Real-Life Days of Thunder

By David E. Thigpen

Like many Americans, Rusty Wallace likes to take the car for a spin on a Sunday afternoon. But Wallace is hardly your typical Sunday driver out on a jaunt in the countryside. Helmeted, buckled up and clad in a fireproof jumpsuit, he averages about 150 m.p.h. in his 670-horsepower gold-on-black Pontiac and is usually hotly pursued by a roaring pack of heavily decaled Chevys, Fords and Chryslers. A Wallace outing, in short, is like a scene from the current Tom Cruise movie about stock-car racing, Days of Thunder. And no wonder: Wallace is the world-champion stock-car driver, and his weekend driving last year earned him six victories and a record $2.2 million.

Days of Thunder has focused new attention on an old sport that is undergoing rapid transformation. Once a passion solely for the male tank-top, tattoo and feed-cap set in the rural South, stock-car racing is now going nationwide and upscale. This year more than 3 million fans in 16 states from Florida to Michigan to California will attend 29 races staged by the National Association of Stock-Car Auto Racing. That is more spectators per event than is averaged by pro football and major league baseball combined. Nearly 40% of audience members are women, up from 25% eight years ago. Televised coverage of this year's Daytona 500, the biggest race of the nine-month circuit, drew a higher rating than the National Basketball Association play-offs.

All of which is a long way from stock-car racing's roots in moonshining. During the 1930s and '40s, drivers running corn whisky from backwoods stills to thirsty customers needed their cars to be a little lighter and quicker than the sheriff's in order to remain in business. Bootleggers like the legendary Junior Johnson of Ronda, N.C., took to tearing out the radios, door handles, glass and backseats from "stock" cars (i.e., directly off showroom floors) and muscling up the engines in their own garages. Although Johnson had to take an enforced break from driving to serve a 10-month bootlegging sentence, his road skills won him 50 races on the NASCAR circuit. A cult developed around him and other cavalier drivers who flouted the law, pocketed good money, spit tobacco and always had great tales to tell.

But what was fascinating and colorful about stock-car racing also helped keep the sport provincial. "People used to think of stock-car driving as the kind of thing where you roll your cigarettes up in your sleeve and go out for a Saturday night bash-up," recalls Wallace, 33, whose fresh face suggests a fast-track Wall Street trainee rather than a fast-lane white knuckler. "The side of your car usually had something like JOE'S GARAGE on it."

Big advertisers were the first to notice the changing audience and begin pumping money into the sport. The $6 million aggregate winners' purse of a decade ago has ripened into a juicy $21 million. Racing teams now have 30 full-time employees and budgets of $2 million a year. Four drivers besides Wallace topped $1 million in earnings last year, a record. The profits have helped expand the circuit. A $30 million track has just opened in Loudon, N.H., and others are planned for Palm Springs, Calif., and Albuquerque. Improved engine technology and better drivers have pushed straightaway speeds over 210 m.p.h., making stock-car racing one of the most fast-moving and dangerous sports in the world. Daredevil driving aces like Wallace, Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt think nothing of going bumper-to-bumper while hurtling down the speedway at upwards of three miles a minute.

Fans gladly pay anywhere from $3 to $63 for an afternoon of racing, which, as in the sport's earlier days, often entails lawn chairs, coolers and daylong family picnics on the track infield. "Going to a race is like going to a carnival," says Michael Daly, 24, a grocery bagger from Wakefield, Mass. "You can get passes to pit row before the start and meet the drivers and the crews. Try getting them to let you into the locker room at a football game." Karen Caywood, 34, a housewife in Mount Sterling, Ky., attends four to six races a year with her husband and daughter. "I don't come to see any bang-up crashes," she says. "I like the close racing and the battle of those guys trying to get around each other at 180 m.p.h. In baseball and football it's two teams against each other, but out here it's one driver against 40 others. And the cars look just like the ones people come to the track in." Well, yes. Sort of the way the spectators look just like Tom Cruise.