Tony Stewart’s culture war
As Nascar’s audience loses interest in the sanitized sport, said Rachel Corbett, an ex–Nascar star packs in crowds for dirt racing—the circuit’s crude, dangerous, anti-PC challenger.
T HE AIR WAS heavy with exhaust and motor oil at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina as I waited for Tony Stewart to arrive. Charlotte was hosting the 2017 championship weekend for the World of Outlaws, the premier dirt-racing series in the country, and all 60,000 tickets had sold out well in advance. Stewart, the ex–Nascar star, was late—running on “Tony time,” a handler told me—so I went for a walk along the dusty pit road to look at the scores of race cars lined up. “You’ll probably have to run at some point,” I was warned. “And remember: The cars can’t turn right.” Their larger right-side tires help them around a loop that only bends left, and indeed make it nearly impossible to turn right. The crowd was young and middleaged, mostly male and almost entirely white. There were lots of graying goatees and wraparound sunglasses and T-shirts that read “Grabbin gears, drinkin beers, slappin rears” and “God made, Jesus saved, racetrack raised.” Until recently, Nascar distanced itself from dirt-track racing. It was a holdover from the sport’s Southern past and emblematic of the backwoods image it has spent decades trying to shed. But today, dirt racing is to Nascar a little like mixed martial arts is to boxing, a rough-edged insurgent counterculture that’s proud of the pain it deals out. On dirt, the ovals are short—often a halfmile around, about a quarter the size of most asphalt tracks—which means cars cluster nose to tail, nicking and bumping one another off the road. The track can be the muddy, river-bottom gumbo of the South or the red dust of the Southeast, and it changes with the weather, causing unpredictable slides and skids. It’s common to see crashes, fires, or, sometimes, a car flip over the fence into a cornfield. Stewart finally arrived at the World of Outlaws race around 4:30, looking unusually fashionable in dark fitted jeans and an RVCA T-shirt. Two and a half years ago, he started dating a former Playboy Playmate named Pennelope Jimenez and, he explained as he took a seat on the leather couch in his trailer, “about 80 percent of the clothes that were in my closet got vanished.” While he went to change into his black Arctic Cat fire suit, Jimenez lent me a pair of plastic safety glasses and a baseball cap to shield against the spraying dirt. She poured us two paper cups of red wine, and we went to watch from a pair of folding chairs near Turn 2. The race began at sundown with a prayer for the military and for the safety of drivers and track workers—not an idle concern at a dirt race. Nascar hasn’t had a fatality in any of its upper levels since Dale Earnhardt’s nationally televised death in 2001, which led it to impose strict safety regulations. But short tracks, which host the dirt races Stewart prefers, are often lethal. Two-thirds of all racing deaths occur on them, with drivers often competing for rewards of $1,000 or less. In 2014, The Charlotte Observer reported that over the previous 25 years, at least 171 people had been killed at dirt tracks. Nascar’s transformation from a Southern pastime to a regulated global business has unleashed a familiar-feeling culture war within its ranks—between the Southerners and the coastal elites, those who came up on dirt tracks and those who came up on pavement. Racing forums today are filled with complaints about how boring it is to watch millionaires turn left and be polite to one another. Television viewership of the Daytona 500, one of Nascar’s most important races, is down 45 percent from 2005. The championship cup race in 2017 was the lowest-rated in the series’ history. Many of Nascar’s disaffected fans have been flocking to dirt tracks like the one in Charlotte and the one Stewart owns in Ohio, Eldora Speedway. Stewart has become a serious investor in dirt racing. In recent years he has bought two dirt-racing teams, a regional series, a dirt-car manufacturer, and a stake in two other dirt speedways, in Kentucky and Illinois. He drives in about 70 dirt races a year. Where Nascar has lost its emotional resonance with fans, Stewart has handily harnessed it. S TEWART GREW UP in auto-racing country. Cars in the area were plastered with bumper stickers for Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon; family outings took place at the nearby Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500. Tony won a national go-kart competition at age 12, soon graduated to sprint cars, and later earned the nickname Smoke because of the way his tires burned rubber on turns. Tony was a wild teenager, drinking and crashing family cars. At 18, his mom kicked him out of the house, and he took jobs at McDonald’s and a concrete-block plant, racing on the side. In 1993, he won second place at a race in Arizona and was awarded $3,500—far more cash than he saw at his day jobs. In 1994, a Nascar team owner approached Stewart at a dirt race in Ohio and offered him a part-time position in the Busch series (now the Xfinity series)—the second-highest tier in national racing.