DIRT 5 SPRINT CARS IMPOSSIBLE DRIVERS
With that success came more corporate-friendly policies, which disproportionately affected drivers like Stewart, one of Nascar’s saltier personalities. By the early 2000s, Nascar had ballooned into an entertainment juggernaut, selling billions of dollars’ worth of branded merchandise a year and bringing in more than twice the corporate sponsorship dollars of Major League Baseball. When Stewart, who is 47, entered Nascar in the late 1990s, stock-car racing was America’s fastest-growing sport, second only to football in television viewership. It’s common to see crashes, fires or, sometimes, a car flip over the fence into a cornfield. The track can be the muddy, river-bottom gumbo of the South or the red dust of the Southeast, and it changes with the weather, causing unpredictable slides and skids. On dirt, the ovals are short - often a half-mile around, about a quarter the size of most asphalt tracks - which means cars cluster nose to tail, nicking and bumping one another off the road. But today, dirt racing is to Nascar a little like mixed martial arts is to boxing, a rough-edged insurgent counterculture that’s proud of the pain it deals out. It was a holdover from the sport’s Southern past and emblematic of the backwoods image it has spent decades trying to shed. Until recently, Nascar distanced itself from dirt-track racing. There were lots of graying goatees and wraparound sunglasses and T-shirts that read “Grabbin gears, drinkin beers, slappin rears” and “God made, Jesus saved, racetrack raised.” When I told one attendee which publication I was representing, he spit on the edge of my shoe. The crowd was young and middle-aged, mostly male and almost entirely white. “And remember: The cars can’t turn right.” Their larger right-side tires help them around a loop that only bends left and, indeed, make it nearly impossible to turn right. “You’ll probably have to run at some point,” I was warned. Stewart, the ex-Nascar star, was late - running on “Tony time,” a handler told me - so I went for a walk along the dusty pit road to look at the scores of racecars lined up.
DIRT 5 SPRINT CARS IMPOSSIBLE SERIES
Charlotte was hosting the 2017 championship weekend for the World of Outlaws, the premier dirt-racing series in the country, and all 60,000 tickets had sold out well in advance. The air was heavy with exhaust and motor oil at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina as I waited for Tony Stewart to arrive.
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