The Winston Right Where It Is

Fan Commentary by Grandstand Bob

Though NASCAR is indeed a national, maybe even international, sport, its deepest fan base is most definitely in the Southeast. That’s become painfully obvious to me, as I recently returned to the Midwest after nearly eight years in North Carolina.

I have to admit that I wasn’t a race fan when I moved to North Carolina. In fact, it took me nearly two years there before I caught the bug. It was too easy to dismiss the sport as a redneck waste of time, cars going in circles, etc. It was too easy until I actually went to a race. On that hot Charlotte afternoon, I became a fan.

For the next six years, I took advantage of the fact that I was within four hours of six Winston Cup tracks. Almost any weekend when the circuit was in the neighborhood, I could be found at the track. If I didn’t make it to the race on Sunday, I was usually “sick” on Friday (ahem), and trying to heal myself with a Budweiser while watching qualifying. If that didn’t happen, you could almost bet the farm that I was there on Saturday afternoon when the Busch cars took the green flag.

It’s been nearly seven months since I’ve heard a stock car engine roar, and I miss it. Like anything else that a person has easy access to, it’s easy to take for granted the privileges that you enjoy. In the Southeast, stock car racing is king. Sure, there are a bunch of NBA, NFL and MLB fans there, but the most common thread is stock car racing.

You can see it wherever you go. The newspapers devote pages to racing coverage, even when racing is days away. The local networks have a Winston Cup spot almost every night, and it’s not at all rare to have drivers making appearances in your area throughout the year.

Beyond that, you can almost count on finding race fans, or at least someone with a passing interest in racing, wherever you go. From the most exclusive country clubs to backwoods hunting clubs, race fans in the Southeast can find camaraderie nearly everywhere they go.

Though there are many more race fans here than there were when I left in 1995, I still feel relatively alone. Instead of talking about why restrictor plate racing has taken the life out of super speedways, I’m more apt to explain why I love racing so much. Though I enjoy talking about my passion for the sport, it would be nice to be able to debate templates and tire compounds.

For these reasons, and many more, I believe that The Winston is in the appropriate venue. True, the area is saturated with races, but you know what – it’s also saturated with race fans, racing businesses and families of race teams. These are the people who have elevated the sport to a national or international level, and these are the people who will likely lose race dates because of the sport’s popularity.