Word: nascar
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...longtime fan of both Dale Earnhardt and NASCAR, I was confused by Cathy H. Tran's column in last Wednesday's sports section (Sports, "When Will Nascar Learn?," Feb. 21). The restrictor plates that Tran alludes to are already used on superspeedways, and they actually increase the threat of accident by bunching cars tightly together. The safety improvements she suggests, such as soft-wall technology or the Hans device, are impractical for stock car racing; stock cars are heavier and require more in-cockpit freedom of movement than Formula One cars...
Ironhead, the Intimidator, Earnhardt: he had massive, irresistible appeal. He brought fans into the sport who wouldn't know NASCAR from NASA. He was the rebel soul of a sport that had gone corporate. What roiled inside him usually came out, sometimes in fits of temper or unruly behavior behind the wheel. Whenever a race started, you wondered what Dale Earnhardt might do today...
...Daytona Beach, Fla., a Sunday ago, it was an Earnhardt kind of day: contradictions everywhere. It was going to be a triumphal afternoon, with a huge network audience watching, the ultimate proof, as if anyone needed it, that NASCAR was nationwide. Yet the sissies had won too, and rules were in place to slow the cars, but the changes seemed to be making the racing more dangerous. An earlier crash looked like an Armageddon of a wreck: 19 cars careering around, smashing into one another, Tony Stewart's Pontiac soaring through the air, ripping the hood off another car, metal...
...NASCAR racers drive stock cars, simultaneously primitive and ultrasophisticated versions of the Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs and Dodges in America's driveways. These cars have engine blocks of 1960s vintage; neither you nor I have bought a car with a carburetor for 15 years, but Earnhardt drove one at Daytona. Certainly his Monte Carlo was a modified machine: its engine had been juiced to about 720 h.p.; its sheet-metal skin was lighter than a road-ready car's; its roll bars were designed to render the cab a fast-moving cage...
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...