Is NASCAR Abandoning Its Southern Roots?
This week NASCAR takes its traveling carnival show to Sonoma, California. Wine country. To the early pioneers of the sport, it would have been all but unthinkable.
From Lloyd Seay to Dale Earnhardt, NASCAR was built on the backs of Southern heroes. Junior Johnson, who learned to drive running ‘shine for his daddy in North Wilkesboro, N.C., became the “Last American Hero.” He was the most successful and famous race car driver in America before the mustachioed Richard Petty took his title in the 1970s and Earnhardt usurped them both in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jeff Gordon, a driver from Indiana by way of California, might as well have been an alien to many NASCAR fans. He faced even more scorn than Bodine when he debuted in NASCAR in 1992, perhaps because of his greater success. The booing that rained down on Gordon at tracks in the South, booing even when he crashed his car, reached what Sports Illustrated called “the point of cruelty.”
Today Gordon is a respected veteran, and you’ll be hard pressed to hear a “y’all” on pit road or see a single RC Cola or moon pie. Of the top 20 drivers in the Sprint Cup standings, only three are from the South, and one of them, Aric Almirola, is from Florida. That hardly even counts.
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Abandoning? I don’t think so. Growing beyond is more like it. NASCAR has another “root”quality for most Americans. In many ways these cars most resemble the cars many of us buy or grew up around. Can’t say that for that other great American motor sport, Indy car. Update for the distant critics-Toyota has a place in NASCAR. Sure foreign cars like Mercedes have their fans too. But no American racing to support them. With genuine popularity will come more diverse drivers and fans. Baseball was once all white. Then all American. Now, increasingly global. NASCAR might do the same.