High-Tailin' It 

Thus the new IMAX NASCAR 3-D movie NASCAR: The IMAX Experience starts at the beginning -- the nefarious birth of the South's only native professional sport. It is widely accepted that NASCAR's roots go back to daredevil rednecks who ran moonshine during Prohibition, and afterward. Supposedly they got so good at super-rigging their cars to outrun the "Law," and had such a damn good time doing it, that once Prohibition ended they just kept on driving, pedal to the metal.

The historical dramatizations of bootleggers, Junior Johnson racing on the beach at Daytona and Richard Petty tearing it up on dirt tracks make for a fun and often visually stunning lesson in NASCAR History 101. (Unfortunately, once the film shifts to present day it becomes what many non-fans think stock car racing really is: repetitive and loud.)

The gleeful bootleggers in the opening shot are played by Jimmie Johnson and Ryan Newman. While they're both genuine NASCAR Nextel Cup drivers, they couldn't be less Southern. Johnson is a well-spoken, clean-cut guy from California while Newman is a Purdue-educated engineer from Idaho -- facts that are less ironic than emblematic.

NASCAR is still perceived, nationally and regionally, to be deeply Southern, but that image now rests less on reality than on increasingly ancient history. In fact, many longtime fans feel that NASCAR isn't Southern enough anymore -- particularly the premiere series, the Nextel Cup (the Winston Cup until this year). For NASCAR itself and many businesses involved in the sport, however, it's apparently still too Southern and they're working to change that. Over the last decade or so, they've been wildly successful. Today the majority of tracks that host Nextel Cup races are outside the South and the overwhelming majority of top drivers -- are you ready for this? -- are not Southern.

Although hardcore fans have complained for years that NASCAR is selling them out for new, high-falutin' fans beyond the Mason-Dixon line, the issue has been brought to a head recently by NASCAR's decision to strip Nextel Cup races from two of the South's most historic tracks. North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham lost one of its two race dates at the beginning of this year and NASCAR announced on May 14 that it would lose its remaining date and the legendary track in Darlington, SC, would lose one of its two dates in the 2005 season. Those race dates have been shipped west of the Mississippi.

From grandstands and infields to chat rooms and radio shows, many Southern fans are speculating on where NASCAR is headed and whether they are being left behind.

Growing Pains
There's no doubt that NASCAR is losing its Southern flavor. Many of the young drivers now dominating the series listen to rock rather than country, play video games instead of hunt, and dress more MTV than CMT. Musical guests at races these days are more likely to be up and coming or has-been bands like the Goo Goo Dolls than country acts, though Nashville types generally do the honors with the national anthem.

"On the one hand, it's great when Yankees recognize that something of ours is worthwhile. On the other hand, it sucks when they take it over -- especially if they water it down," says noted author and Southern culture expert John Shelton Reed.

The problem is, it seems the watering down is coming from within. And it's not pretty.

Just watch Fox's cheesy "Crank it up" montages before and during races. Some awful song like "I Can't Drive 55" plays over clips of drivers and spinning cars. It's all quick edits and jerky camera work a la MTV in the early 90s.

But when Fox lets NASCAR be itself, they shine. Their "Hollywood Hotel" commentators are perfection -- Larry McReynolds, Jeff Hammond, and the thoroughly lovable Darrell Waltrip. Losing them mid-way through the season when NBC takes over coverage is just depressing. As long as Fox doesn't replace them with Ryan Seacrest to attract the lucrative teenage girl market, I guess we'll be OK.

Stock car racing's identity crisis and desire to be urban is nowhere more painfully evidenced than in a show on the Speed Channel called Infield Hot Pass. The wild-and-wacky camera and edit stuff is cranked up to 11. So is the royalty-free generic rock. The female host isn't bad. She's perky and pretty and harmless. But the guy. The guy is unbelievable. You watch wincing, praying that this is some kind of parody, but alas, it isn't. His just-off-the-mark wraparound shades and bleach-tipped hair could be overlooked, but not his incessant, ludicrous rap star posturing. The show is as desperate to be cool as Saved by the Bell and somehow manages to fail more miserably.

"Maybe NASCAR has an inferiority complex," says fan Trin Schwandt of Oak Grove, Mississippi. "The thing is, I like it that NASCAR is a little redneck. I'm a little bit redneck, too."

"Many institutions that the South has created -- country music, Coke, Fed Ex, Elvis -- have achieved a national and global presence. The same is happening with NASCAR," says Bill Ferris, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and co-director of The Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Southern Born and Bred
According to Reed, you're Southern if A) you believe you are and/or B) others believe you are. In his book My Tears Spoiled My Aim he discusses the difficulty of precisely defining or locating the South though he assures that ultimately "people know whether they're in it or not."

For this article, I've adopted a map he drew according to "where people are likely to say that they like Southern accents, prefer Southern food, and believe that Southern women are better looking than other women." The states that fit the bill are the obvious ones: North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Lousiana and Mississippi. Since we're talking about NASCAR, we also have to toss in Florida based on the merit of Daytona alone.

In this so-defined South, NASCAR was born. A small group of those post-Prohibition bootleggers and their cronies got together in Daytona, Florida, in 1948 with the mission of bringing some order to the chaos that was stock car racing. The head crony, Bill France, was a shrewd businessman in a yokel's disguise. He knew that if he could organize the drivers, tracks and schedules and create some standardized rules and practices, there was money to be made. Fans would flock to this series in which competition spread beyond just random local events to encompass a season-long pursuit of a championship. So a "sanctioning body" was formed and Bill France, Sr., assumed the throne. The head bootlegger, Junior Johnson, talked North Carolina's own RJR Tobacco into kicking in some sponsor money and the Winston Cup was born.

In the early 1970s when the so-called "modern era" of NASCAR began, all but two of the tracks running championship races were in the South. In the first three decades, Southerners took home the Winston Cup Championship year after year -- names like Lee and Richard Petty, David Pearson and Dale Earnhardt. Sure, there were non-Southerners running in NASCAR from the beginning, but for most of the sport's history they didn't seem to have a snowball's chance in hell.

To be fair, guys who weren't from around here had it tougher. As Woody Allen once famously put it, "Eighty percent of success is showing up" and that was true in NASCAR's early years. Since points are tallied from all sanctioned races in the season, the drivers entering the most races were the most likely contenders. With the high costs of travel and just getting a good running car out on the track, making it to all the races was no easy feat and few did. Southerners, then, had an all-important advantage over any incursion forces: location, location, location.

Just Born that Way
Some experts reject the notion that there was ever anything quintessentially Southern about the series to begin with.

"It is a coincidence of history that NASCAR is a Southeastern sport with a Southeastern fan base," says Dave Despain of the Speed Channel's call-in talk show Windtunnel. "Had Bill France driven west instead of South, would NASCAR have been a West Coast phenomenon? I think there's a very good chance the answer is yes."

Jim Wright, a sociologist at the University of Central Florida and author of the book Fixin' to Git: One Fan's Love Affair with the Winston Cup, agrees. "NASCAR always wanted to be a national organization. The only reason it was regional for so long was a result of the United States Auto Club's domination of stock car racing outside the South. Once USAC withered, NASCAR started to spread."

Wright's book features exhaustive research illustrating Yankee involvement in NASCAR from its inception. Many fans would be surprised at the figures. A Northerner himself and son of a dirt track racer, he explains that they've been on board all along, there were just some circumstantial obstacles along the way.

"I think the appeals are universal," says Despain, "but for a long time, three-quarters of the country was denied the chance to get involved."

Now the biggest spectator sport in the country and still growing, NASCAR's intense efforts to serve and profit from that three-quarters has certainly paid off, but at what price?

"There's no doubt that many hardcore Southern fans are pissed," says Marty Smith, a commentator with nascar.com. "They feel that NASCAR's "not dancing with the one that brought "em.'"

One major event in the de-Southernization of NASCAR was the exit of Old South corporate empire RJR Tobacco as title sponsor. RJR funded the Winston Cup from its inception 54 years ago up to the 2003 season and everybody -- drivers, fans, crews, owners and their first cousins -- all waxed nostalgic about the loss of a big part of the sport's history. Still, it's hard to be too choked up about the decline of a company that made billions from a product that killed millions of people. Nextel is based in Virginia, but there's nothing Southern about the company -- a fact that will surely help NASCAR outdistance its heritage.

Only two Southern drivers, Dale Earnhart and Dale Jarrett, have won the championship title since 1992, the year the first bona fide by-anyone's-definition Yankee (Alan Kulwicki of Wisconsin) took home the Winston Cup. Only one Southerner, Jeff Burton, has won Rookie of the Year in the decade since Jeff Gordon won the title. Not that NASCAR is driving out Southern drivers.

But NASCAR is driving races west of the Mississippi. All tracks added to the schedule since 1973 have been outside the Southeast with the bulk of the expansion taking place from the late 90s to 2001 to include new tracks built in Las Vegas, Kansas City, Chicago, Fort Worth, California, and Miami (definitely not Southern).

At the time of the addition of two races in 2001, Mike Helton, now NASCAR's president, said "We're fortunate to be able to attract investors that will create facilities in markets like that. That gives NASCAR the ability to grow from its rural roots to urban markets. That helps fuel growth. That's exposure. That's more of everything for everybody."

Except the Southern "market," apparently.

With the loss of North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham, of the 22 tracks the Nextel Cup series visits each year, only nine are in the Southeast.

"As a fan, I hate it that we're leaving these great old tracks. But realistically, in order for NASCAR to grow -- and all businesses want to grow -- they have to focus on these bigger venues in other parts of the country," says Marty Smith.

It's not as though NASCAR can just add a couple of races to the schedule. Teams already face the longest and most grueling season of any professional sport in the country -- 36 races in 10 months. Most teams agree there's no room for expansion. This means that in order for the NASCAR lords to giveth, they must taketh away.

While NASCAR says it wants to bring the joys of Nextel Cup racing to underserved fans, that rings hollow when the expansion isn't including new tracks in other cities, just giving another race to those already on the schedule -- two of which, Phoenix and California, are actually owned by the France family. If all this isn't complicated enough, the France family also owns Rockingham and Darlington. Confused? Not surprising. The two benefiting tracks on the West Coast are larger (more ticket revenue) and in populous, urban areas (more potential TV ad revenue).

It's not underhanded. It's just business -- a family-owned business shifting resources from declining investments to growing ones. Unlike the other major professional sports in this country that are run by commissioners appointed by team owners, NASCAR is and has always been a monarchy and what's good for the France family is apparently what's good for NASCAR.

Where Have All the Good Ole Boys Gone?
Despain contends that despite NASCAR's controversial schedule changes and exorbitant ticket costs (see sidebar), fan loyalty will ultimately be decided on more personal terms. "What do the fans like about the sport? The drivers. If they like the drivers, they'll come back."

Unfortunately for the Southern fan who prefers to pull for a Southern driver, options are dwindling there, too.

This season there are 39 active Nextel Cup drivers according to nascar.com. Of those, only 15 are Southern. Just two of the six Rookies are Southern. Over the past decade the number of Southerners in the top ranks has dropped dramatically.

Last year, the final Top 10 in the Winston Cup standings included only two drivers from the Southeast -- Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Bill Elliott. And at the end of the season, Elliott announced his retirement from full-time cup racing and handed his keys over to Kasey Kahne, an almost unknown kid from Washington state. This leaves Junior as the sole Southerner who is currently a serious contender -- a fact that no doubt contributes to his huge popularity.

"Dale Earnhardt Jr. is to stock car racing what Elvis was to rock & roll and being Southern is a big part of that," says Ferris. "And of course he is part of the first family of NASCAR. It's a legacy, and family is a powerful institution in the South."

"He seems like one of us," says Schwandt, the fan from Mississippi. She and her family attended the Aaron's 499 in Talladega, specifically because it's a great track for Junior. "He wins so much at Talladega so we know if we come here we're going to have a good race day."

But can Junior simultaneously be "one of us" and NASCAR's representative People magazine's 2004 list of the 50 Most Beautiful People?

"I think he's gotten ruint," said a fan at Talladega who wouldn't give his name. "I've been in the garage area a few times and seen him get all bowed up when people ask for his autograph so I decided I wouldn't ever ask. But my wife really wanted it, so I got up my nerve today and asked him. I made sure it was after qualifying."

His brother standing nearby in a red #8-emblazoned hat rolls his eyes. "I don't know what you're so pissed about. He signed it."

"Yeah, but I even told him I was sorry for asking. And he never said a word, just acted all pissed off."

Like any good disciple, the brother looks for a loophole that will allow him to keep the faith: "You shouldn't have bothered him. It's your fault. He doesn't want to be bothered by all the fans."

Nonetheless, the 1.3 million votes Junior received in last year's online vote for most popular driver shows that he has fans to burn.

The race that day in Talladega ended in the worst possible way for many diehard Southern fans. Not only did it end under caution, Jeff Gordon beat Junior. Notoriously NASCAR's rowdiest, the fans at Talladega embarrassed themselves by pelting the track with beer cans and garbage to protest the result. Nowhere is Gordon's masterful intrusion on the South's favorite pastime more keenly resented than Talladega.

Behind the booing he gets during driver introductions and the proliferation of anti-Gordon displays in the RV village next to tracks, is the mostly unarticulated sense of injury many Southern fans feel over his extraordinary early success in the Winston/Nextel Cup. Some fans claim he's gay (apparently the worst possible insult Southern machismo can muster) and others say he's two-faced, all nice for the cameras and an asshole in reality, but the heart of the problem is that he won too much too soon and against Dale Earnhardt in particular. Earnhardt never won another championship following Gordon's first in 1995. Dethroning the man with near God-like status in the South was a bad PR move.

While John Shelton Reed traces the end of country music as a truly Southern institution to Olivia Newton John snagging a Country Music Award in 1973, the beginning of the end of the South's hold on NASCAR must surely have been 1989, Jeff Gordon's rookie year.

The Californian opened the door for more like him. Car/team owners now are more likely to scout out new blood in the ranks of open wheel drivers, and for good reason. Something about running open wheel on dirt seems to be the right training to whip ass in Nextel Cup racing. Just look at Matt Kenseth (reigning champion), Jimmie Johnson, Kasey Kahne, Kevin Harvick, Ryan Newman, and Tony Stewart. The list keeps growing.

"For the most part, the ones succeeding are coming from USAC, from dirt tracks. Guys who know how to drive a car on the edge of out of control," says Smith.

Still, with Junior's unparalleled popularity, you'd think more team owners would be looking for the next hot young Southern driver. Problem is, they may very well be looking and coming up empty handed.

"Southern drivers are still coming up the traditional way -- through stock car racing on local tracks, then trucks and then the Busch series," says Smith. Apparently that traditional approach isn't working anymore.

Gordon also inadvertently redefined the off-track component of a driver's job. Before him, sponsors pretty much just expected their drivers to win. But Gordon showed them what a well-groomed, well-spoken driver from middle America could do -- get into middle American wallets. For the rest of the country, he was the first accessible NASCAR champion, one who talks and walks like them. The housewives think he's attractive and the kids like his non-threatening persona. He may well have been the first champion to know which fork to use during the big championship dinner at the Waldorf Astoria.

Sweet Home Carolina
"No matter how big or far flung NASCAR gets, it will always be rooted in the South," says Ferris. For now, NASCAR is most solidly rooted in North Carolina. Pretty much all major teams are headquartered here, making the Mooresville/Kannapolis/Charlotte area the Silicon Valley of stock car racing. The technology is here, the talent is here and the money is here.

Displaying either prescience or paranoia, NC governor Mike Easley sent a letter to state legislators on May 5 announcing that he will ask for $15 million to build a test track near Charlotte in a bid to keep the lucrative industry here. "We must invest now," Easley wrote in his letter, "to ensure that this industry keeps its home in North Carolina."

Taxpayers may wonder at the need to spend their money to support a multi-billion dollar industry. A test track won't be holding public events (and thus drawing out of town money) and will only create a handful of jobs. But it will save race teams a ton of money and precious man hours currently spent on sending race teams to Kentucky and other tracks for what is no longer a luxury, but a necessity if you want to compete -- testing. NASCAR dictates that teams can only test seven times a year on tracks that host Nextel Cup events, so teams can't just use Lowe's Motor Speedway over and over.

Luckily for local fans, there hasn't been any indication that teams were contemplating some kind of en masse relocation.

"There's no danger of that," says Smith of nascar.com. "If you're not in Charlotte, you're behind the curve already. If you leave Charlotte, you hurt."

Just ask the Wood Brothers team about "hurting" by not being in the Charlotte area. Based in Stuart, Va., for 53 years, the team decided this year to move to the Mooresville area. Their #21 car driven by Ricky Rudd has struggled for years, and the team is confident that the move will make them more competitive.

"That's a glaring, tell-tale sign of how important it is to be here," says Smith. "And NASCAR even moved their R&D facility here in 2003."

Hold On To Your Assets
Whether the rest of the South can hold on to its beloved NASCAR may depend on whether NASCAR will take into account the marketing potential of its Southern image.

In his book Fixin' to Git, Jim Wright proposes that the rest of the nation is actually becoming more like the South and is more welcoming of all things Southern, NASCAR included. He proposes the emergence of what he calls "the NASCAR paradox." Pointing to the demographic shift from urban to suburban areas, he ultimately decides that more of America is "countrified" than not and falls right in line with "NASCAR's carefully cultivated association with Americanism, community, Christian virtue, and family values. . . .The wild popularity of stock-car racing -- among Yankees and Southerners alike -- reveals a nation becoming more like the South, not the South becoming more like the rest of the nation."

"Southern institutions need to respect their roots because that's part of their appeal and NASCAR is no exception," says Ferris. "Just look at what happened when Coke changed its formula."

Most fans I spoke to at Talladega and Atlanta said they definitely think of NASCAR as Southern, and that it matters to them. Jeff Walker, a fan from San Francisco, put it this way: "Part of what makes NASCAR cool is that it's got so much character and attitude. My friends think I'm being ironic, but I really get a kick out of it. Maybe I'm connecting with my inner bad ass."

If this is the case, then NASCAR better put on the brakes and remember the lessons that every one of those kids Saved by the Bell had to learn time and time again: don't go ditching your old friends for the popular kids when you get a chance, and the only way to be cool is to be yourself. For NASCAR, that surely means being rough, rowdy and unashamedly Southern.

Can I get a "hell, yeah!"