Around Iredell Sports

2007 Sep-07

Can writer help NASCAR crack into NY market?

by Mike Mulhern
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Want to write a book about NASCAR?

It would seem that everyone does.

Well, certainly there is no dearth of subject matter, although finding people brave enough and knowledgeable enough to delve into some closets is getting more difficult.

At the moment, there are well over 1,000 books in print about NASCAR, including the intriguing (and of course, rather tongue-in-cheek) “Girl’s Guide to Winning a NASCAR Driver: Secrets to Grabbing His Attention and Stealing His Heart,” and even a number of Harlequin romance novels. NASCAR is trying to appeal to that 40 percent of the racing market that is female.

One of the best of the serious works recently released is Neal Thompson’s “Driving with the Devil.”

There are also the latest from veteran NASCAR writers David Poole and Monte Dutton, and at least 25 more books are expected to be out between now and next February, the key Daytona 500 marketing month. Perhaps one to watch for is by Washington Post reporter Liz Clarke.

Another coming soon: “The complete idiot’s guide to NASCAR.” Insert your own punch line here.

At times it seems that this little part of the writers’ market is filled with what one critic termed “the literary equivalent of ‘Desperate Housewives’” and other harmless but meaningless drivel.

The rush to print has been particularly acute over the past 10 years — even best-selling Janet Evanovich, the Stephanie Plum novelist, has done her NASCAR fling.

And now here comes Robert Lipsyte, sack of books slung over his shoulder ready to add to the NASCAR bookcase, with a new novel, “Yellow Flag.”

“This is my 15th novel, and as a journalist you can sometimes get to the truth through fiction more than through non-fiction,” Lipsyte said. “You can tell stories you could never get in the paper. In fiction, you can get to stories you really want to deal with.”

Where this one goes, nobody knows. It just came out this week.

But Lipsyte has an intriguing angle: The New York Times gave him a year-long assignment of covering NASCAR back in 2001.

Naturally, he did the Richard Petty Driving Experience in Charlotte at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

“They cleared the track and sent people in the grandstands home,” he said. “It was an overwhelming experience, round and round.

“And to realize that people do this with 42 other people out there, too…”

Fine, good. But here’s the real issue: Can Lipsyte help NASCAR crack the tough New York market? Can Lipsyte, a New Yorker, even explain to the rest of us why people in New York just don’t get NASCAR?

Richmond International Raceway, a relatively flat but very fast three-quarter-mile track, has become the template for what NASCAR’s France family would like to build somewhere near New York City.

When Lesa France Kennedy was booed off the stage a year ago at a presentation about why Staten Island would be just the place for her proposed New York City Speedway, it was clearly time for NASCAR to reshape its New York City plan.

But Lipsyte says that New York isn’t a monolithic community. And one big problem that NASCAR faces is, “People in Manhattan don’t drive,” Lipsyte said. “There are other boroughs of New York City where people actually drive cars. That’s the thing. And they drive in New Jersey, too.

“I go back to those Westside parties I’d go to, after a weekend at a NASCAR track, and they would be asking me, ‘What’s all that about? Driving in circles?’ And they’d look at me like I was crazy. But now, six years later, people are beginning to understand — though it will take a long time.

“Plus, remember there is a shelf where ‘sports’ are stacked, and something will have to fall off that shelf to make room for NASCAR. Baseball, football, basketball, hockey ...

“I think the country is catching up to NASCAR … and NASCAR is catching up to the rest of the country.

“I remember the first NASCAR cocktail party I went to back in 2001 — when I asked for a glass of white wine, the room went dead, and everybody looked at me. A guy quickly whispered to me, ‘Ask for any light beer.’

“But the last NASCAR party I went to, last December, and asked for white wine, they said, ‘Do you want pinot grigio, chardonnay or sauvignon blanc?’ That’s catching up.”

Well, yes. Car owner Richard Childress even has his own vineyards and high-class winery, and Jeff Gordon puts his name on fine Sonoma wines, and even roughneck Trucker Mike Skinner took an enjoyable tour of the wine country of Tuscany.

Sometimes the world as seen by New Yorkers is rather like that famous New Yorker magazine cover of 1976, where the Hudson River just past 11th Avenue is the demarcation line between “them” and “the rest of us.”

But Lipsyte says that during the past six years in-and-out of the NASCAR world has sensed changes on both sides:

“Like in current events — my first real sense that the war in Iraq was going south was by talking to some people in NASCAR, interviewing real people in the infield and hearing about them holding bake sales to raise money to send to their kids for protective vests … . This was before the mainstream press was even talking about this.

“So all of a sudden you start seeing connections between NASCAR and America and where we’re going. The idea that this sport is somehow filled with ‘crazed Republican rednecks,’ which may well be a New York view, is nonsense.

“And NASCAR itself is reaching out, holding out to the hardcore while reaching out to the rich yuppies. I think the people of NASCAR are changing too — the hardcore of NASCAR is changing — moving off that right-wing Bush-ism, because they’re bleeding.

“And I don’t think anybody in New York thinks ‘NASCAR redneck South’ any more. People are more sophisticated than that. But they are interested in land and space and traffic. Heck, it’s hard enough just to get to a baseball stadium.”

So how does NASCAR succeed in the Big Apple? Can it?

First, the Frances may have to do a better selling job in the New York City media. But does the flagship New York Times really care about NASCAR?.

“I think the larger question is, does The New York Times really care about sports,” Lipsyte replied. “I started there in 1957, as a copyboy, and while they’ve become more interested in sports because it is a revenue producer, I think they still look upon sports as their comics section. The ‘toy department.’”

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