Wide Open

by Assael, Shaun

• ISBN13: 9780345426772
• ISBN10: 0345426770
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

WIDE OPEN looks at one full year on the NASCAR circuit as it's never been examined before. Shaun Assael takes us behind the scenes, into the pits and onto the tracks, examining the life, the loves, the blood feuds of the stars, the grunts, the drivers, the mechanics, the wives, the girlfriends, the moneymen--everyone and anyone who makes things happen. WIDE OPEN is a funny, tragic, dramatic journey inside a world that has long been closed.

Author Biography

Shaun Assael, a former New  York City criminal justice reporter, is a senior writer for ESPN Magazine. His work has appeared in such places as Esquire, The Village Voice, New York, and Smart Money.

Excerpts

The Daytona International Speedway is quiet when the caravan of trailers start arriving. Without people to bother them, seagulls nest in the infield grass. The air is clean; the overpowering smell of seared rubber hasn't yet settled in. There are no low-hanging clouds, mixing car exhaust with the smoke from a thousand greasy grills.

The arrival of the eighteen-wheelers, in a carnival of color-drenched logos, marks the unofficial start of the season. For the next eleven months they'll be traveling around the country together like a giant medicine revival, selling speed as the salvation for all that ails. Unlike other sports, which put down roots in a place then live there over long seasons, the speed people don't stay in one place for long. Every week they're somewhere else, trying to solve the mystery of how to bleed two-hundredths of a second more out of a car....

Because it is a sport of old lineage and trades passed from one generation to the next, sons follow fathers and brothers follow one another. Among the dozens of multicolored cars spilling out onto the speedway for the first Winston Cup practice of the 1996 season, two were piloted by Bodines. For Brett Bodine, the baby-faced, thirty-seven-year-old middle brother of the upstate New York racing clan, it was more than the start of a new season. It was the start of a new life. Over the winter, he'd bought the last pieces of Junior Johnson's faded empire, allowing the white-haired legend to retire to the North Carolina mountains that made him famous. Every penny Brett had was riding on the gamble that he could make it on his own.

Feeling out the track, he veered down from the edge of the front stretch, taking an arc that resembled the flying patterns of the seagulls looping over the grandstands, until he was inside the first turn. It rose over him like an asphalt tidal wave, but to keep from getting lost in it, Brett stayed low, waiting for the mouth of the backstretch to appear so he could go throttle-down. When it's for real, it's called going WFO: wide fuckin' open. But this was just practice, so he dove back up and eased into the backstretch, letting it disappear beneath him at a calm 170 mph.

Then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Brett felt his legs beginning to bake. His heart tightened when he saw the source: flames snaking out from under the engine. Racers can walk away from catapulting crashes, but if there's one thing that scares them to death, it's fire. It's the one thing they can't outrun. Going into the fourth turn, he leaned hard into the brake, but it did no good because the flames had burned through the lines.

"I got a fire, I got a fire," he radioed, measuring his panic as the flames, being fed by the speed, began eating through the floorboard. He needed time to think, a way to get the car stopped. That's when he reached for the red lever by the driver's seat and sent fire-retardant dust spraying through the cockpit.

Coughing and blinded and still traveling at three times the normal speed limit, Brett threw his Ford into reverse in the hope it might lock the brakes, but nothing happened. That's when he realized he'd have to crash the damn thing to stop it.


From the Hardcover edition.

---

Excerpted from Wide Open: Days and Nights on the Nascar Tour by Shaun Assael
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.