A car-crazy kid goes to racing heaven
Moms and Dads, start your engines! If your kids love cars and car races, head for the rolling hills just north of Charlotte, North Carolina, where NASCAR was born, and stock car racing is a way of life.

CONCORD, S.C. --“We’d like a NASCAR please,” said Max, my five year-old son, to the car rental agent in Charlotte airport, hoping that our rental car might come covered in decals, with giant numbers on the doors. “Sorry son,” drawled the manager, “but you’ll have to make do with a mid-size Mercury.” “That’s okay”, Max shot back. “My mom’s driving anyway.” Moments later, we were streaking down the I85, headed for racing car heaven.

The NASCAR Corporation may be based in Daytona Beach, but for fans of the sport, the heart and soul of the sport is here, in the lush green countryside that surrounds Concord, NC. More than 90 percent of all national stock car teams are based within a 100-mile radius of Concord, so the local county has created the Pit Pass, an all-inclusive pass to local race attractions for a family of four (see IF YOU GO). With Pit Passes around our neck, we felt like a NASCAR insider, and got treated like one too.

We started with the main attraction - a tour of Lowe’s Motor Speedway, the local NASCAR track most pro racers call home. Each year, thousands of fans gather for the two major race weeks held here in May and October, for a look at the fastest growing spectator sport in the world. Built in 1960, the legendary 1.5-mile super speedway seats 167,000, along with another 35,000 or so who camp out in the infield during race weeks. The speedway is home to NASCAR Nextel Cup events and Busch and Craftsman Truck Series racing, but it also hosts car shows, stock car driving schools and a 10-week summer series of smaller cars. In all, the track is busy 350 days a year.

The day we visited Lowe’s, our guide Mary Ann Bassett took us around the track in a tour van, accompanied by the drone of engines being driven by race school students. Bassett, a feisty grandma who was bitten by the NASCAR bug some 20 years ago, took its famous curves at more than 100 miles per hour, (slowing only a bit on the track’s 24-degree banks), and simultaneously pointed out highlights of the track and its long history. After a pass through Victory Lane, Bassett takes us to meet Norrie Baird, the track’s Emergency Services Director. 

Baird, an affable Scot and former pro rally driver himself, explains that most injuries at Lowe’s involve spectators, not drivers. “The folks camped out on Redneck Hill in the infield will race anything they’ve brought along with them - little red wagons, beer coolers, you name it. And some of them end up smacking into walls, among other things.” Big races bring the total population of Lowe’s up to 300,000 people, one-third of them camped in fields surrounding the speedway. Baird’s medical team has to be ready to deliver babies, stitch up drunken revelers, and only occasionally has to medivac drivers with serious injuries. In fact, NASCAR cars have become some of the safest on the road, with each race death or injury causing officials to raise safety standards and improve equipment.

After the speedway it’s time to visit the race shops, where teams are headquartered and fans hope to catch a glimpse of a Jeff Gordon or a Matt Kenseth. This is where race teams design, build and rebuild their cars in clean-as-a-whistle machine shops that positively gleam for visitors. If you’re lucky, you can watch pit crews practice outside the shops on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays, usually around lunchtime. By Friday they’re back on the road headed to their next race.

After our seventh or eighth race shop, they began to blur. Until, that is, we arrived at Dale Earnhardt Inc, the enormous glass and concrete complex known locally as the Garage Mahal. Race fans gather here to see trophies, cars, uniforms, the race shop and other displays devoted to one of the winningest families in NASCAR. Close by in Kannapolis, NC, a bronze statue of Dale Earnhardt Sr. commemorates the hometown hero who died on his last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001. His legacy lives on in his son, superstar driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., and in the family car racing business, which, like NASCAR, is thriving. In fact, there are no fewer than 18 NASCAR families, each of which has had more than one generation of drivers on the circuit, often driving and supporting each other in the same races, though sometimes for different teams.

It’s those family values that impress fans like Michael Schoultz of Appleton, Wisconsin, who discovered NASCAR while serving in the US Navy aboard the USS Charlotte. “Every Sunday, everything stopped for the races, and pretty soon it grew on me.” Like other racing buffs, Schoultz has made the trip to North Carolina before, and he'll be back again. He admires the way drivers treat their fans, and believes they’re better role models than their counterparts in the NBA and NFL. And like many of the estimated 50 million Americans that follow the sport, Schoultz happily admits “it’s become a bit of an addiction.”

Stock car racing began in the Prohibition era, when moonshine was brought down from the mountains by men driving cars fast enough to outrun the police. On their days off, these same men would pit their Chevys against another guy’s Ford on crude dirt tracks. Things were pretty loose in those days, with few rules and shady promoters who often absconded with the winnings. Eventually, a racing promoter named Big Bill France Sr decided to create a racing series with rules and award an annual Cup. In 1949 the first NASCAR-sanctioned race was run. It’s carried on in much the same fashion, with Ford Tauruses going bumper to bumper with Chevrolet Monte Carlos, in the average guy’s version of car racing.

Just a short drive from Concord is Mooresville, where 50 race shops line the streets of suburban industrial parks. Mooresville is also famed for a couple of car museums - the North Carolina Racing Hall of Fame and Memory Lane - both of them loaded bumper to bumper with famous NASCARs, race memorabilia and vintage cars that have starred in movies like Days of Thunder and Driving Miss Daisy. In Mooresville, streets bear names like Gasoline Alley and Performance Road, and restaurant walls are covered in racing hoods and crumpled fenders. We sat in Poppa’s Hot Dogs, refueling for the rest of the day, while keeping an eye out for race teams, who frequent the joint. Another eatery, Lancasters Bar-B-Que, is where you can sample famous North Carolina-style barbecue while sitting inside a racing bus surrounded by race paraphernalia that covers the walls and hangs from the ceiling.

After dinner, locals pointed us toward Hickory Motor Speedway, a legendary short track where the offspring of big-name racers hone their skills on Saturday nights. Hickory is stock car racing the way it used to be, with cheap admission, a snack bar serving up fried OREO’s, pork cracklings and key lime pie, and Miss Hickory Motor Speedway who hands out the trophies. More than anything, Hickory is a place to see how NASCAR got its family-friendly reputation. Dozens of families spend their Saturday nights here, sprawled over the concrete stands, their baby strollers, coolers and lawn chairs around them. As we soaked up the atmosphere, a young man proposed to his girlfriend over the PA system. To hoots and hollers from the crowd, the couple hopped into the backseat of the official pace car, where they spent the rest of the night being chauffered around the track in grand style.

That night we watched all five racing series being run - the PRO-4’s, Late Models, Super Trucks, Limited Late Models and Hobby cars. And with each race, we learned more about racing. Every race started with a few slow laps led by the pace car until the green flag was waved, then the high whine of the cars would rise to a deafening pitch, and the race was on.

Our favourite was the Super Trucks, whose winner - a tiny, fresh-faced 17 year-old girl - told the crowd that her Poppa taught her everything she knows. Her two brothers, leaning back casually on the truck, arms crossed in front of them, were pride personified. And as she posed with her dad for a photo in Victory Lane, it all seemed too good to be true.

We stayed a bit longer, until the sky went inky black, and the car trailers started pulling out of the track, bound for home.

IF YOU GO:

Getting here: US Airways flies daily from Toronto to Charlotte.

When to go: Avoid May and October race weeks at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. It’s impossible to get rooms, tickets and rental cars during these peak times and the Pit Pass and tours of Lowe’s Motor Speedway aren’t offered either. Best times to see stock car races on local speedways are Friday and Saturday nights. Check www.lowesmotorspeedway.com for its summer event schedule. Also Hickory Motor Speedway (www.hickorymotorspeedway.com) and Concord Motor Sportpark (www.concordmotorsportpark.com). The best time to see teams at the race shops are Mondays and Tuesdays when they check in after weekend races.

Pit Pass Package: The Pit Pass gets a family of four two nights in a hotel with breakfast, plus racing attractions such as: tour of Lowe's Motor Speedway, NASCAR Speedpark Day Pass, Sam Bass Gallery, Hendrick Motorsports Museum, Team Caliber, Backing Up Classics Museum, discount shopping and dining and much more. The average price for a three-day, two-night Pit Pass Package with admission to all sites is US$357 per family. Visit www.pitpasscabarrus.com for more details or call 1-800-848-3743.

Information: Call 1-800-VISIT-NC or visit www.visitnc.com for the 2004 North Carolina Travel Guide and map. For Mooresville info, visit www.racecityusa.org. Canadians can get a 2-for-1 coupon for the Lowes Motor Speedway tour in the Carolina Drives Homes the Value for Canadians coupon brochure. To obtain one, call (416) 622-1680.