Mobile
Page 2 of 5
"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."
Latest in Cover
More by M.S. Herrin
-
Welcome, Race Fans!
May 25, 2005 -
Shiny, Happy Badass
May 26, 2004 -
HotRods In The Summertime
May 21, 2003 - More »
Calendar
-
DoubleTree by Hilton South Charlotte Tyvola @ DoubleTree by Hilton South Charlotte Tyvola.
-
The Versus Show @ CATCh
-
Queen Charlotte Fair @ Route 29 Pavilion
- Mondays-Sundays. Continues through July 5
-
-
AllMachines
- Through Dec. 30, 12-9 p.m.
-
-
AllMachines - Forklifts
- Through Dec. 30, 12-6 p.m.
-
-
High-Tailin' It
Is NASCAR Getting Too Big for Its Southern Britches?
-
Who Crapped in the Sand Box? 7
How greed spoiled Myrtle Beach
-
'Lies, slander, hatred and jealousy': The rise and fall of former District 3 representative Warren Turner 3
