Nascar Spin - Blog

Fred Morris asked:


to understand the culture of the redneck man, it is necessary to understand the most Southern of sports: NASCAR. It’s more than just cars driving in circles at high speed, punctuated by the occasional crash; it is an integral part of the modern South. In order to really understand both, you must know where NASCAR came from and why it exists.

History of NASCAR

NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) really started back just before Prohibition, when hillbilly moonshiners up in the Appalachians found out that the revenuers’ cars were fast enough to get the jump on them. Illegal stills started getting busted, and shine makers started going to jail. Instead of buckling, moonshiners moved their stills further back into the woods and down in the hollers, and they started using cars.

When Prohibition came into effect in 1920, moonshiners started looking beyond outwitting the tax-collecting revenuers and toward shipping ’shine to the cities for real profit. Gangsters - Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Capone - started making contact with these good ol’ boys to see if they could get a steady supply of alcohol for their speakeasies and other businesses. And young men, usually the sons or nephews of established moonshiners, started working with stock cars to get the ’shine to town as fast as possible.

These, our redneck forefathers, modified the cars they ordered from magazines or purchased from fledgling dealers in towns to run faster, harder, on rough and smooth surfaces. They experimented with using ’shine as a fuel for a boost in speed, and invented many of the tricks used today in NASCAR. Junior Johnson, one of NASCAR’s earliest legends, spent years running ’shine for his father using scampish tricks later mimicked by Burt Reynolds characters and the Dukes of Hazzard. He invented the famous bootleg turn, the 180-degree spinout sending you careening in the opposite direction, that is used in nearly every movie car chase today, and later as a NASCAR champ discovered how to “draft” another driver to increase his own speed and reduce fuel consumption.

NASCAR was officially born in 1948, a merging of this wild redneck tradition with the more upscale Grand Prix racing imported from Europe, in which mostly concept cars and special sports cars were raced. William France, a racing mechanic, had a notion that stock cars would draw crowds in America, and he incorporated NASCAR in Daytona, from which it quickly grew to the giant it is today.

Today’s NASCAR, industrialized and streamlined and watered down for general consumption, is only a pale imitation of the free-for-all madness our bootlegging ancestors first drove.

NASCAR Rules

While the first NASCAR stock cars were completely unmodified stock cars, the same ones you’d buy off the lot, today’s cars are modified according to strict safety and performance rules.

The rules in NASCAR are both simple and complex. Drivers in the top 43 of each race accumulate points according to a set system. Cups are awarded according to who has accumulated the most points in a set group of races. The Sprint Cup (usually just called the Cup, as it was previously the R.J. Reynolds and the Nextel Cup) is the big prize, and is awarded after a set of 36 races. Other smaller cups are awarded for other groups of races, and each major race has around $4 million total in prize money awarded for that race alone.

Points in the major races (but not all NASCAR races) are awarded not only to the race winner but to each lap leader. If you’ve led at least one lap, you automatically get five bonus points; if you lead the most laps, you get an extra five, for ten bonus points total. Points go to the driver who started the race (replacement drivers get nothing) and to the car owner. Races are generally prefaced either by qualifying trials or by heats, small races that get the crowd warmed up but don’t count toward prizes. Starting order is determined by qualifying time.

The track, once started, is slowed down by yellow caution flags for fender benders, spills, etc.; if something catastrophic happens, the red flag will come down to stop the race until wreckage can be cleared. Green flag means everything is fine. And in most NASCAR races, you’ll see drivers pull off for at least one pit stop; the pit crew works fast to fuel, check, condition, and change tires because the time in pit counts against your time on the track.

A NASCAR Date

So now you have that redneck sweetheart and you really want to impress him? Set up a date for one of the smaller NASCAR races, with barbecue and and chips for your refreshments. Beer is a must, and for that special touch, ask your liquor store for some ’shine, which should be drunk straight but in moderation. Dress any old way you want, park him on the couch, and let him explain all the finer points of the race to you while you both enjoy the race.



Frances