Topped Off

Lot 10 is Mardi Gras without Bourbon Street. No real street, just slippery mud lanes and an endless flow of partyers on foot and on wheels.

A half-mile in, campers have cross-beamed two spotlights on the muddy roadway where a gantlet of 150 to 200 people, most males, twenties to middle-aged, hold out fists of Mardi Gras beads toward any vehicle with women. "Show us your [breasts]!" Some lift up their shirts, most don't.

"This is party central. Girls flash here all the time, man! It's outta control," says an enthusiastic Christopher Hudson, 22, from Smyrna, Del., selling $3-a-bag ice to campers to support the volunteer fire department.

Cops in patrol cars farther down the path pull over one flashing Delaware sweetie for being underage -- underage for drinking, that is. A little farther, a man wears a Santa Claus costume holding a sign -- "Hooters for Santa." When a Delaware state trooper blasts his warning horn and barges into "flash row," one guy mutters, "Oh God, always someone gotta save the world."

Mud in Your Eye

The Dover infield, on the speedway's northwest end, inside the concrete oval track, opens at 4:30 a.m. Sunday to waiting fans who paid a $60 overnight infield-line fee, plus $40 per person and $40 per vehicle.

Fans in the infield view the race from on top of cars or RVs, and often build on-the-spot wooden platforms and sit up there in lawn chairs and Barcaloungers. Until the race starts, infielders throw horseshoes and drink beer while bikinied girls sunbathe.

Dusty Shifflett from Edgewater, Md., built his 12-foot-by-4-foot platform on top of three pickups, and it tips slightly to one side and sways like a boat.

"Never been to the stands yet," says Shifflett, 28, owner of the BC Paintball store in Annapolis.

He's been coming to Dover for five years and this year brought several uninitiated friends along. "It's a good party," he says.

And there's the decadent fun, he says, like the 50-yard naked cartwheel dash last year, and this year when pal Joe Moschetto Jr. lost a bet at Texas horseshoes and had to dip his bare butt in mud and leave butt prints on people's windshields.

"I was drunk," says Moschetto. "Dip 'n' Stamp, we call it."

As race time approaches, John Anderson is slouched in a lawn chair at the back of his tent. He's healthier and quieter than on Friday night, ready to hit the grandstands.

Highlights of the weekend? Pouring beer down his wife Janet's shirt was fun, and there was that girl over beside the muddy truck who kept flashing him "as many times as I wanted her to," brags Anderson, grinning.

"Why'd you need to see 'em more than once?" Janet asks annoyed.

John pauses to consider his best response: "Well, it's like racing. I'm going to see as many races as I can."