Babes, Bordeaux & Billy Bobs

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ot that there isn't some grumbling among drivers. "These are the best of times and the worst of times," says Darrell Waltrip, a former champion who's hanging on at age 52 because the popularity and the money make it too hard to leave. "But it used to be just you and the race car. Now it's too big a business, and everybody wants a bigger piece of your time." In the old days, says Waltrip, "Richard Petty used to be able to win a race and sit up on the wall for an hour, sign all the autographs and go home. You sit up on that wall now, you'll get killed." Bill France, whose father started NASCAR 51 years ago, puts it this way: "We have the world's largest locker room."

Accessibility has always been part of the marketing plan, and you can begin to see the simple genius of it. These are souped-up replicas of real Pontiacs, Fords and Chevys--not open-wheel, Indy-type cars--and nearly everyone in America has a car. Nearly everyone has driven too fast too. At a NASCAR race, you can meet someone who gets paid stupid money to drive too fast. And chances are, he won't cry about his multimillion-dollar contract or go on strike, both of which have turned off fans of other sports. If a NASCAR driver doesn't keep his public happy, no sponsor will back him. And if he doesn't have big-time backing (it costs up to $10 million a year to keep a racing team going), he isn't going to win.

Blood drained from the faces of baseball purists earlier this year when someone suggested putting advertising on the sleeves of players' jerseys. But NASCAR covers every square inch of a driver's uniform and is proud of it. The right side of Gordon's Chevrolet is plastered with more than 40 logos, and fans say they go out of their way to buy the sponsors' products.

On race day in Bristol, 120,000 fans walk into the stadium wearing roughly half a million racing-related logos. The Winston people are giving away cigarettes. The cars are burning fossil fuel. The noise is obscene. There's a Remington firearms car, a Winston No Bull car, a Skoal car. The smells of raw horsepower, burned rubber and expectorated snuff are cooked by a wicked sun.

This is the most unapologetic, politically incorrect, crassly American spectacle I've witnessed since my last trip to Vegas.

I'm beginning to see the appeal.

Unfortunately, I still don't know the first thing about racing. What's the driver got to do with it, for one thing? Isn't it the car that wins? Ray Evernham, Gordon's crew chief, helps me out a little. Every track is different, so the preparation of the car, and the strategy, changes from week to week. During a race, he and Gordon talk by radio. A half-pound of air pressure in one tire, added or subtracted during a pit stop, can tighten handling and make the difference between winning and losing.

"Jeff has a good car and a good crew, which is a big part of his success," Evernham says. "But he also has something extra, like Michael Jordan and Mickey Mantle had. He has a different sense of time than you and I. He can slow the race down in his mind, see things coming around and react before the next guy." The key in a race, Gordon says, isn't to drop the hammer "but to tell yourself to be calm, be calm, be calm. And just have a lot of patience to let the race unfold."

At the Daytona 500 earlier this year, the entire field tried to gang-tackle him, deliberately closing off the passing lane, so to speak. But near the end of the race, Gordon sensed his moment and pulled a spectacular stunt, diving down off a banked turn to the apron of the track to limbo around two other cars. He won with Dale Earnhardt as close to his bumper as a license plate. Gordon says he drives without fear and that there is a point in every race when "desire overrides everything, and if you really want it badly, special things happen."

Nothing special happens to Gordon in Bristol. He gets into a minor wreck and finishes in sixth place, with his car literally duct-taped together. The week after that, in Goody's 500 in Martinsville, Va., he stays close enough to win but finishes a frustrating third. For the first time in four years, race fans who despise him are smiling.

My notion that the drivers' 750-h.p. days at the track would be followed by even faster nights ends up a wreck too. There's a traveling ministry on the NASCAR circuit, and drivers and their families attend Sunday services in a makeshift chapel near the pits. Gordon and his wife Brooke, a former Miss Winston, are often the first two people at Saturday-night Bible study. On race day she'll give him a verse from Scripture, and he'll tape it to his steering wheel.

When drivers aren't praying, they're fasting. Who knew they were an offshoot of the Franciscan monks? As I'm talking to Kyle Petty, the ponytailed shaman among NASCAR drivers, he goes into the refrigerator of his trailer for an energy bar and makes sure it has the right ratio of protein to carbohydrates. "In the trailer park where all the drivers live in their coaches, if you're out of skim milk or tuna, you know what door to knock on, because you know who's on what diet."