DOVER, Del., June 5
John Anderson stands at the front of his tented camper Friday night, drinking another Captain Morgan spiced rum and Coke, doing his drunken-best rebel yell.
Following a day-long downpour and now steady drizzle, with tens of thousands of fans already having arrived and encamped for a long weekend of NASCAR races, Dover International Speedway's surrounding grounds are a muddy morass.
Anderson's screams prod a Jeep driver from Lancaster, Pa., to keep on speeding around a slick field, skidding sideways and splattering muck on a parked Nextel semi. Anderson promised the guy a beer to do it. His two buddies in the tent, and each of the men's wives, all holler encouragement, too.
"Yeee-hah!" shouts Anderson, 35, who arrived here the day before from Saugerties, N.Y. (which is near the original Woodstock site), where he installs "metal fabrications" or something he couldn't quite articulate at the moment. His stringy, shoulder-length black hair is soaked, or it needs a good shampooing. Twice. His eyes are bloodshot from rise-and-shine partying. Despite rain-dampened spirits, the evening is young; hot dogs and hamburgers are on the grill, and a four-foot-long ice chest is packed with Bud Light.
Life is good outside the fast lane.
On any given Sunday during the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing's 40-week season, the sport's main event -- the Nextel Cup Series races, which travel to a different track each week -- caps off days of Olympian partying among fans. By the thousands, they converge on a chain of speedway properties across the nation, at nearby private campgrounds and retail parking lots days beforehand to create the biggest bash going, week after week.
The 140,000 fans who show up for "The Monster Mile," as this track's called, bloat Dover's population fivefold. Practically every hotel room an hour outside Dover is also taken. Thousands of motor homes -- awnings extended to stake claim on precious little party property before the next camper rolls in -- jam all available space within walking distance to the speedway. Pickup trucks with pop-up caps and tents on the back wedge in, some with makeshift plywood enclosures. RVs fly flags on fiberglass poles 15 feet in the sky -- Old Glory waving alongside the Confederate flag, both outnumbered by colorful NASCAR driver flags.
The boozing and partying begin as soon as the lighter fluid hits the charcoal. It's the side of the sport that fans watching NASCAR on television don't see.
But according to modern rules of society, politics and image, we are somehow not allowed to refer to any of this as Bubba or redneck, or disparage its place in the cultural sphere. After a decade of reinventing stock-car racing as the fastest-growing, second-biggest sport in America, taking it from niche to rich, NASCAR's moguls aren't about to turn the spotlight off its life-and-death race to the finishes, or handsome drivers, to reveal a pie-eyed fan festival.
But it's why many of those at Dover are here. "For the atmosphere . . . " Anderson slurs the reason he's gone to more than 20 NASCAR races from Dover to Daytona over the past decade.
"Drunk and stupid!" he clarifies, when asked what atmosphere. Like many fans, he wears his loyalties to his favorite driver -- a blue No. 2 Rusty Wallace hat and a flashy, race driver-style Miller Lite/Rusty Wallace jacket. "Everybody's here to have a good time!"
