Funny, Pierre Davis doesn’t look like a hillbilly.
No Skoal chewing tobacco tucked under his lip. No mesh trucker hat on his head.
The 24-year-old North Lawndale resident has heard the snickers, the skepticism and the stereotypes, and it’s all small-minded bunk as far as he’s concerned.
He’s young, he’s urban, and, yes, he’s a NASCAR fan.
And he’s not alone.
Davis is one of NASCAR’s 75 million U.S. fans, proof that the sport is gaining its foothold in the mainstream. But some die-hard fans aren’t happy about it, saying the mass appeal has diluted the sport’s Southern roots.
For Chicago auto racing fans like Davis, this weekend is the biggest they’ll experience all year, as the Chicagoland Speedway plays host to three NASCAR events.
A friend turned Davis onto the sport more than a year ago, and the college student got sucked in by the speed and soap-opera-like feuds that play out on the track between stock car racing’s rivals.
“It’s kind of funny sometimes when they have their little beefs, and they bump into the back of the car and make ’em [spin] out,” Davis said.
“I even have some NASCAR jackets, and I know the names of the people that I have,” said Davis, whose favorite driver is Kasey Kahne. “And people are like, ‘You don’t even know what you’re wearing!’ But I actually do know who I’m wearing and the kind of car they drive.”
Reaching a city kid like Davis is all a part of the plan, say NASCAR representatives.
Having “Talladega Nights” movie star Will Ferrell attend Chicagoland Speedway’s USG Sheetrock 400 as a special guest on Sunday–along with “American Idol” runner-up Diana DeGarmo, who is scheduled to sing the national anthem–are more attempts by NASCAR to win the hearts of the unconvinced.
The racing league already has been making gains in Chicago.
NASCAR was the third-most-watched sport on network TV (second-most on cable) in 2005 after the NFL and Major League Baseball in Chicago’s TV market, which includes 3.4 million households in 16 counties in the Chicago area and northwest Indiana, according to Nielsen Media Research. That’s better than the NHL, the PGA and even the NBA.
Bob Welch, senior director of marketing and sales for Chicagoland Speedway, estimates the track draws between 300,000 and 400,000 fans per year from a pool of 3 million motor sports fans in the Chicago market.
“The races at Chicagoland–man, they pack ’em in,” said Herb Branham, a senior spokesman for NASCAR and managing editor of NASCAR Insider magazine. “The grass-roots racing up there is very popular.”
Not everyone is thrilled about the sport’s growth in urban centers such as Chicago. Or at least how it grew. Some die-hards feel NASCAR’s marketing machine is forsaking its old-school fans to go Hollywood–literally.
“I think the No. 1 indication of that … is when they dropped the Southern 500 at Darlington” and moved the Labor Day race to Fontana, Calif., east of L.A., in 2004, said Tom “Pappy” Higgins, a NASCAR blogger from Mooresville, N.C.
“Dear God, it’s like taking the ivy off the walls at Wrigley Field,” Higgins said.
“That’s fine, they’re doing what they gotta do,” he said. “They’re exposing it to the rest of the country. But they’re forgetting fans from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s that put them in the position to where they are today.”
Former NASCAR vice president Roger Vandersnick said he understands why traditional fans feel they’ve lost “exclusivity,” but said the league has worked hard to reach more newcomers, including women and minorities.
“We want to be a sport that broadly appeals to America,” said Vandersnick, who now runs marketing for NASCAR partner and track operator International Speedway Corporation. “We don’t want to leave what we were behind, we just want to add it.”
And they have.
NASCAR trails only the NFL as the most-watched sport–averaging 9.4 million viewers for Nextel Cup races this year–and has the largest average attendance among all spectator sports in the nation, said NASCAR broadcast vice president Dick Glover.
After building a solid foundation in smaller markets, NASCAR had nowhere to go but up. Other sports leagues started off in big markets and picked up smaller ones later, but NASCAR did the opposite.
“We were expanding to cities like Chicago, Miami, Kansas City and Indianapolis,” Glover said.
NASCAR took a big jump with the explosion of cable TV in the 1980s, and took another huge leap in 2000 when it consolidated TV rights from the hands of local promoters.
Corporate sponsorship also spurred growth, and NASCAR scored a coup over other major sports by setting up an office in L.A. with a singular purpose: Tap into Hollywood, and you’ll tap into America.
Hollywood is coming to the Midwest on Sunday, when Ferrell will start Sunday’s big race at Chicagoland Speedway with the traditional, “Gentlemen, start your engines.” And NASCAR promoters say they’re eager to bring more promotions to the track.
They won’t have to persuade John Howard, a Bank of America administrative assistant who replied less than two minutes after the company sent out an e-mail last week offering free passes for the Saturday and Sunday NASCAR races at Chicagoland Speedway.
In his life before kids, the 28-year-old Garfield Ridge resident had a basement shrine of kit cars, driver photos and flags. But he’s got nothing on his dad.
“If I had any type of sporting event [as a child], he wouldn’t attend my sporting event,” Howard said. “He’d be sitting in his rocking chair, one leg tucked under the other, with no shirt on, just a pair of shorts watching the race.”
Now, Howard joins his dad in his devotion to NASCAR. Despite the sport’s spreading popularity, Howard says friends and co-workers tease him: “How can you watch the races? All they do is go around in circles. How can you be a fan living in Chicago?”
It doesn’t bother him though.
“Chicago’s a sports town,” Howard said. “As long as you have your favorite sport, you can pretty much get away with anything.”
———-
plthompson@tribune.com
