So – NASCAR. Considering NASCAR is supposedly the number two spectator sport as regards television ratings, there have been an awful lot of people who react with surprise upon hearing that we spent an evening at a speedway watching car races. Although thought of in the US as a “Southern” sport, NASCAR officials estimate that they have 75 million fans, and 17 out of the top 20 best-attended sports events in the US.
Although I knew all this before going, and with the disclaimer that I would never have dreamed of going if J hadn’t wanted to experience this slice of North American life, the sheer number of people were frightening. It started before we even drove into the Speedway car parks. Local landowners had given over their every last inch of space to people in RV’s – no tents of course – these are motor people!
The vast official car parks were also jam-packed with cars, trucks and people. It was mostly trucks and people, though. I’m accustomed now to the fact that everything seems bigger on this side of the pond, but I’m not ashamed to say that the sheer mass of fans was utterly intimidating. I don’t feel at all lost in a crowd of 27, 751 (That was the record-breaking attendance at the West Brom-Portsmouth relegation-avoiding match in May of 2005. Capacity at the Hawthorns is 28, 003). However, see these people:
all 75, 000 of them, plus the lucky people in the center of the track, and the millions of people in the car parks who didn’t even have tickets to get close to the track area, were a bit much.
I expected the noise to be my biggest hate of the evening, but with a pair of heavy-duty earplugs I was happy as a clam watching the cars go round, and round, and round, and round…
For two hours.
We spent some of the time listening to the racetrack radio, which was disappointingly quiet for long periods of time. And then all of a sudden, someone would calmly explain that he’d lost a wheel nut, which left me wondering if that wasn’t a little dangerous at 200mph? It doesn’t sound like a good thing, does it?
Still, with no loss of wheels and only a few slow laps with the safety car in charge, someone won, resulting in a lap of honor and a big spin with lots of smoke.
There's a car in there somewhere
What I didn’t realize was that the evening was far from over. Just because somebody had got to the end of the prescribed number of laps on the racetrack, didn’t mean that anybody had finished their drinking. I didn’t have my camera with me to immortalize the considerable number of people you can fit in the back of a pick up and still go round in circles in a field full of beer-drinkers.
Trust me, it’s quite a few.
LivinginChicago 