shirt and a NAPA auto-parts hat. But I now check to see who wins each week, and on the highway, I find myself looking for my openings, waiting for just the right moment to jam it in there. Maybe that’s how it begins, and before long you’re going around repeating the line Bill France says he stole from Hemingway: “There are only three sports. Bullfighting, mountain climbing and car racing. All the rest are just games.”