I've been watching NASCAR for a few years now, after many years watching Formula 1. Not actually watching, more like having it on to accompany whatever I'm doing - on TV you miss the speed and sounds of a real race. I once had a taste of stock-car racing when I volunteered at the Edmonton Indy, and thought the thunderous sound of a V-8 pushrod engine at 9500 RPM was AMAZING.
So I'm planning to see a race - in Bristol, Tennessee ...
| 2012.08.25 |
Race Day 4: The Big One: Irwin Tools Night Race |
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I need to sort out my ticket and get my VIP Pass before the race, so today is all that. My email about my seat from the night before got some results, the reply said my message was forwarded to both VIP and Director of Ticketing. I didn't expect much, and if need be I can wander to find a seat somehow. Or something. I head to the track around noon and try my luck with the church again. Fate is good again - I get a spot right at the entrance, which means an easy out later. This time I give him 20 bucks, and another 10 for the night before, and he gives me a very happy look and a bag with a religious tract, a bottle of hand sanitizer and a pocket notebook. Off I go to the track, first to get my VIP Pass.
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I didn't take as many pictures of the area around the track as I thought I had. Or good ones, anyway. I did try to save my batteries for race action, not knowing what was ahead, and by the time the race was done it was too dark. Or I lost some in moving them off the phone to my laptop, and from that to home over a connection that I think was throttled by the ISP of my hosts - FTP would timeout after a couple or many images. And with the distractions of trying to get my pass and seat sorted out I wandered around less than I would have. |
For my VIP Pass, I'm directed to a particular ticket booth on the opposite side of the track from where I enter off the parkway. So I trudge up the hill to it, to be met with quizzical looks from people trying to be helpful. So I'm sent to the Hospitality Center, halfway around the track, but one of many golf carts diven by volunteers for shuttling people like me around. Damn handy - the track was dug into the top of a hill, and everything else is below it. I get to the Center and more quizzical looks. Texts are sent - everyone is pretty well-connected. Gotta go back to where I was, another cart has been dispatched for me. Thank God - remember it's 80-something degrees and 80% humidity at least. I'm an old boy from dry prairie air, and outside a real hot shower we don't get the same air-soup steambath. Back up and around, and a lady who's trying to do her best to figure out what's going on and instructs me: "You just wait right there and we won't let you leave until this is solved." Turns out, my pass was sent separately, after my tickets, and was likely waiting for me when I got home. So I shouldn't have been looking for anything. A call down to the Center to tell them about me, and another cart was flagged down by an older cop that was assigned to the booth, and I was whisked back down and around to the Center by a pretty coed-aged girl with the usual sweet southern accent - she was chatty too as she filled me in on how she didn't exactly know her way around the place yet and how she was there as a volunteer to raise money for her sports team/club. We zoomed back down to the Center, I got my wrist-tags and goody bag and drink/raffle tickets and finally entrance into some a/c and a beer.
The pass is for the Mountain Dew Half Mile Club, an extra bit of hospitality one can purchase for any race. For the MDHMC there's access to a hospitality tent, one of many in an access-controlled area for sponsors and paying attendees. The large tent is full of tables of other fans, a couple buffet lines off to the side, and an emcee reading off raffle-ticket numbers. I get a beer and some chow (pretty darned good) and enjoy some cooool a/c and one problem sorted out. The goody bag has a program and little car, which I've already bought at the Food City event, a MDHMC water bottle, Irwin Tools hat, pass/ticket lanyard, sunscreen and lip balm (both unusually unbranded).
I hydrated and refuelled, several times. Met a young couple who had bought tickets and a pass, and then he won tickets to a corporate box so they were extra-happy. There were the usual branded trinkets as prizes, some autographed by Dale Earnhardt Jr.(often called just JR), even some Mountain Dew promo standups with his image. JR is a fan favourite as Dale Sr's son and a good racer. I didn't win anything, not unusual for me, and less to carry around.
Once all the ticket draws were over, it was time for one of the highlights of the pass: the Track Tour. I line up, sign a liability waiver, and line up again to make our way back up the hill, walking, to the track. I chat up a couple from South Dakota, mostly her, about the SD entertainment production biz, since I mentioned my Wilmington hostess was out here for the same work. We wound our way up the hill, through the belly of that side of the facility, and then onto the track.
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The Food City V-8 | |
from the Hauler Parade | |
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Back-stretch pits | |
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Front-stretch pits | |
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the Start/Finish line | |
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We were limited to the track apron for corners 1 and 2 and the straights. Limited by a platoon of 20-something US Army people in the same at-ease pose when they weren't being greeted and thanked for their service by honestly-grateful fans. There's been a military component in every event I've attended, from the Army fellow handing out boom-boom sticks on the first night of racing to the Army and Navy and Marine booths at the Street Party. |
The apron is the only flat area of the track and cars try not to spend much time down here - to get race speed you need to be on the banks, and any great amount of speed will throw your car up there anyway once you start sliding on the painted logos, in a bad way. The banking is 4-8 degrees on the stretches and 24-30 degrees on the corners, 8 degrees less than household stairs. In response to fan complaints about boring "parade" racing (and a significant drop in ticket sales) BMS ground a half-million pounds of concrete off the top couple feet of the banking to (hopefully) make drivers keep a little lower and tighter together for the rubbin'-is-'racin' style that had make this track famous.
Here's Darrell Waltrip, 12-time Bristol winner, talking about the track changes.
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Photographers were wandering the area offering to take pictures, so I got 3, to show I was actually there. :) Later I could go online to get prints, or t-shirts or mugs, with my mug on them. Not sure if I will, but these are the pics that are awaiting my money, with an optional border with my fave driver's number.
I travelled light, and dressed lightly. A trip to Wal-Mart for a hat ($10) and Goodwill for summer shirts (3 for $14) complemented my $10 cargo pants from here, my Edmonton Indy half-pack, and my goody-bag. I chose to carry my phone on my belt rather than banging around in the leg-pocket of my pants, and that works real well. This get-up, sans goody bag, was my standard for the week. |
Sun-baked, I headed back down to the Hospitality Center for some a/c and a beer. Another very handy feature of my pass - there was no other respite from the heat anywhere.
Now I needed to sort out my ticket. On my phone was a reply from the Director of Ticketing, telling me to exchange my ticket at the nearest ticket booth, or they'd bring a replacement to me. I replied that they could bring a replacement right to me, but the T-Mobile cell coverage I had on that side of the track (and nowhere else anywhere) was pretty congested and didn't seem reliable enough to wait for so I headed for a ticket booth. The race start was an hour away.
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Eventually I got my replacement ticket, after a bit of a wait with walk-up buyers and exchangers. My new seat is in the Kulwicki Terrace, Section O Row 3 Seat 3, above Turn 1. It's not covered, but the sky is clear as darkness falls. And I have the row pretty much to myself - no one is beside me for a couple seats. |
I get to my seat as the anthem wraps up, and now all that chasing around in the heat is done and finally I'm where I've been aiming to be since this whole idea got started: in the stands at the Irwin Tools Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway!!! And my radio worked, though not so well, but well enough to hear the commentary and highlights fed from the TV broadcast.
I was warned about rednecks and rowdies - totally believable now that I see people can bring in their own alcohol. One young fellow at the end of my row slept for most of the race, a victim of too-early partying. As I took my seat I turned to find a young fellow mid-swig on a bottle of... Baby Duck...! Cheap Canadian panty-remover from my youth, a sparkling wine of a certain... mass-market vintage. Brits have Baby Cham, and I'm sure Americans their own version. Import booze always tastes better I suppose - works for me. Nikki forewarned me about getting people's beer on me and I did from various can-opening spritzes that are inevitable with cold fizzy beverages in such a hot environment. But really it didn't matter. By now, getting on to 8 hours here, it was all part of the humidity profile of the place.
end of pre-race
festivities and
prayer and anthem | |
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pairing up for
the Start | |
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everyone collects
behind the pace car
before the flag is
waved to Start | |
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the stands were
still filling with fans | |
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one more lap... | |
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off they go! | |
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Darkness fell, and further south it falls faster than I'm used to in summer. The track lights make that irrelevant though. Part of the spectacle of the place.
Everyone around was real good - watching racing like this is like watching a hockey game: you BS with your seatmate(s) and catch a game. Baseball is the best example of this - a bench in the park to sit and be with people, with something going on. EXCEPT, it's so damn loud that ear protection is required for the sensible. Which means that folks can't talk much. Which might be good, since fans are pretty vocal anyway, in positive and negative ways - I was warned about that too. During the race, as cars would pass, people would jump up seemingly at random and point down toward the cars, or even flip a double-bird off into space. The Baby-Duck fellow and I exchanged hand signals and some shouted talk like in a club or at a gig throughout the race, and his friend (wearing a home-made t-shirt with a very crude sexual slur about Danica Patrick) enjoyed tossing various (light) things at the sleeping kid down my row, who was barely conscious for 3/4 of the race. More goofy than rowdy. Baby-Duck guy got a warning card about smoking, reluctantly from one of the 2 late-teen volunteer entryway monitors. Along with the presence of military volunteers was a large body of volunteer groups getting some kind of return for lending out their members to run info kiosks, monitor entryways, shuttle people around, and run the track's food places.
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a restart | |
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8:40pm - certainly
not dark in here |
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the Finish is in
here somewhere | |
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Maybe not the "old Bristol" that old-time Bristol fans wanted, but "Bristol" enough for me! 13 cautions, all but a couple from contact, Tony Stewart gets crashed out by Matt Kenseth and tosses his helmet at Kenseth's car as he passes by during the caution. Danica Patrick gets crashed out - a shame, she was doing real well for her first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series start - and gives the offender a finger-wag as he passes around on the caution. Carl Edwards decides to roll the dice and ignore his crew-chief's directions to pit to keep the lead with 40+ laps remaining, hoping for more cautions to help him conserve fuel. Doesn't work - he runs out of gas with 4 laps to go. Carl's out of The Sprint Cup Chase this season.
an entertainment
zone along the parkway | |
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trailer camps around behind the track | |
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Here's a very rough idea of the mass of humanity on this side of the track. I had pretty much used up the batteries in my camera and phone by the end of the race so you'll have to take my word that there are A LOT of trailers out in that darkness. |
Now remained the issue of What To Do Next, with 145,000 other people (it wasn't a sell-out). It's either scoot out of there as quickly as possible, or linger for at least an hour, maybe 2, as wheeled traffic is held around the track for an hour after the race to let pedestrians clear. I'm in the corner of the track closest to the parkway, so have the least amount of people and space to get through. I hoof it through the crowd, to my car (parked conveniently right at the exit) get a gap in the walking traffic, and boot it out of there, passing my lodgings at 11:20 on my way up the parkway to turn around and find some food on the way back and avoid what I thought would be the parkway clogging up. MacDonold's was all there was on my side of the parkway, so I had to settle for that (the only time I did as part of my side-tour of American fast-food chains that we don't have in Canada).
About 12 hours after I left, I was back at my lodgings chatting with my hosts, who were surprised at how quickly I returned despite my stop for eats. I guess it's the nerd in me, and a childhood walking to and from school for grades 1-12 - I can move it on foot when needed. Would have been nice to have lingered and gone through all the surrounding hubbub like the Toyota Fun Zone and the vendor tents along the parkway, but I was not in a mind for it after chasing around all morning and the heat and that it may have been cr*p I'd seen before, etc., etc. Next time, maybe.
After a little time out with the critters of the night and a large can of beer to replenish vital fluids and enhance reflection and absorption of the many moments before, I closed the day on the original reason for this whole venture with a good sound sleep. |
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