BLOWING THE WHEELS OFF BUBBA

By ADAM COHEN/ATLANTA

WHEN NORTH CAROLINA'S CHARlotte Motor Speedway built condominium apartments along its noisy track and decided to sell them for $90,000 and up, it looked like someone had come up with another Edsel. The acoustically overendowed condos--mere feet away from high-performance cars screaming by at 170 m.p.h.--were even the butt of a David Letterman routine. But the gags are dying away as the trackside units are being resold to wealthy fans of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing and interested corporations for up to $575,000. Says speedway president H.A. ("Humpy") Wheeler: "Our only mistake was that we sold them too cheap."

NASCAR has not made many similar mistakes since. The nation's premiere stock-car-racing league is in the midst of a boom that has turned it into a $2 billion-a-year industry and a high-performance marketing success. In the process the sport is moving beyond its good-ol'-boy roots and finding a new audience in yuppie America. Live attendance at NASCAR Winston Cup races passed the 5 million mark last year, having more than tripled since 1980. ESPN's national television audience for NASCAR races jumped more than 30% during the same period. And in the past five years, sales of NASCAR tie-in merchandise have climbed 10-fold, from $60 million to $600 million.

As NASCAR's 10-month Winston Cup season gets under way following last weekend's Daytona 500 opener, this year's success promises to be even bigger. New speedways are under construction in Southern California and Texas, and this fall NASCAR races will be held in Suzuka, Japan. The first NASCAR Thunder retail outlet, a store that will feature NASCAR insignia clothing, souvenirs and artwork, will open in Atlanta in April. As early as September, the first NASCAR Cafe, a theme restaurant, will start serving in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. By 1998 the association hopes to lift its sales of trinkets, clothing and other memorabilia to a startling $1 billion.

NASCAR's hydrobenzene-powered growth reflects its success in breaking out of its traditional audience demographics: Deep South, male and working class. "Our biggest weakness in the past was that we were a regional sport, not like baseball or basketball," says Wheeler. But with close to 1 million fans vying for more than 270,000 tickets to a recent NASCAR race in Indianapolis, Indiana, and sellout crowds from Brooklyn, Michigan, to Loudon, New Hampshire, the sport has clearly moved beyond regionalism.

NASCAR's expansion has been fueled in part by shrewd salesmanship. The league markets itself as a slice of the American heartland, with "fan-friendly" drivers who keep up a hectic schedule of autograph signings and charity events. And NASCAR has flooded the market with races. "A lot of it is quantity," says Joyce Julius Cotman, a sports-marketing analyst based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "They have the Winston Cup Series, the Busch Series, the SuperTruck Series--every weekend, there's some kind of NASCAR event going on."

The sport has made some of its most impressive gains among women. They now make up 38% of NASCAR attendance, up from 15% in 1975. "It's not just for men with red necks and potbellies anymore," says Susie Anderson, a nurse from Bennettsville, South Carolina, who was one of the few women fans when she started attending NASCAR races 21 years ago. Female participation has surged in part because the sport has become more family oriented, says Janie Brown, who teaches a course on NASCAR's business strategy at North Carolina's Elon College. Modern speedways set aside parking space for campers, and some offer alcohol-free family sections in the stands. But a lot of women with keys to the family station wagon, RV or muscle car have found that they love the sport for its own sake. Says Anderson: "We used to joke that we wished you could bottle the smell of the track."

The modernizing of NASCAR's audience is a reflection of changes in average American income and education level, especially in the Deep South. Almost a third of NASCAR fans have household incomes above $50,000, and more than a quarter are professional or managerial--a far cry from the pickup-truck-and-overalls crowd of the sport's earliest days. Increasingly plush speedway facilities--air-conditioned VIP boxes and gourmet food, anyone?--have helped pull in this more upscale crowd.

The sport has also aggressively encouraged corporations to do business entertaining at the track, whether they rent a box above the speedway or paint their logos across the hoods of 720-h.p. racers. "Things that women are involved in purchasing are showing up a lot more," notes Brown. Traditional sponsors, such as Valvoline and Skoal chewing tobacco, are increasingly sharing side-panel space with such brands as Tide, Maxwell House and the Family Channel.

Predictably, there is something of a pork-rind backlash. Some fans grumble that the modern speedways, charging more than $100 for the best tickets, are driving out the down-home folks who helped build NASCAR in the first place. But driver Darrell Waltrip, a three-time Winston Cup winner and a 24-year veteran of the sport, insists there is still room for all kinds of fans. "You can sit in the infields and be rowdy, or you can sit up in the stands and be a gentleman," says Waltrip. And either way, revel in the noise.