This Sunday 250,000 people are expected to attend the Daytona 500, the most famous race in America’s Nascar series. It’s interesting to speculate how many might be from the US political elite surreptitiously getting a handle on ‘Trumpism’. Because Nascar is Trump country.
It’s the 58th year of this salute to the uniquely American obsession with stock car racing, a 500-mile stamina test both for the drivers manoeuvring around a massive oval in what are, by Formula 1 standards, crates, and those inside that oval who get to raise a little hell.
They used to be America’s ignored, or at least felt like they were. But not anymore. If elites used to scoff at the easy Nascar caricature of white yokels steering loud rickety death-traps through the rust-belt in a none too subtle nod to the sport’s bootlegging roots, who’s laughing now?
That disaffected, angry white blue-collar vote has got a billionaire bullshit-artist into the Oval Office: ignoring such a stark retort to those prepared to dismiss a vast swathe who get their thrills from the unfashionable is difficult.
The Daytona 500 was once admiringly labelled “Redneck Super Bowl” by, of all people, Kid Rock, the faux-Lynyrd Skynrd rock star who, in a reflection of the turbulent political times we live in, has even been mooted as a possible Republican candidate for the US senate next year.
And Nascar might well be the venue of choice for those who think the Kentucky Derby infield is too classy: but simply labelling it some dumb sweet home Daytona for good ole boys does it an injustice.
On Sunday, there will be those who argue the real story is in the stands, like that’s some original idea and not recognition of sport’s perpetual reality. Without an audience sport is just activity. What’s always fascinating is the relationship between the two, and Nascar is particularly so in motor-racing terms because of what it doesn’t do.
Flame-outs
Because if F1 is primarily about technology, Nascar is about entertainment.
It always has been, ever since an Irish-American mechanic, Bill France, decided to put a formal sheen on the all-American impulse to bling-up cars and race ’em loud and proud: and if there were fights and flame-outs along the way, well, all to the good.
Depending on which set of stats you want to believe, Nascar comes second only to the NFL in terms of numbers flocking to watch US sport. And if both seem incomprehensible to many of us here, that hardly matters to a constituency that has always vehemently believed in America first.
"Nascar and the Daytona 500 are about as American as you can get," said the former senator and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, whose book, Blue Collar Conservatives, is apparently the closest thing to a political bible Trump has.
But if Trump is in the White House through pandering to a nostalgia for supposedly better and simpler times, where technology was an aid rather than an exercise in cutting the employment ground out from underneath your own feet, then Nascar’s retro instinct is a lot less cynical.
It’s still mostly about finding the best driver, not the best car, which makes it a throwback within the ‘brmm-brmm’ game and all the more refreshing for it.
Sure it’s cheap too which helps, but it’s not just about money. Nascar is rolling in it thanks to a long-term TV deal. Yet it has consciously kept putting the brakes on the remorseless tide of technical evolution which characterises F1 and instead goes out of its way to keep its racing a human exercise.
Technically, the cars lining up in Daytona are crude, gaudily painted pig-iron. They have chassis that have more in common with an Astra than the space shuttle. But they are cars that Tex in the stands can relate to since the most important computer inside the car remains the driver.
This is racing where starting outside the first three rows doesn’t automatically make victory impossible. Overtaking actually happens – a lot. Different people actually get to win sometimes. Cars get close to each other, sometimes even touch. The rules are relatively straightforward and the jargon involved doesn’t require an engineering degree to understand.
Dangerous jalopies
It’s motor racing as it used to be, a hopelessly retro hark back to when competition was about drivers and those in charge recognised it behoved them to produce a product that ordinary people actually loved to watch for the excitement of watching drivers take dangerous jalopies close to the edge.
Of course, there can barely be an F1 fan worldwide who hasn’t at some stage looked down on Nascar as some interminable common-as-muck exercise in engineering vulgarity.
Technically there is certainly no comparison; even culturally it's the same. The idea of a fleet of expensive hot-to-trot Eurotrash types diverting their uber-yachts from Monaco to 'Yeehaw-ville' is as incongruous as stock car racing exerting as firm a grip on the public imagination anywhere else but the US.
Perhaps that’s why the France family’s recent attempts to prettify aspects of Nascar appear to have backfired. Fiddly rule changes don’t seem to have worked. The use of exotic foreign drivers to attract more overseas attention has instead seemed to alienate the sport’s core base, which is hardly an unfamiliar concept anymore.
Such ‘America First’ instincts only strengthen the Nascar caricature and make it a sideshow for much of the rest of the world. But scoffing isn’t going to loosen its hold on the popular imagination in the US for the simple reason that it remains a competitive test and sporting spectacle based on driver rather than machine.
That might make it hopelessly unfashionable but there’s an honesty about this particular retro instinct that makes it refreshing.
