Word: circuit
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Outwardly, though, a NASCAR car looks like any old car wearing a sweater of decals, and in NASCAR racing there is little psychic distance between the superstar and the fan in the stands. The popular image of the European Grand Prix circuit, with its dukes and duchesses and ascot-wearing playboy drivers, is as foreign to NASCAR as Bordeaux is to Bud. NASCAR in America is religion, replete with charismatic figures, creeds and commandments about how life should be lived...
...didn't start out as such a holy thing. Early on, stock-car-racing events ranged from illegal to highly illegal, emerging from races between law officers and moonshine runners. It wasn't until a racer named Bill France started the National championship circuit in 1946--which incorporated as the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing in 1948--that jalopy races began to look like something resembling a league, an organization, a sport...
...business of racing, using the money from his on-track success, which would eventually burgeon to an all-time record $41.6 million, to start Dale Earnhardt Inc., an auto-racing company that would grow to employ 200 in Mooresville and field three cars on NASCAR's Winston Cup circuit...
...oval too. He came to be seen as a grand, grizzled gentleman of the game, the kind of athlete you take your kid to see, so that a decade from now the kid can say he once saw Dale Earnhardt drive. Another change: Dale Jr. joined him on the circuit. "These past two years, having Junior on the track, we've all seen a marked change in Dale," said David Allen, his longtime p.r. manager...
...cars and a brand-new $2.4 billion network TV contract, and the last thing NASCAR officials wanted at their showcase event was a repeat of the boring 2000 Daytona, which featured only nine lead changes and a walkaway win by Jarrett. Last autumn they experimented at the circuit's other superspeedway course, Talladega, with ways of slowing down the cars to make for bunched, exciting racing. Some of the drivers had come out of Talladega looking ashen--"A little too exciting at times for me," admitted Gordon--but there had been 49 lead changes and no big wrecks...