The Last Lap

For Dale Earnhardt, the race was never over. Back when he was winning everything in sight--11 races one year, nine in another--he would come home some nights mad as hell about something that somebody had done to him on the track. Squeezed him, bumped him, as if he would never do such things himself. And this was after a victory.

Earnhardt had been a wild-child teenager, as reckless as they come and headed for nowhere, but he grew up to be his sport's father figure, Dad without the breaks, and a corporate titan to boot. He could regale a crowd of GM dealers with war stories for an hour--Mr. Charm--then shift gears in a heartbeat, chiding drivers who wanted to slow the cars down as "candy asses." He made tens of millions of dollars racing and tens of millions more running Dale Earnhardt Inc., but even at 49, a man of considerable responsibilities and with nothing left to prove, he would never take his foot off the gas. That is why they loved him.

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.

At 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 clanging, a 16-minute red flag to clean up the mess--and only a bum shoulder, Stewart's, as a result. Then on the last turn of the last lap, Earnhardt's famous black No. 3 Chevy Monte Carlo plowed--thud--into the wall and drifted back out, nose smashed. No fire, no catapulting frames. Ironhead had walked away from stuff that looked a lot worse than this. "No one ever expected Dale Earnhardt to die in a race car," said Max Helton, a NASCAR chaplain.

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.

It 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.

It was roughshod and regional, but France negotiated the bumpy road efficiently, and then in the late 1950s, Detroit moved south and everything changed. Much of America thinks stock-car racing broke through about five years ago, when the Kid--Jeff Gordon, he of the Tom Cruise looks and the middle-class Indiana upbringing--started winning everything in sight and turning up on the Today show to hobnob with Katie and Matt. But consider this: by 1965, NASCAR was already the second most popular sport, by attendance, in the country. And it hadn't started its Northern offensive.

That would be mounted gradually. To an itinerary of Spartanburg, S.C.; Birmingham and Talladega, Ala.; and Hickory and Asheville, N.C.; NASCAR added, over time, Long Pond, Pa.; Sonoma, Calif.; Joliet, Ill.; Brooklyn, Mich.; Dover, Del.; and Loudon, N.H. The fans were attracted, in this mature iteration of NASCAR, by the thunder of the cars, which have been able to reach 190 m.p.h. for 40 years now, and also by a host of stars every bit as human and accessible as some of the early characters, if better scrubbed. Richard Petty won 200 races. David Pearson beat Petty head to head 33 times to 30. Bobby Allison won 84 times in 25 years. Cale Yarborough won 83 times and was an entertaining throwback, a broad-bellied, bullheaded racer, maybe the biggest s.o.b. on the track this side of...