Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Carolina,
Don't you wanna get down and dirty
'cause, Florida I'm thirsty, hit me with your Tennessee whiskey and crank it up loud
Laid back, you crazy old timer, sweet magnolia, dive bars and diners,
Oh yeah oh, and even if you're, up north, c'mon down, c'mon down
Oh, it's all about the south.
Don't you wanna get down and dirty
'cause, Florida I'm thirsty, hit me with your Tennessee whiskey and crank it up loud
Laid back, you crazy old timer, sweet magnolia, dive bars and diners,
Oh yeah oh, and even if you're, up north, c'mon down, c'mon down
Oh, it's all about the south.
-
The Cadillac Three
Friday 21 and Saturday 22 August
It’s official. I’ve got a new
meaning for the word ‘deafening’. It’s hearing 43 V8-engined Ford Fusions,
Chevrolet SS and Toyota Camry stock cars ticking off laps of the 0.5-mile Bristol
Motor Speedway at somewhere around thirteen seconds a circuit, and at average
speeds of over 120mph.
If you thought a V8 Supercar race
was loud and big and in-your-face, it’s got nothing on what the NASCAR boys can
deliver on what is colloquially known as Thunder Valley.
Every sport has it’s coliseum, it’s great venue, unsurpassed
by all others. Tennis has Wimbledon, AFL football has the MCG, baseball has
Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, college football the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and,
of course, Madison Square Garden in New York, a venue of great importance for
many sports – basketball, boxing and hockey – without even touching on the
unparalleled musicians who have sold out the stage inside what is colloquially
known as The Garden.
Then there’s Bristol, a concrete
short track that, since it’s first ever NASCAR race in July of 1961, has become
a venue like no other – not just in NASCAR, or even motorsport worldwide, but
in sport full stop. Nestled up in the spectacular mountains of East Tennessee.
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| First glimpse. Even from this far away, it's an imposing place. |
How fast is it? Well, green flag laps are ticked off so
quickly that you look away for a few seconds and you’ve missed a half a lap of
racing. Drivers don’t get much of a break except under caution. Anyone who says
these guys aren’t athletes hasn’t seen them wrestle these heavy cars around the
high-banked oval, in front of crowds in excess of 160,000. Anyone who thinks
oval racing is easy should come here and see what mastery these guys have over
their machines.
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| Pre-race ceremonies |
Bristol hosts two NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races a year, a
springtime race that takes place in the afternoon, and then what is
consistently the toughest ticket in NASCAR, the night-race, a late-summer Saturday
night event for so many people in Tennessee, and elsewhere, too. I met people
from all points north, south, east and west. People plan their summertime lives
around this weekend. We saw the development Xfinity Series race 300 laps Friday
night and the big boys from the Sprint Cup Series go 500 laps twenty-four hours
later.
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| Skydiver bringing the American flag into Bristol |
Why? Because the night race at Bristol is far more than just
another race. In fact, the word ‘race’ does Bristol at night no justice at all.
It’s an event, and one that’s unparalleled in motorsport.
Whilst the race begins as the sun begins to set, the crowd
files in. It’s a parochial audience, pretty much everyone’s driver allegiance obvious
thanks to t-shirts, caps and other merchandise. Dale Earnhardt Jr., the son of
arguably NASCAR’s most popular driver, who died in a last-lap Daytona 500 crash
in 2001, is endlessly popular, and there’s plenty of fans who still wear
merchandise from his father, who made the black #3 Chevrolet famous. The
retiring legend Jeff Gordon is popular. So is Indiana’s Tony Stewart and Missouri’s
Carl Edwards. Las Vegas native Kyle Busch is booed, but doesn’t seem to care.
Fully ninety-percent of the crowd applauds Dale Earnhardt Jr’s introduction,
and everyone applauds the national anthem, the appearance of two sky-divers,
and the obligatory jet flyover, which seems to shake the joint.
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| Pre-race tuning. |
For so many, it’s tradition now. Generations of families
have made this summertime journey, so much so that it’s an ingrained part of
their life. NASCAR is as American as Babe Ruth sitting atop the Statue of
Liberty. It’s long been a part of southern DNA. You look around and see
grandfathers with grandkids, fathers and sons, people who’ve been coming here
as long as they’ve had racing at Bristol. They will keep coming, and why
wouldn’t you? A weekend here, watching the show these cars put on, and you’re
hooked. I wish I could come here every year! It’s incredible.
To understand the lure of Bristol you have to come here and
experience it. Watching on TV, it’s an impressive sight, no doubt, but nothing
can prepare you for seeing those first few green flag laps. Oval racing is
maligned in Australia, armchair warriors calling it “easy”, but it’s not. Not
even close: these guys are driving a ridiculously heavy car, ill-handling car
on thin tyres around a track as steep as an escalator, in the heat, for 500
laps, with forty-two other drivers using every trick in the book to get past
you. The old ‘bump-and-run’ technique is a controversial favourite. Nudge a
guy, move him up the banking, and slide by. We see it executed with varying
levels of success.
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| 2014 Daytona 500 champ Joey Logano visiting our spot in the hospitality village |
The crowd laps it up. There’s nowhere else where 160,000
fans are packed so tightly together. There’s no bad seat at Bristol. You can
sit anywhere and see everything. If you’re towards the front, you’ll be
battered by rubber thrown up from the forty-three cars that, after ten or
fifteen laps, are strung out around the entire length of the speedway, so that
it appears to be one endless conveyer belt. There’s nowhere to go, no escape.
There are cars around you for every lap, full-contact motorsport.
It’s noisy! You’ve never heard noise like it. Because of the
towering grandstands, precious little of the sound of the race cars leaves the
arena. You have to bellow to be heard, and even then, there’s no guarantee that
the person next to you has heard a word of what you said. Ear protection is a
must.
The lower down you are, the louder it is. On pit road, the
epicentre of the noise, crew and TV reporters generally use hand signals to
communicate. Interviews for the television broadcast are hard to discern,
because there’s no let-up.
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| Field led by the pace car |
The noise is constant – trust me! – even under caution. You
can’t escape it: the throaty growl of engines, the high-pitched report of
rattle guns on pit road, the squealing of tyres when a car gets turned around,
the crunch of a car impacting with the wall. The pace car comes out and the
field comes to pit road, wanting new tyres, perhaps an adjustment, and often
some fuel. I listen to the radios on my scanner, and realise that no driver has
a perfect car here. They just struggle on, as sunset becomes night, and those
cars seem even faster.
Hiring a scanner to listen to crew-driver communications
(and the radio broadcast) is brilliant. You’re right amongst the race. The
things you hear – well, I couldn’t repeat them here. Everyone’s upset with
someone. Everyone swears they’ll beat someone else’s [expletive] after the
race. No one’s happy by the end.
Except the winner, Team Penske’s Joey Logano, who dominated
the last half of Saturday night’s 500-lap event (run exceptionally quickly, at
just under two and three quarter hours. I felt like a winner, too, because I
was there to witness a truly incredible – and kinda insane – night of racing.
What a place!
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| Post-race burnouts by the #22 of Joey Logano |
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