Daddy's dead but his car's doing fine

Matthew Engel in the USA
Thursday May 15, 2003
The Guardian

New York does not have a country music station. But over huge swaths of America, country is about all you can find on the car radio - all those songs about tormented love, mommy going away or daddy dying, calculated to make the toughest among us break into floods over the steering wheel as we head through Texas or Tennessee.

New Yorkers, and people in most other big cities here, probably assume the old pecking order in US spectator sports (1 American football, 2 baseball, 3 basketball, 4 ice hockey) still exists and will stay that way forever. But they don't hear the country music and they can't hear the roar of the engines either.

The whole fabric of American sport is undergoing a sensational change. And the transformation is barely recognized here, so it will cause bewilderment in Britain, where the sport involved has had no profile whatever since the days when ITV tried to run Saturday afternoon sports programs and would show anything to fill the time available. The sport is stock-car racing or, as it is known in the US, Nascar (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing Inc), in which souped-up, stripped-down saloon cars, festooned with stickers, do ridiculous and dangerous things.

Ridiculous? Nascar's TV ratings, week in, week out, are now surpassing every sport in the US except American football. Attendance has doubled in little more than a decade. And total revenue has probably already overtaken ice hockey and may catch baseball and basketball by the end of the decade.

And, as in the songs, daddy did die. Two years ago Dale Earnhardt - the leading driver in the sport - was killed in a crash at Daytona. It looked like nothing and the car was hardly damaged but he hit a wall at just the wrong angle and his seatbelt sheared off.

On April 29, which would have been Earnhardt's 52nd birthday, the fans were allowed to tour round his garage in North Carolina. About 13,000 people turned up. Some drove across the country; some queued all night; many cried. It is a cult acquiring trappings of the Elvis industry: within four days of his death 100,000 Earnhardt items were for sale on eBay; when a goat was born in some remote farmstead with markings that resembled a three, the number on Earnhardt's car, pilgrims came from all quarters to witness what was assumed to be a divine manifestation.

Nascar's audience is presumed to comprise gun-totin', speed-lovin', beer-guzzlin', Bush-votin' southern white males, many of them tattooed and fat. That is the truth - Nascar events are often festooned with Confederate flags, and black faces are rare - but no longer the whole truth. For a start, 40% of the audience are now said to be women, and sponsors and Hollywood moguls have picked up on the fact that the demographic has widened way beyond its low-income redneck base: Britney Spears is reputedly about to star in a Nascar movie. And UPS - a business-to-business company, note - recently switched its sponsorship from the Olympic team to Nascar.

This is a sport that knows how to treat its fans, who traditionally get unparalleled access to the heroes, and its sponsors. One driver, Jeff Gordon, got out of his car after a victory and said: "I'd like to thank God, Pepsi and Fritos."

Above all, Earnhardt's death gave the sport a fresh narrative, because daddy had a son and Dale Jr is a racer, who insisted that he would compete the following weekend as usual because that is what the old man would have wanted. He hated anyone who was chicken. As Dale Sr once said: "Get the hell out of the race car if you've got feathers on your legs or butt." And "Little E", though not yet the racer his father was, has become a star in his own right, as a sex symbol who is still seen as a regular guy.

And here is the secret of Nascar's success. Despite appearances most Americans do not yet weigh 25 stone, which pretty much rules out American football. Nor are they 6ft 6in at least, which rules out basketball. Nor can they hit a 97mph fastball 400 yards or skate and fight simultaneously.

But they can all race away from the traffic lights in a beat-up Chevy and see themselves as the new Dale Earnhardt. It is, as Jeff MacGregor of Sports Illustrated put it, "at once death-defying and prosaic".