The Lion's Rear

I sat down and watched a real honest to god NASCAR race for the first time in at least a decade this week. I grew up in a stock car house, a Chevy house, and I grew up on the rivalries and races of the Winston Cup. I don't really remember much of it besides the "legacy" of it; I still have paraphernalia and all the good memories attached, but as I grew up I grew away from the sport that was increasingly positioned as spectacular corporatized bloodsport for Budweiser fans waiting for The Big Onefn1. The commercialization that came with it made it distasteful at best, and as I became more historically and socially educated, I came to find both the roots and the modern incarnation of NASCAR, both the organization and community, to be unworth attention and I tuned out of Motorsports entirely.

My father and I would go to dirt oval race tracks around Arizona and we would turn wrenches and scrape mud for a few drivers who my dad was friends with. One of them was a real estate agent bathing in the pre-2008 economy. The other had been working at a junk yard 10 hours a day and prepping his car at night and going to the track every Saturday night since before I was born. He might still be. By the end of it I had a lot of respect for that man who would cobble a car together with him and his buddies, and he'd go out there and compete with people who had a 20,000$ engine in their car. The first guy still had a 20,000$ engine in his car. I don't remember much about that time at the track -- mostly I was bored. My dad really resents me for that still, hiding from the desert wind in the truck with my GameBoy, falling asleep in the stands, not wanting clay under my fingernails all week. So when I grew up, I didn't carry the hobby with me. I was uninterested in sports, only the lofty Pursuit Of Knowledge and of having working audio and WiFi on GNU+Linux. So some of the most technically and competitively interesting era of motorsports in my lifetime crept up on me and nearly escaped.

In the last 12 months, I've fallen in love with motorsports again, after realizing that the 24 Hours of Le Mans still existed and was technically interesting. Computational Fluid Dynamics, hybrid powertrains and powerful electrification had made it to the top of endurance racing and people were still going 200 miles an hour down the Mulsanne straight at 3 in the morning. Coming back to the sport as an adult, technically engaged, and able to understand the dynamics at play in the sport were more than just "go faster harder". I found the all-electric Formula E to be interesting, and the spectacle of Formula 1 is grand if often disappointing. I fell in love with the Porsche 911 again, I nearly bought a Cayman. I joined a Discord guildfn2 that collected news, replays, live races, and we'd watch them together with a scoreboard of who's stayed up for the most 24 hour races. That community is not without its cranks, of course, but it's a fine place full of people interested in the sportsmanship of it, and a culture of careful moderation. With a community and intelligent commentary for what's happening, you learn a lot about a sport.

The broadcast in NASCAR are way better than they used to be, they've got a good data pipeline, tons of cameras, and smart commentary. It's not as good as modern Formula 1 broadcasting is, perhaps, but it's much more pragmatic. There's no "AWS AI" "predicting tire wear," but there are 20 cameras on every car, and a producer that listens to the request and direction of commentators Mike Joy and Jeff Gordan. Mike's been the voice of NASCAR since before I was born, and Jeff Gordan was the popular face of NASCAR in the 90s, 4-time winner of the race I watched, now retired and commentating on a lot of the same men I watched race him 20 years ago, young guns now champions and veterans.

And, yeah, the racing was pretty good. Not without artifice and gaffs and faults, but the racing was fast and close and exciting. NASCAR has struggled to find a balance between compelling sport and compelling television, and I think they falter more than they succeed, but when they do get out of the way and let cars race, it is dynamic, unpredictable, and exciting.

It's hard on paper to explain stock car racing to people, especially super-speedways like the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. You just turn left right? It's a D-shaped oval track 4.28 kilometers (2.66 miles) in circumference with sweeping banked turns, it's the race track which Ricky Bobby famously won at in the documentary roam:Talladega Nights . Like many old race tracks, it's built around an old military airfield, grass fields and sports facilities paved over the remains of an unnecessary military installation. In 1997, the average speed of the cars over the entire race was 188 miles per hourfn3 after completing the race without a single caution incident. So you're in a hot metal car in the middle of the Alabama summer and you are driving 200 miles per hour. For four hours you try to turn the perfect lap and lose as little momentum as possible, and there are 39 people doing that within 100 yards of you. Even a few miles an hour slower out of the corner puts you down the roster and fighting your way back up. There are strange aerodynamic effects between the cars, aerodynamic drafting is the name of the game. Near the end of the race, cars were intentionally falling out of the lead so that they had aerodynamic advantages, getting pulled along by the cars in front of them, literally filling a void left by the car 6 inches in front. Your car is dynamically evolving and so are the cars around you as fuel burns off, as tires wear down, as the environment of and around the track changes. Drivers adapt to grip falling off by minutely adjusting their entry point in to each turn, finding the spot where they can lift halfway off the gas for a half a second, just long enough to turn the car in a direction that'll allow them to get back on the gas all the way out of the turn, in to the next, 400 times in four hours, stopping only to take on new resources, fix issues, or to very briefly turn right. Strategy plays out over the course of minutes and hours, a push-and-pull happens on track as lanes of cars fight for clean air, for the cars behind to push against the aero-force of the front cars, propelling the group forward. Teams will coordinate this and drivers will from these blocs ad-hoc, blindly pushing the car in front and hoping they are also in a position to push. The moments where they aren't is where the risk of carnage lies, a car getting pushed out of line or shuffled in to the liminal space between lanes, cursed to fall back until they can find shelter from the wind.

This race nearly finished under green-flag conditions with fuel conservation strategies playing out in real-time. A driver on the outside line is nearly out of fuel and needs to get to the inside line to pit before he runs out of fuel. If he runs out of fuel, the other drivers could make it to the end, their own gambits playing out. A car spins, out of the way, out of trouble, the yellow flag instinctively comes out to prevent the unpredictable cascading carnage eponymous with superspeedway racing, and we finish with a "sprint to the finish", a green flag, a white flag, a checkered flag, a cautious policy designed to create close sprints and chaos across the finish line. And would you look at that, third place finished backwards like I do for fun in Forza Horizon.

It's unnecessary to explain how things have ground to a halt over the last three months, of course, but motorsports were in an interesting position where they could, nearly, emulate enough of the sport to deliver dramatic and compelling racing from all across the world for three months straight. There were a handful of young professional drivers who had their own simulators and became stars in those first few days of the pandemic, streaming live on Twitch with cameras on their wheel and pedals, running the same telemetry overlays I use, talking with their chat like any streaming professional parasocialite. I learned a lot about racing, and these racers learned a lot about their sport and cultivated a relationship with their fans they otherwise wouldn't have. It quickly became the standard, old men getting shipped expensive computers to run iRacing and rFactor 2. During one of the early Formula 1 e-races, rookie Lando Norris was using his Twitch chat as track-spotter and race engineers, advising him for fuel strategy and tire selection. I re-installed iRacing and got my wheel back out, and have slowly been putting laps in, both in stock car and sportscar racing, and it's been a really great way to learn the sport and have fun during the downtime. I've played plenty of racing games in my life, hours and hours and days and days, but until the last year was I unwilling to come to it as a thing to get better at, consistently. I am bad at forming habits and I am terribly bad at Putting In The Time long enough to gain proficiency. I certainly don't feel comfortable driving a Real Car still, it's not the same sort of driving, and the risk is wildly different. But being able to put myself in the context of those cars on those tracks, even a facsimile of it, or to see exactly what a professional sees, in real time, lets me connect with and understand the sport in a way that few other sports could provide even during These Uncertain Times.

During the race, there was a rain stoppage, about an hour of thunderstorms passing through the area. Cars parked on the in-field and only four or five commercials to fill the space with. They aired about half a documentary about the classic 90s rivalry between Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordan. Now, one of these men is dead, his lasting legacy is his hubris and disinterest in growing with the sport. The other was commentating this race I was watching. Earnhardt was a bastard, and a hard-ass, and his stubbornness undoubtedly got him killed; he embodies the sort of "man's man" Southern image of sport, the farmer smoker christian husband with the denim shirt and cowboy hat and bad attitude. Gordon was a young guy from northern California, the privileged upstart raised at the karting track with a clean mustache and a clean bill. I didn't get to watch the whole thing, the rain fell off about an hour in to the documentary-cum-commercial-block, but I was reminded of how un-willing the NASCAR community was to grow when I was young, the push of progress and growth against conservative comfort, and how that alienated me from the sport as the machismo and brawling and pageantry won out over sportsmanship and racing.

This race I watched happened on a Monday rather than the usual post-sermon Sunday afternoon, rain washed the race out, and time being as artificially constructed as it is these days, NASCAR ran it the next day (and it still almost rained out!). After teams went back to their COVID-19 -proof biosphere-bubble-hotel a noose appeared in the garage of Richard Petty's near-eponymous #43, driven by the only Black man in the sport Bubba Wallacefn4. and we've circled back to where we started. A sport driven by the craven demands for blood of a racist, regressive supporter-base. "at least he didn't have to find the fucking thing himself."

The sport quickly rallied itself to support Bubbafn5, as much as a bunch of privileged men can, a bunch of very-careful attempts at Social Media Grace perhaps slowly turning in to real growth at home and in the paddock. NASCAR finally banned the display of Confederate battle flags at the events last month, a rule that is surely going to be flagrantly challenged as soon as real crowds are allowed back to the races; apparently they were placed all around the track and someone tried to fly a plane over the track with one. None of it made it to the broadcast. Bubba Wallace ran a "Black Lives Matter" livery because he can't secure sponsorship in the middle of a Black rights movement one week and gets a death threat the next. Bubba says "you're not gonna take my smile" after nearly winning the damned race, propelled at times to the front by his fellow drivers. The FBI is called to investigate it as a hate-crime and ultimately decide, no, it's "just" a garage-door pull rope that someone had tied that way last yearfn6. History continues to rhyme, especially when people sing songs in praise of it.

I haven't watched a lot of NASCAR racing in the last year, but I am a fan of another series owned by the company called IMSA , the International Motor Sport Assocation, which organizes prototype car racing, and street-styled GT supercars. Sportscar Racing has a very ...different feeling than NASCAR, much more progressive and familial and communal, though I don't know how that feeling is fully earned. I haven't been to an IMSA event in personfn7, but sportscar racing is an internationally diverse sport in ways that stock cars simply aren't. Motor racing is a sport that has always had generational dynasties, more-so than other sports do it seems like, some of NASCAR's dynasties go back to the Jim Crow era, its origins are, famously, moonshining in the Appalachian Mountains. But what I have seen this year has been the beginning of the baby steps towards modernity in that organization, along with similarly clumsy steps from many others in the sport. Interest in building in roles for women drivers and crew and teams, access to resources and interests in green technologies, at least as genuinely you can when you're running 500 horse-power to the tires and you're sponsored by an oil company. I'm under no impression that this is anything more than a marketing venture for car companies, and a hobby for rich people to spend their money on, but there is still sportsmanship there worth interrogating. It is not inherently a rich person's venture, not inherently a tax-advantaged marketing arm for a soft drink companyfn8, as hobbyist organizations like the SCCA and the "run what ya brung" 500$ LeMons endurance league show. But those examples also show how slow their growth and cars are compared to those vast marketing budgets. I see similar parallels in the technology industry, massive marketing budgets and entrepreneurial wealth propping up a few winners while the rest struggle for enough funds to put a team together.

It is still, through all this, a sport that has massive opportunity gaps, and is a sport whose community is quite sick in many places. The handful of women and Black men in the professional and semi-professional eschelons of the sport sport could fit in a room together, I would guess the queer racers all know each other. I haven't written here about the recent efforts of Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton to spend his champion's bootie on STEM education for underrepresented minorities, or of Formula 1 aligning their compass on these goalsfn9 with him, but even these slow conservative organizations built to sell overcaffeinated soda and Ferrari-branded jackets can learn and grow when it's demanded of them.

And it is what's demanded of us right now. Perhaps it's funny, perhaps not, having grown up on NASCAR in the era that I did, I thought for a while that Bubba Wallace was Rusty Wallace's son, another white kid brought up in the racing dynasties, rather than the first black man in NASCAR since Bill Lester tried to rise through the ranks at the turn of the new millenium. I was quietly glad that I had the opportunity to learn this myself, rather than be taught, but over the last month I've come to think that that might be wrong. This embarassment over making mistakes and of being wrong is deeply ingrained in our culture and I think it's imperative that we shake it. Whether you believe the popular protests taking place right now are a demand for justice, or a bullseye-target for taking shots at the very foundations of Americanism, there is a deep fear of change or growth, of being earnestly challenged in our own beliefs. Growth comes from learning new information, and choosing to course correct or apologise for past decisions, continue to learn and to shape a just and accurate vision of the world.

Even the old moonshiner families and racing moguls can start to see it now. A few short years from Richard Petty saying he'd fire anyone who protested like Colin Kaepernick didfn10, he and his team are supporting his Black driver's protest whether they wanted to a month ago or not. And I hope they see that as growth and not failure.

Just before the Black Lives Matter protests erupted (once again), my roommate Tor found Uppity: The Willy T. Ribbs Story fn11 on Netflix, a great documentary about the first Black man to race in the Indy 500, America's motorsport crown jewel. It's a story of determination and courage, a Black man from northern California trying to survive in a Southern white man's sport years before Earnhardt said Gordan talked like a west-coast sissy in TV interviews. Willy nearly made it to Formula 1 when Lewis Hamilton was still in diapers. I didn't even know about this guy, I didn't retain much of my motorsports history lessons growing up. I remember little of the 90s and naughts of Le Mans and sports cars, I was born just after the death of Group B and the Can-Am supercars that are still worshiped today. I found it really well produced with smart commentary from names I did recognize and appreciate. There's a lot of things that we never learned in school, we must be educated and engaged in spite of all the forces around us demanding that we "return to normal" and book a flight to Disneyworld or Le Mans and to buy a new Honda.

I think that political and societal growth can flow out of educated people speaking, and uneducated people listening and learning and humbly internalizing and it is time to start doing that instead of assuming we can independently shape our world views. I don't simply want political revolution and the end of racism, I want that desire to revolutionize the world to infect everyone in spite of the cynicism we've yoked ourselves to. Even if it starts cynically, or only locally, or from profit motives, we have a rare chance to bake justice in to the future of our communities right now, and it's going to take more than voting for Joe Biden this fall. We have to look at each part of our own identities, apply the KonMari method to it, and find newer, better things to put in their place with our friends and family's help. Me? I'll gladly support a sport that is younger, more politically aware, less conservative, and more willing to grapple with its future and its past, and the future and past of everything connected to it. Everyone and every organization makes mistakes, and you don't need forgiveness or salvation to grow from those mistakes, only a quiet awareness and a willingness to not let it happen again. We were given blindly biased craphouse educations, sold a beautiful golden goose of a national conscience, and told that if we don't like it we can fuck right off, commie. It's time that we reckon with the reality of that, that our job of understanding our legacy and our history is not done when we are no longer being forced to learn. Our guilt is not in participating in our ancestors' grift but in perpetuating it rather than striking it down without hesitation. The trunk and roots and many branches of the motorsports family tree are undoubtedly racist, classist, and ecologically dangerous, but the leaves are green, young, and promising, and I intend to nurture that part of the garden.

Writing this from Seattle, WA, mere miles from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where A.N.T.I.F.A. super soldiers are apparently engaged in a vast paramilitary seccessionary conflict against the local police forces and fascist elements. I'm supposed to get an electric bike delivered next month, the Vanmoof S3 Electric Bike fn12 and I am looking forward to it arriving and getting to know better streets further from home. I applied to an internship on a Japanese tea farm from September-December, I'm hoping I'll like looking at computers more when I get back if I am accepted. My family is safe and healthy, as far as I know, and I'm quite glad for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_One_(motorsport)

The Big One is a phrase describing any crash usually involving five or more cars in NASCAR, ARCA, and IndyCar racing. It is most commonly used at Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway, although occasionally seen at other tracks as well, such as Dover International Speedway and Watkins Glen International.

https://gthub.eu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEICO₅₀₀

https://www.autosport.com/nascar/news/150094/nascar-investigating-noose-found-in-wallace-garage

https://twitter.com/FOXSports/status/1275143753833971713

https://racer.com/2020/06/23/fbi-determines-that-wallace-was-not-a-hate-crime-target/

I was going to go to one last March, but that sure didn't happen. Maybe next year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_Racing

https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/150110/why-f1-campaign-on-racism-must-follow-hamilton-lead

https://wreg.com/news/richard-petty-says-hed-fire-nascar-drivers-who-protest-national-anthem/

https://www.netflix.com/title/81232163

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/14/21220464/vanmoof-ebike-x3-s3-leak-specs-price-launch-date