Talladega rights: the selling of NASCAR.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: One Helluva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation - Book review

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One Helluva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation

By Liz Clarke

Villard, 320 pp.

"A full moon rose over the backstretch of Charlotte Motor Speedway the night of NASCAR's 1992 all-star race ..." is the rather melodramatic way Liz Clarke begins the first line of the first paragraph of the first chapter of One Helluva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation. The good news is that this hoary lunar invocation does not deliver on the bats and werewolves it augurs. Instead, we get a good story, often well told. More than fifteen years of covering NASCAR (and other sports) for the Washington Post, USA Today, and other newspapers has given Clarke a close and personal knowledge of the drivers and other participants in NASCAR, and she has acquired a privileged perspective on the sport's growth from a rustic diversion featuring colorful fellows named Red and Buck and Fireball to a major pop-cultural phenomenon. Clarke has written a good book about this transformation--although, truth be told, she has written a book good enough to make me wish it were a better one.

NASCAR--which stands for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, but the CAR part pretty much says it all--got its start in 1947 when Bill France, the mechanic-owner of a track in Daytona, Florida, confederated with track owners in Martinsville, Virginia, North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Darlington, South Carolina, and other small towns whose mellifluous names cannot be spoken without conjuring up the aroma of motor oil. The growth of motor sports, as Clarke points out, was part of a general postwar boom. But what manifested itself as drag racing in the big flat stretches of the Southwest became stock racing in the dry counties of the Deep South. There the indigenous moonshine-running industry fostered the careers of ambitious young men, whose ability to outrun police cruisers at high speeds over tight twisty roads found a more sporting expression at Talladega and other tracks.

From that beginning NASCAR grew into a popular niche sport, occasionally showcased on Wide World of Sports, stunted by the inferiority complex it felt before the more professional and sophisticated (read: international) practitioners of Indy-style racing, and enriched by the personalities of the drivers, especially the showmanship of the brilliant Richard Petty (who, lauding NASCAR's spirit of teamwork in his introduction to One Helluva Ride, pricelessly avers, "There's no I in racing"). There...