Red Flag at Loudon | Yankee Classic: June 2001

It was the Friday before Mother’s Day, sunny, the first big event of the season at the New Hampshire International Speedway (NHIS). Vendors traded briskly. T-shirts, caps, die-cast cars. Buy your favorite driver here. After breakfast, inhabitants of the RV campsite — several thousand pioneers who would reconstruct their town a dozen times throughout the season — moved outward to join a stream of day-trippers. Together they made the final distance on foot, to the center of it all, the dry man-made eye in the earth.

Inside the oval, teams plotted the strategies that would determine the outcome of the next day’s $700,000 purse. The cars, more capricious than their drivers, were weighed and corner-weighted, every bolt adjusted, while the drivers themselves deliberated on the peculiarities of the track, described by one veteran as “tricky.”

Among those drivers — young men cut in the well-groomed NASCAR mold — one stood out, if not by virtue of his smile (for handsome smiles are in as wide supply in NASCAR as ready handshakes), then because of his lineage. Adam Petty, the 19-year-old fourth-generation driver of stock-car racing’s most famous family, would take the wheel of the #45 Sprint PCS Chevy in the Busch 200. Adam’s great-grandfather had been one of the sport’s earliest drivers, and his grandfather, Richard Petty, had won seven NASCAR Winston Cup championships. His father, Kyle Petty, was himself an accomplished driver. Adam had his own aspirations. Earlier that week he’d written in his online racing journal: … I’ll talk to you later after New Hampshire…. I have a good feeling that it is our turn this week. God Bless, Adam.

Some time around noon Petty climbed through the window of #45. His crew strapped him in, and he rolled from the infield to join other cars already on the one-mile track. He drove around a couple of times, zigzagging his tires to deepen their bite. Then, on the front straightaway, he brought his car to speed in a burst of atomized carbon that made fans in the stands sit up. At the end of the stretch, Petty slowed for turns one and two. On the back straightaway he again built speed, perhaps as much as 150 miles per hour. At the end of that stretch the car did not slow. Instead, it brushed the wall in turn three, spun, then struck the wall hard.

By the time rescue workers reached him, Adam Petty was unresponsive. Within minutes he was dead.

After its roof was removed to extricate Petty, the car was draped in a tarp and hauled off the track. Practice continued, and fans, many of whom had not witnessed the crash because of its location, were not informed of Petty’s death. Within hours the wall on turn three had been repainted white. The next day’s race proceeded on schedule.

When news of Petty’s death was made public, the media charged race officials with insensitivity. Immediately, NASCAR and the track closed ranks. No one, they said, would mourn Adam Petty more than they. But his death was what it was, a tragedy caused by a stuck throttle. The condition of the track was fine. Configuration, fine. There was a race to be run, and it was run. The implication was clear: The media’s reaction was yet more evidence of a great cultural divide, illustrative of the skepticism with which a liberal press regards widespread popular phenomena such as religious fundamentalism or gun ownership — anything, that is, outside its ken.

Eight weeks later, July 7, another practice Friday, this time for the Winston Cup 300, NASCAR’s major league to the Busch minors. On Sunday, a crowd of 100,000 would turn the speedway into New Hampshire’s second-largest city, and the place would be awash in the riptide of noise and speed that is a Cup race.

That Friday, crews were prepping cars, while in the media center Richard Petty held a press conference. It was the first time any member of the Petty family had been to NHIS since Adam’s death. They were all struggling, Richard Petty said. Mostly, they were trying to stay busy. He said, You can’t blame racing. You can’t blame the track. You can’t blame the circumstances. It was meant to be and it happened.

Meanwhile, stock cars circled the oval. Around 11 a.m., the 1998 Winston Cup Rookie of the Year, a young man from Indiana by the name of Kenny Irwin, climbed into his #42 BellSouth Monte Carlo. After he’d rolled from the infield to join the others, Irwin drove around a couple of times, zigzagging his tires to deepen their bite. On the front stretch, he brought his car to speed then slowed for the curve. On the back straightaway he again built speed. At the end of that stretch the car did not slow. Instead, it struck the wall of turn three and flipped, skidding roof-down along the track. By the time rescue workers reached him, Kenny Irwin was unresponsive. Minutes later he was dead.

Almost immediately the plug on the TV feed to the media center was interrupted. Practice continued, and fans were not informed of Irwin’s death. The flags over the track remained at full staff. The wall on turn three was repainted white. And when NASCAR and track officials finally began to talk, the accident was again blamed on a stuck throttle.

If NHIS had eagerly awaited the specter of itself beamed down into millions of homes as the venue of America’s fastest-growing sport, it had never anticipated this. Second Driver Dies on Same Turn at New Hampshire International Speedway. Worse, the media were denouncing the track’s collusion with NASCAR in suppressing the human toll exacted by stock-car racing. The Concord Monitor accused race officials of maintaining police-level control on information and fostering a culture of collective amnesia. Why? Profits were at stake — for the track, for NASCAR, and for its corporate sponsors.

This much was certain: Two young drivers had died under virtually identical circumstances in two months. It was too much, even in a sport where risk is a given. The ranks did not close so easily the second time around. Drivers and team members wanted answers. If the throttles were at fault, what could be done to prevent them from sticking? Many wondered aloud about the Loudon track, with its square corners and lack of banking. Some pointed fingers directly at turn three. Said one car owner: That corner … it’s who is the bravest and gets in the deepest there. It’s always been that way.

Others clung to the notion that the deaths were nothing more than a terrible coincidence. Among them was NHIS’s owner himself, Bob Bahre (pronounced Bear), who insisted that jammed throttles caused the accidents. Even so, when NASCAR made the resoundingly unpopular decision to run the September Winston Cup race with carburetor restrictor plates that would reduce top speeds 10 to 20 miles per hour — this in spite of the fact that restrictor plates had never been used on a track shorter than two miles — Bob Bahre acquiesced. He said, If it’s got to be that, it’s got to be that. And after the race, which did in fact result in unexciting, bumper-to-bumper racing, Bahre, who might have been the most upset of all, was not. NASCAR did the right thing, he said. In the uncertainty that continues to surround the deaths of Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin, and by extension the future of the Loudon track itself, this much seems clear: Bob Bahre is a man who knows when to challenge and when to go along.

• • •

Consult a map of Loudon, New Hampshire, and you get an idea of NHIS’s presence there. The town, population 4,650, totals 35 square miles, a sizable northeast portion of which is the speedway, more than a thousand acres butted up against the Canterbury line. Just down the road is the Lakes Region Greyhound Park. Five miles to the nearby Shaker Village. Go in person to Loudon, an unremarkably pretty town 14 miles north of Concord. Pass myriad wind-torn banners, Welcome, Race Fans, a Jeff Gordon Pepsi machine, several souvenir shops. You begin to get a big feeling, as if you’re approaching the ocean or some other colossus. You get that feeling long before the speedway itself looms, a veritable city skyline with sweeping eight-story grandstands. Big. Welcome, Race Fans.

The track, a woman in the nearby Loudon town office will tell you, is a good neighbor. It contributes $200,000 a year for police and fire protection and makes up about 14 percent of the local tax base. Yes, there’s some noise and traffic during the summer months, but all in all, things work out. Consider, too, the money that track visitors spend. While it’s difficult to determine Loudon’s exact portion of the pie, the total statewide last year amounted to $108 million, three-quarters of which came from out-of-state visitors.

And NHIS, Bob Bahre wants to point out, takes little in return. Still, not every town would tolerate a superspeedway in its midst. Loudon puts up with NHIS in spite of the fact that for several weekends a year, long stretches of Route 106 are virtually impassable, puts up with a wholesale trade of quietude and a certain diminution in the quality of life for reasons that are varied and complex and have to do with Bob Bahre’s considerable charm and the history of the site itself.

First, history. In an earlier incarnation, the Loudon track was the kind of place where by night teenagers partied, and by day the adventuresome went “mud-bogging,” an enterprise in which drivers ram trucks into deep muck at high speeds. To be sure, Loudon had a track — a serpentine affair that hosted the occasional motorcycle race — but in the words of the man who would turn the speedway into New England’s largest sports facility with greater seating capacity than Fenway Park and Foxboro Stadium combined (with, on many occasions, all of those seats sold and occupied), the former Bryar Motorsports Park was “a real hellhole.” But Bahre has the knack of seeing beyond the obvious, and in Loudon he recognized some distinct logistical virtues. The track was located an hour from Boston on Interstate 93, with a good system of feeder roads; the Loudon zoning board was likely to grant permits to improve the site (and Bahre figured the existence of one track would temper public ire over the building of another); and perhaps most important, Bahre had signed an agreement prohibiting him from operating another track near the Oxford Plains Speedway in Maine after he sold it in 1986 to a young entrepreneur who rightly feared Bahre’s commercial proximity.

Second, Bob Bahre. From the start, when as a teenager growing up on a tobacco farm outside Hartford, Connecticut, he talked his mother into putting down a few dollars on a welder, it was obvious Bahre was someone you don’t bet against. From his earnings doing welding jobs for neighbors, he bought junked cars for $5 apiece, salvaged their parts, and built hay trailers, which he sold for $300. Eventually, after a series of leverages involving corn choppers, backhoes, septic tanks, and the various proceeds from each, Bob Bahre began developing real estate and making real money. He still is; in addition to the Loudon track, he owns 600 apartment units and five shopping centers.

Bahre, you may imagine, is not a man of many foibles. A straight arrow who claims to never have smoked a cigarette or tasted alcohol, he’s not a man of many hobbies either. Other than work and family, Bahre’s sole love is for cars — in particular, for stock-car racing. One weekend in 1963, when Bahre went north to Oxford Plains for a race and found the owner wanting to sell, his dual passions for cars and enterprise intersected. And Maine, he decided, was a good place to raise a family. Bahre bought the speedway, eventually moving his wife, Sandy, and their two children to nearby Paris Hill, into the former home of Hannibal Hamlin. After he’d razed and rebuilt Oxford Plains, Bahre proceeded to run the show himself, which included refereeing from a block in the middle of the track, 35 weekends a year for 23 years.

It would seem part of Bahre’s success is keeping one eye on what’s in front of him and the other on the next important deal. So it was that by the time Bahre sold Oxford Plains, he had in mind something grander — a superspeedway, a big-time track like Daytona. Right around then he heard about Loudon, 70 miles across the New Hampshire border. Once he’d decided the place would work, he proceeded in classic Bahre style. When Loudon firefighters expressed concern about not being able to adequately protect the track’s proposed ten-story press box, Bahre asked what it would take to solve the problem. The answer: a 110-foot truck and ladder. Bahre turned to his son, Gary, who is now NHIS’s president, and said, Write them a check. When neighbors in Canterbury sued Loudon for granting Bahre permission to build the track, he met with them over dinner. In response to the multiplicity of their worries, Bahre agreed to limit the amount of beer NHIS sold and to pay for what could be done to muffle noise (not much, as it turned out: The oval was sunk 18 inches into the ground and billboards were placed at both ends). The complainants dropped their suit and Bahre demonstrated his gratitude by paying for their attorney.

On June 5, 1990, nearly 10 months after the groundbreaking, New Hampshire Governor Judd Gregg presided over the ribbon cutting at NHIS, inaugurating the state’s newest source of revenue. Contractors had moved 10 million cubic yards of earth to build the speedway. They’d also blasted 30,000 cubic yards of rock ledge on its north side to make room for the now infamous third turn.

At 73, Bob Bahre still works from before dawn until after dark. His South Paris office has the animated feel of a well-inhabited place. Piles of papers are strewn on the floor, a treadmill doubles as a coat rack, and a sofa with worn pillows looks as if it’s been slept on more than a few times. Bahre himself, in khakis and scuffed dress shoes, gives the impression of a weary Santa, rummaging through boxes to find souvenirs for a visitor — beer glasses and a jacket emblazoned with the Pennzoil logo. A shock of white hair dips over his blue eyes. There’s a rock-candy quality about him — hard, but sweet.

His answers to questions are laconic. He does not elaborate, does not fall for the tactic of letting silence linger. On the track’s fiduciary relationship with Loudon: We get nothing for nothing over there. His management style: We try to treat people fair and decent. Spiritual beliefs: We all worship the same guy. Anybody that doesn’t believe there’s a bigger boss is nuts. How the track was designed: We went by the ass of our pants. On any topic he wishes to avoid: What do you mean by that?

These last two suggest a point of some contention — the possibility of a design flaw in the track. Throughout, Bob Bahre has maintained there is nothing wrong with NHIS, not with the tightness of its turns nor with its lack of banking. “There’s flatter tracks than this,” he says. “Milwaukee is perfectly flat. There’s Phoenix, which is flatter. You’ve got Martinsville. Christ, you’ve got flat tracks.”

Well, yes, the banking at Martinsville is the same as at NHIS, but the track is shorter, .526 mile to Loudon’s 1.058, and Martinsville’s stretches are 800 feet as opposed to 1,500, resulting in average speeds about 35 miles per hour slower. Phoenix, while unbanked on its straightaways, has a different configuration than NHIS, more circular, without the same square turns.

Bahre doesn’t want to hear about it. NHIS is safe, period — and in fairness, its 11-year record is better than average other than the deaths of Petty and Irwin, neither of which was NASCAR-related. All the same, in spite of his intractability (and who, honestly, expects him to admit the project that represents the achievement of a lifetime might be mortally flawed?) Bob Bahre seems at heart a kind man. Talking about the accidents, his eyes fill. “You think about it every day. Adam Petty was a sweetheart, the kind of kid you just want to give a big hug to.” Another anecdote Bahre repeats three times: He’s learned from Irwin’s father, with whom he speaks regularly, that Kenny’s sister recently gave birth to a son. “His voice was so bubbly,” says Bahre. “It was the first time I’d heard him like that since the accident.”

Almost everyone, it seems, loves Bob Bahre. In fact, Bahre managed to get not one but two coveted Winston Cup dates due to his ability to form and sustain relationships. While he was building Loudon, Bahre had no guarantee of a race date from any sanctioning body, let alone NASCAR, which historically eschewed northern locations as Winston Cup sites. But Bahre had an important friend in NASCAR president Bill France Jr., whom he’s known since the early days at Oxford Plains.

It is difficult to overstate the France family’s presence in the world of stock-car racing. In 1948, when racing was moving into adolescence from its origins as a by-product of bootlegging (the first stock cars were souped up to run moonshine on backcountry roads), Bill France Sr. formed NASCAR, ostensibly to protect drivers and fans from unethical promoters. Bill France Jr. took over from his father in 1972, continuing to govern NASCAR as a cross between a monarchy and a protectorate. In business terms at least, NASCAR is a formidable success. Still family-owned, the regulator of the nation’s most highly attended sporting events last year posted merchandise earnings alone of $1.1 billion.

Bob Bahre had everything finished at NHIS — some 25 buildings altogether — and was already hosting IndyCar and motorcycle races before Bill France ever saw it. The timing of France’s first visit to Loudon is perhaps indicative of the mutual back-scratching intrinsic to NASCAR. In September 1992, NASCAR ran its last race at Oxford Plains, then under the ownership of Michael Liberty, to whom Bob Bahre had sold it in 1986. Liberty had been told NASCAR would no longer do business with him because he’d decided to take on a series sanctioned by a competitor. A week after that final race, Bill France visited NHIS. A month later, NASCAR announced that Winston Cup racing was coming to New England for the 1993 season. (Liberty is not among the legions of people who love Bob Bahre. He has, in fact, filed suit against him, charging among other things interference with advantageous relationships and violations of the Sherman Act relating to monopolization.)

Not long after France gave Bob Bahre his first Winston Cup race, Bahre acquired a second one by buying a share of the North Wilkesboro (North Carolina) Speedway and transferring its Cup date to NHIS. How he accomplished this bit of magicianship is unclear, but what seems certain is that if not for Bahre, there would be no Winston Cup racing in New Hampshire. As one NASCAR official said: Without Bahre they would not be interested “in the facility or in the market area.”

Ben Blake, senior editor of Racer magazine, puts it another way. “Until recently, NASCAR was a Confederate sport,” he says. In some ways it seems it still is. Most of the racing venues remain outside of the North, with a preponderance in the deep South. The drivers, too, are primarily Southern and white. There’s also a heavy Christian influence. If you wonder, turn on ESPN the afternoon of a Cup race. Were it not for the techno backdrop, it could be another era. Drivers as homogeneously attractive as Miss America contestants credit their fortune to hard work and God. There’s car owner Joe Gibbs, who coached the Washington Redskins to three Super Bowl wins before turning his sights on NASCAR, equating his points-leading driver, Bobby Labonte, with any top quarterback. Labonte’s crew chief comes on to praise the intervention of a higher power. Driver Dale Jarrett, 1999 NASCAR Winston Cup champion, furthers the sentiment by saying he’s grateful “our children can grow up in a Christian atmosphere in NASCAR.” Dale’s father, Ned Jarrett, smiles down from the media tower, where he’s announcing the race. Ned Jarrett himself won the Cup in 1961, when Dale was five years old. In fact, father-father and brother-brother combos abound among drivers and crew members. As one driver says in his Carolinian drawl, Racing and family go together.

Family, God, country. Then there’s the corollary to patriotism itself in NASCAR’s homage to the automobile, that most American of commodities, and not just to any automobile but to the “stock car,” the Taurus or Monte Carlo that, minus a few dozen modifications, fans can buy, too. And do buy, because NASCAR has a dog-loyal following. Three-quarters of NASCAR fans shop for products from companies that back racing. Sponsors like those numbers, and they should: $10 million a year to have your logo painted on a car that has the attention of millions of people for hours every week is a pretty good deal.

Indeed, what’s happened to the economic fabric of NASCAR has been described as Tobacco Road Meets Wall Street. Many team sponsors are corporate big boys — among them Kodak, Panasonic, and McDonald’s — which is particularly impressive considering that early on, support was limited to the three Bs: beer, butts, and beef. That NASCAR has become a popular market for products as ubiquitous as blue jeans and shaving cream indicates how mainstream it has become. In fact, with 2,200 sanctioned races a year at more than 128 racetracks in 40 states, NASCAR is fast eclipsing football as the sports world’s biggest moneymaker.

Still, if the numbers of NASCAR are easy to pin down, its huge popular appeal is not. In part, the meaning of NASCAR is elusive because it defies familiar niches of classification. Is stock-car racing a sport? Its competitive dimension would define it as such, though some might argue that its limited athleticism and the centrality of machines do not. Is it a hobby? A quest for vicarious danger? Too limited a definition, and too simplistic, respectively. Scholars posit that car racing is a kind of ritual in which men tame wild, nonhuman things — similar to the rodeo or bullfight — but the synchronicity of car and man that is necessary to win a race suggests that even this explanation falls short.

In many ways, NASCAR is closer to a movement, underpinned by ideology — in this case, a 1950s-style conservatism combined with a belief in the redemptive qualities of free enterprise and driven by passion, here, a love of men in fast machines. A movement suggests broad appeal, and for all its lack of diversity, NASCAR is deliberately nonclassist, probably stemming from the fact that from the outset its devotees have had anxiety about racing’s place on the status ladder. Even now, it seems rarified types do not generally mess around with cars, even to watch them on a track, while racing fans, the men at least, are likely to have grown up tinkering with engines. Which is to say: There’s more than a hint of anticulture in NASCAR. Plenty of monied fans may sit in the stands (or in the luxury suites), but they’re not generally the same folk you find exiting the symphony on a Saturday night.

A movement also accounts for fanaticism at its fringes, and for the several million members of the RV community that follow the circuit. NASCAR is an extreme way of life, even a kind of calling. As for the other 40 million U.S. adults who profess an interest in stock-car racing, the very scale of NASCAR suggests both its appeal and the reason for that appeal. In the midst of something so immense, who can help but feel a powerful sense of belonging?

And danger and risk — where do these fit? Those who are not fans suggest people go to the races to watch cars crash. A few ghouls surely do, though they’d be better off cruising the nation’s highways, because racing is not nearly as perilous as opinion would have it. There’s also the criticism that when a driver does die, there’s a rush to memorialize him and move on. Even Bob Bahre, for all his sadness over the deaths of Petty and Irwin, shifted quickly to talk about the dangers inherent in skiing and four-wheeling. But was it insensitivity or something else? Isn’t it possible that the opposite is true, that the turning away suggests not callousness, but a fear of being undone?

Race fans, after all, come to the track to watch human beings. The T-shirts, jackets, posters — these have the visages of men, not cars. That there’s a powerful identification between NASCAR fans and drivers is obvious, and if that identification is the result of extraordinary access on the part of drivers or even an artifact of brilliant marketing, it is real nonetheless. NASCAR fans see their drivers as heroes but also as fathers, husbands, friends. The outpouring of grief that followed the death of racing legend Dale Earnhardt in February, after he crashed into a wall on the final turn of the final lap of the Daytona 500, was compared to the public’s reaction to the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Princess Diana. Rather than caring too little about these men so like themselves, maybe race fans care too much.

• • •

Three hours before race time, Ricky Craven kicks back in a director’s chair outside the rig that hauls his #50 car from track to track. On Winston Cup weekends, haulers double as team headquarters. Today 40 of them are drawn powwow style in the Phoenix International Raceway infield.

Craven’s rig is packed with members of the MidWest Transit team for which he drives. His wife, Cathleen, and their kids are here, as are miscellaneous well-wishers, car owner Hal Hicks, and his wife, Jeannie. Nearby, crew members inch their way through a 20-page checklist for Craven’s Chevy Monte Carlo, which has been hugely modified — stripped, engine torqued, roll cage installed — to endure the rigors of the track. Jacks ratchet; drills whir. Slim Shadyplays on a radio.

A puppyish public relations guy fends off fans lucky enough to have wangled garage passes. Craven signs his name for two women who giggle and tuck the autographs into their purses, signs again for an older man. The man wishes him luck, and Craven earnestly thanks him. Earnestness, it seems, is another prerequisite for NASCAR drivers.

Growing up in Newburgh, Maine — which advertises itself as having a few hundred residents, 75 moose, and one Winston Cup racer — Craven had the same start many drivers do, just north instead of south. His father raced stock cars, and Craven spent time at the nearby track. He learned to drive young, on Sundays when his family went out for dinner and he feigned sick. After they’d left, Craven would climb into his father’s cattle truck and take off. Once, he says, the ride on the dirt roads was particularly bumpy, the truck not handling well at all. When he finally got out, he heard a shuffling sound. He opened the back. Cows: upright but displeased.

Craven’s a long way from Newburgh now, from NHIS, too, which he considers his home track. Even so, a Cup race is a transferable microcosm — same cars, same drivers, many of the same fans from week to week — so there’s much here that is familiar.

At any race, the inhabitants of the garage compose the track city’s most coveted neighborhood. Imagine concentric circles: the garage at the core surrounded by an infield crowded with people strolling and eating turkey drumsticks the size of T-ball bats; then the oval itself, preternaturally quiet in the hours before the race; and finally the grandstands, jammed, a sea of color. Tonight, in the area beyond the stands, beer will flow and the ground will pulse with music. An array of ATVs will zip along the makeshift roads. Kids will splash in portable pools while an older crowd cruises the concession alleys and the bars. But for now, all eyes are on the track. The scene is family-oriented, wholesome, the vices associated with racing seemingly well sublimated.

Across from Craven’s hauler, at an outdoor church service for crews and their families, every seat is taken. The pastor gives thanks for the weather, perfect after days of rain, then prays for the drivers’ safety in the coming race. There’s a chorus of “amens.” A couple of race cars roll by as a trio of tenors breaks into a hymn.

Craven and his family do not attend these trackside gatherings. “Our religion is a private thing,” Craven will explain. “I guess you’d say we’re Puritans.”

Inside the hauler, in the cushy lounge at the end, Craven’s eight-year-old daughter, Riley, is sketching. She draws and crosses out, draws and crosses out. Her mother sighs. “Like her father. A perfectionist.” Cathleen describes Ricky: stoic, serious, well-spoken. He has to be, she says, venturing forth with un-NASCAR-like candor: “NASCAR’s worked really hard to get rid of that redneck image. I mean, you’re not going to give a $10 million sponsorship to some idiot grease monkey.”

Indeed. Craven says that if he weren’t a race-car driver, he would be a businessman. Dressed in pressed khakis, with his well-cut hair and smooth face, he looks the part. “Actually, I could do anything,” he says. “I’m a competitor.” He seems that, too; there’s a brash, roosterish edge to him.

Riley tears a sheet from her pad. At a nearby table four-year-old Everett forms clay balls then pounds them flat. Usually the Cravens have a mobile home at races, and when they don’t it’s hard, three days in the public eye, no bad behavior allowed. Everett, especially, seems subdued. Later, when the cars are lining up for the start and he’s out there with the rest of the MidWest team, Everett will spark. He will hang on to his father’s window, play with the safety mesh, and run his fingers along the door opening. It will seem a driver could be born in a moment like that — the stands a cheering swell of people, race cars poised to fire up, and one of them your father’s.

But the Cravens don’t view stock-car racing in particularly romantic terms. “I’d rather Everett play golf,” Cathleen says. When they’re on the road, it’s work, though they try hard to have some fun. Tonight, if the headache Ricky gets from carbon monoxide isn’t too severe, they’ll meet some friends for dinner at a restaurant near their motel.

For now, Craven is in and out of the hauler, patting Everett’s head, sitting to admire Riley’s drawing, then getting up again. It’s hard to relax. In a short time he’ll pull on his fireproof suit and climb inside #50, where for the next few hours he’ll be bumped and jarred, subjected to temperatures sometimes high enough to adhere the soles of his boots to the car floor. Then there are the psychological pressures, not the least of which is the fact that Craven is having a mediocre season ($850,000 won in 1999, as opposed to $1.25 million in his best year). Not long ago, after he captured the 1995 Winston Cup Rookie of the Year title, car sponsors were vying for him. Then a crash in which he sustained head injuries sidelined him for two races in 1997 and kept him out of 12 more in 1998. He made a comeback at NHIS late in the ’98 season, but since then he has struggled to find the kind of daring, incisive driving that characterized his earlier years. No one’s talking about it today, but it’s clear the stakes are high.

Around 11 o’clock a guy named Mountain, the MidWest rig driver who doubles as team chef, begins laying steaks on the outside grill. Other teams are cooking, too; the air fills with the carbon-cousin scents of charred meat and gasoline. Hal Hicks, who dishes out $5 million a year to keep the team going, hovers nearby talking about why he hired Craven to drive for MidWest in the first place. Ricky, he says, is “one of the most underestimated drivers out there. He’s smart, he knows what’s what. He represents the new NASCAR.”

As meat starts coming off the grill, Hicks reaches into his pocket and drops a fistful of pills into his mouth. He swallows them without water, while his wife, Jeannie, watches. If Hicks forgot to take those pills, Jeannie would see to it that he did. It’s her role, she says, as an owner’s wife. “We take care of the little things like that.” Most NASCAR team wives are helpmates. Cathleen Craven looks after their children while Ricky races, although Cathleen says she’d like to write children’s books and intends someday to do it.

The team begins filling their plates with Mountain’s food. Another car rolls by, #27, the Pfizer/Viagra Pontiac, driven by the aptly named (and fortunately youthful) Mike Bliss. “Yeah, I take 250 milligrams of that, too. Ha,” says Hicks, then to the Viagra crew chief, “How’s it going?”

The chief stops. “Well, we’re having a little trouble keeping the roof down.” Everyone guffaws.

“You got any samples?” asks one of Craven’s crew. More laughter.

A few minutes later, Craven emerges from the hauler in his racing suit. He climbs into the waiting car, and for a moment there is unintended silence. Plates and drinks are hurriedly discarded. Then the crew surrounds him, and together they begin to roll him toward the track.

• • •

At the New Hampshire International Speedway, the 2001 season is packed. Almost every day from April to October there will be action: engine testing, vintage roadsters, go-carts, even the franchised Richard Petty Driving Experience, where for $1,199, you can sample 30 laps of “white-knuckled, heart-pounding speed.”

On July 22, the date of the track’s next Winston Cup 300, television will again beam the name of Loudon, New Hampshire, into millions of American homes. Some things about that day seem certain: The grandstands will be full (tickets are long sold out, with a 10,000-person waiting list), and the cars with their winsome drivers will take to the track at speeds in excess of 150 miles per hour. It’s certain, too, that the feel of the race will go deep and stay in some first-timers, the way it always has. Other things seem likely: Ricky Craven has signed on with a new team, and if things proceed as planned, will take the wheel of the #32 Tide Ford car. Kyle Petty will probably be driving Adam’s #45, and the stain where Kenny Irwin’s car finally came to rest will persist, despite workers’ best efforts to eliminate it.

All the same, much remains a mystery. No matter what NASCAR and NHIS say — and what they want to believe — questions persist about what took place last summer. Why, for example, has there been only conjecture about how the accidents occurred when such incidents are routinely reconstructed with far less evidence than was available here? Do race officials know more than they are telling? And if so, what purpose, ultimately, does such secrecy serve?

The future itself is unclear. Whether the oval will be altered, and what will happen if it’s not, will be determined, respectively, by NASCAR and by events beyond even its control. In the aftermath of Dale Earnhardt’s fatal crash the spotlight was squarely on what NASCAR would do to increase safety. Would walls be cushioned? Would drivers be mandated to wear specially designed helmets that some believe might have saved not only Earnhardt’s life, but also Adam Petty’s and Kenny Irwin’s?

How the NASCAR community will truly feel returning to the track where nearly identical deaths took place is difficult to gauge. Ricky Craven assumes the platitudinous stance when he says NHIS is safe, that he’s looking forward to a good race there. After last summer’s brief schism, the ranks have closed again.

Bob Bahre, the consummate host, says he, too, is anticipating the season. He says, We’ll do our best to make our guests happy. The race, Bahre promises, will be run without restrictor plates. Still, a certain tentative-ness is apparent at the Loudon office, Gary Bahre a bit too vehement when he dismisses the possibility of Loudon losing a Cup date: It couldn’t be further from my mind. He knows, of course, it’s not his call, that what NASCAR giveth, NASCAR can taketh away.

As for the fans who will drive hours to get to Loudon, sit in the clotted traffic on Route 106, buy T-shirts and caps, and rent scanners — what will they be thinking when they finally take their seats? Is it safe to say that if their gaze fixes on turn three they will dwell on it fleetingly then move on, adjusting their scanners to listen to their favorite driver and his crew, getting as close as possible to the inside of the car as it pulls onto the track?

In the end, what is NASCAR? Sport, ritual, a movement? Perhaps at its core, human existence — rising every morning and putting on the coffee — requires some degree of denial. Perhaps it’s a sign of wellness, the simultaneous embrace and rejection of peril, that final danger that will eventually come for each of us.

Maybe at the heart of NASCAR is the wish, however futile, for our heroes to be less mortal than we — the specter of risk an attraction because people go to the track not to watch men die, but to watch men drive too fast and not die. For in the grandiose spectatorship, in the naked commercialism of a Winston Cup race, isn’t there too a certain wistfulness? Log on to the Adam Petty Web site and you will see that he still lives there in the present tense. “I’m honored to be a Petty. My dad and grandfather put no pressure on me at all. I just do the best I can.”

Is NASCAR a phenomenon particular to our time and place? Probably not. But in this uncertain age, we are ever more vulnerable, more in need of heroes who can hurtle through space ahead of us. Maybe, finally, NASCAR in the year 2001 is who we are: enterprising, earnest, myopic, exposed. Which is to say, American.