The NASCARing of the Northwest

It's Sunday, and Seattle race-car fans have gathered for worship at a North End NASCAR bar. In the parking lot, big trucks and SUVs outnumber the Japanese sedans they could crush like Godzilla. Inside, folks belly up beneath a sign with a Ben Franklin quote ("Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy") and a NASCAR betting board, to razz each other with one eye on the TV's racetrack action.

"I used to live in Arkansas. . . . "

"Is that where your mom and dad got divorced, and they were still brother and sister?"

"They were cousins, dammit!"

The ex-Arkansan is a die-hard fan—"I've got, like, 400 hats, and I bet 50 of 'em are NASCAR!" He tries to explain that stock-car racing, which first kicked up dust on moonshiners' back roads, has hit the interstate and zoomed nationwide, overtaking pro football as the new American religion. "I used to truck drive, and we'd watch NFL at bars. Now, you look for a bar, and it's got eight TVs, and seven are on NASCAR and one waaay in the corner is on NFL." And if you look for the next bar, a couple blocks south on Bothell Way, you'll find it is also a NASCAR bar; inside, a dentally challenged guy growls his explanation for the NFL's decline and NASCAR's ascent: "It's cuz football is European. And this [sloshing his beer toward the screen] is American!"

NASCAR—the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (no, it doesn't stand for Non-Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks) is also, increasingly, Northwestern. By Christmas, the Daytona, Fla.–based International Speedway Corp. (ISC) hopes to announce its new Seattle-area NASCAR racetrack site, in either Snohomish, Kitsap, or Thurston counties. The sport's fastest-rising rookie is Enumclaw's own cherubic cutie Kasey Kahne, 24, the cover boy of American Thunder magazine, and 70,000 fans may be thundering his name soon at a track near you. Seattle research firm Berk & Associates estimates that if the Puget Sound track could sell out two national races and less-than-half-fill one local event per year, it would rake in revenues of about $87 million to $121 million a year, more than $65 million of it new money from out-of-state fans. The upbeat ISC claims the total economic impact of a typical NASCAR racetrack can reach $400 million a year. And the flag-waving crowd loves that NASCAR does it all without fancy-pants French Grand Prix fag wagons or Japanese rice rockets—just good, honest, red-blooded muscle cars from Detroit, souped-up versions of what they've got in the garage and polish each weekend more passionately than they caress their own wives.

The Dixiefication of America

"Get the folks at Starbucks involved with this speedway!" urges Mark Howell, author of the NASCAR history From Moonshine to Madison Avenue. "Putting their name on a race or a race team would be a huge opportunity for exposure! As long as fans threw their empty cups away properly, I don't think NASCAR would have a problem at all."

Three Puget Sound counties are vying to become home to a new Northwest NASCAR racetrack—part of the sport's strategy to broaden its reach beyond its Southern-fried base.

But NASCAR fans are notorious for pelting drivers with Budweiser cans for being insufficiently all-American. Littering, open defiance of public niceness, and consumption of nonimported, nonmicrobrew beer: What could be more un-Seattle? University of Cincinnati sociologist Rhys Williams sees such traditions as Southern in nature, and NASCAR's spread as a Dixiefication of the nation—an exporting of "this cultural ethos of guns, cars, and Republican politics and masculinity that just has a stranglehold on the South."

How will this historic cultural collision play out here? Will Latte Alley turn into Thunder Road? Will NASCAR Dads drive out Soccer Moms in a state that sent one to the U.S. Senate? Are the stock-car invaders white-trash Visigoths, "some kind of manifestation of the animal irresponsibility of the lower orders" (as Tom Wolfe put it in a classic 1965 NASCAR essay)? Will yahoos who don't use Yahoo! fume up our pristine air, pinch our uppity educated women on the butt, fire Smith & Wessons from the Smith Tower, replace our rainbow coalitions with rainbow oil stains, and violate sound ordinances by gunning the gas-guzzlingest cars in the universe? Is it time to retire our colors and hoist the Confederate flag over Olympia? Or must we throw a red flag at the blue-collar, red-state rednecks for crashing the green party of Ecotopia?

Relax, says state Rep. Hans Dunshee, a Democrat from racetrack-coveting Snohomish. "I don't think it's like the South is finally winning the Civil War or anything. There are plenty of blue-state people at [NASCAR] events. You have the wrong image of Democrats, because Democrats also include the union member who hunts and watches NASCAR and drinks beer." If the fans seem alien to us, it's because we're alienated from the culture beyond the borders of King County. "Bluntly, you come from a place where there are lots of Free Tibet stickers. There are a lot more 3s and 8s [the car numbers of late racing saint Dale Earnhardt and son Dale Earnhardt Jr.] in my district than Free Tibet stickers." If a NASCAR track ever does come to exurban Puget Sound, predicts Dunshee, "I could take the 80,000 people in the stand[s] , and I'll bet the majority of them will have voted for a Democratic candidate out of Washington."