Spencer Hall found everything on his Talladega Checklist, including sunburns and pitbulls.
1. Pitbull in a pickup truck: check
At 8:30 a.m. CT, the Waffle House at exit #168 off I-20 in Alabama isn't full of race fans yet. The day race at Talladega doesn't start for another five hours or so, and many people come here and camp in RVs or in tents or just sleep in the rushes outside the speedway like the good hobo lord intended. I didn't see anyone sleeping in those rushes or in the fields, but they're there. I know they are.
There's a gray Chevy Silverado parked outside. I'm waiting for our people to show up with a van full of moonshine and tickets for the race, but for now it's just us, sitting in a parking lot with the hum of I-20 and the music from the Waffle House in the background. They're playing MGMT on race day, for some reason. There's a pitbull in the bed of the truck. It'd be a bad idea to go over and try to pet it.
I'm petting the pitbull when the owner rolls out of Waffle House. The pitbull is perfectly nice, sniffing my ear and leaning his head on my shoulder. The owner wears two hoop earrings in his left ear, shower sandals, gym shorts and a t-shirt. He is the kind of sunburned you can only be after years of beer drinking outside at sporting events. He holds a giant to-go container of eggs, grits, toast, bacon, and maybe a waffle? I think I saw a waffle in there.
The owner throws it in the back and yells, "GET IT, CHEVY." Chevy, the pitbull, disappears over the lip of the truck bed. I can only see a tail, and hear the noise of something being destroyed.
"How old is he?" I ask.
"Oh, bout a year."
"With kids?"
"Great."
"With cats?"
"He'll eat one. He'll kill it if he can catch it. He eats pussy like the rest of us."
With that, the guy gets in his pickup truck and roars off.
Our hookup says he's across from the Chevron on the other side of the interstate.
A pickup truck mudding in the cursed parking lot: check
Talladega is allegedly cursed. It's either built on a burial ground, or the site of a chief's horse-related death, or where Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek here and brought down a curse upon the site. If it is cursed, it is a very broad geographical curse: Talladega sprawls, with fans camping all the way up to the fence lining I-20.* It is a mammoth, battlefield-sized canvas of humanity painted right up to the fringes of the roaring speedway. That curse, if real, is spread pretty thin on raceday. Something like "one unfortunate beer can-related injury per 10 racegoers," if the spiritual math works out.
*There's a race in October, the more lively one, usually. I drove past Talladega at 1:00 in the morning one Sunday after a Florida/Alabama game, and in the dark along the fence I saw three or four police ATVs with gumball lights flashing, all chasing one shirtless dude in jeans doing the windmilling sprint of hammered defiance down a dirt track. It looked like the best episode of COPS no one ever bothered to film.
The curse might be real. Davey Allison did die in a helicopter crash in the infield. The wrecks here are spectacular on television, and that's saying something if you've ever seen the metalstorm of a real NASCAR banger from the stands. It's in Alabama already; everything in the state already could plausibly be under the effects of a lingering curse, and that's before you do any research. Even the track's length is literally demonic: a burning 2.666 miles around the tri-oval.
There's nothing ominous on the run up, though. If you're accustomed to warring over parking spots at a sporting event, Talladega makes it easy instead. The parking's free, and you can camp in any one of five thousand seemingly perfect places. People share beers and other forms of barter -- lighters, matches, cigarettes, snacks, and occasionally sunscreen -- freely.
There's a bacchanal somewhere over by the interstate, sure. The horsemounteds don't care what you do as long as it's not openly taking drugs, fighting, or firing your gun in the air, basically. The real debauchery happens on Friday night when the cheapseats fans -- and in affordable NASCAR terms, that is a very cheap seat -- come in and raise hell within shouting distance of the interstate. There's a strip club with an impromptu business office over there. It might be cursed, too.
This Sunday race, though: oh, it's lovely. Someone's passing a jug of muscadine moonshine around. Fans going in wear an alternating series of college football shirts (mostly Alabama) and race gear. Nationwide is everywhere because this is Talladega, the race Dale Earnhardt won 10 times, and because Dale Jr. rides for Nationwide, and because NASCAR fans have zero problems rooting for the father through the son. The sun burns a hole through your hat at 10:30 a.m. Shirts start to evaporate.
On the way into the raceway I pass a muddy, low spot where someone unadvisedly tried to park cars. Some amazing and brilliant jackass has parked a Mercedes SLS AMG GT in the mud. Just to its left, a shirtless kid around 18 or so is doing donuts in the parking lot, spitting fat clods of mud in the air. The noise that greets it is atavistic, high-pitched, and eerily consistent no matter who makes it.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO----
Giant badass America-truck: check
I'm up by the Tri-Oval Tower and running late. This is the Talladega America-Truck.
Talladega starts with invocations. The announcer booms "This isn't just a race." The crowd responds with:
"THIS IS TALLADEGA."
That giant badass truck goes around the tri-oval at Talladega during the anthem, just tearing ass around the track at 90 miles per hour. It crossed in front of me right at the "hoooooome of the braaaaaaaave." That WOOOO-ing sound is me. It came out of my body involuntarily and without warning.
Scanner: check
NASCAR is probably more famous for doing things wrong, business-wise, than right, and that's maybe a little unfair when you actually go to a race and realize how many things they get totally and completely right.
For instance: NASCAR's the only sport you can follow from a full team perspective, right down to in-contest chatter. If you don't own one -- and most hardcore fans do -- you can rent a scanner for $35 at the race, and pop in on the radio channels of any driver at any time. This can't really be overstated here: in NASCAR, you can sit in the stands, drink a reasonably priced American beer, and listen to your favorite driver talk shit about another driver live from the discomfort of his American death machine.
To wit: On lap 34, I listened to Jimmie Johnson casually note his water temperature.
JJ: "Water temp's at 250."
Crew chief: "You bored?"
JJ: [hurtling down the track at 202 mph in tight traffic in a car with no air conditioning] "Yup."
Having a scanner changed the entire experience of the race as a spectator event. The Big One -- the multi-car catastrophe Talladega is all but designed to create, at least once per race -- inevitably happened on the back stretch out of Turn 2. Like most NASCAR crashes, the chain of culpability was murky. Somewhere between Kurt Busch pushing into a gap he might or might not have had to slip into, Trevor Bayne's aerodynamic profile imploded, and Bayne's car slid down the track, sweeping up Danica Patrick and Kevin Harvick.
It looked bad, especially for Harvick. But on the scanner, I could hear Harvick quietly noting how the damage to his car wasn't that bad despite how bad it looked. He never sounded ruffled, even after flying blind into a wall of mobile metal garbage at speed during a race. To the contrary, Harvick sounded downright chipper about only suffering "a dinged up front ... um ... the front lower part area." Harvick would finish a respectable eighth and keep his spot atop the points standings.
Another example: Austin Dillon's car blowed up* real good, with fire spewing from the undercarriage and wheel wells on the right side. His crew chief calmly asked him to get out of the car on the left side, and thanked everyone for their hard work this week, but that they'd get it back together for next week. He could have been reading out MTA stops. He sounded that bored and composed at the sight of a car bursting into flames on a track loaded with speeding racecars.
The preternatural calm of drivers and spotters in the moment is insane. So is the amount of nurturing going on. Drivers can't see much at all with the HANS (Head and Neck Support) device attached to their heads, so spotters at the top of the track do their navigation through traffic for them, often via a solicitous chain of intel and subtle suggestions and, at times, outright demands. They call out "helps" for drafting behind the driver; they toss out "high" or "low" when drivers have to plow blind through crashes.
The combination in the moment is strangely intimate: here you are, listening across huge distances to a driver pinned into a deafening car, talking to a spotter way up in the rafters, who together split 16 inches of bumper clearance from one car to the next at 202 miles per hour. It's like listening in to a surgeon helping a stranded polar climate scientist conduct their own emergency appendectomy. And you get to do it for three hours.
There's nothing else like it in sports, and I didn't even have the deluxe FanScanner video screen-equipped edition.
*Correct technical term here
Mind-boggling sunburns: check
I'd forgotten that people could sunburn with the negligence of my parents' generation. They can, and do, and all of those people attend NASCAR races and were at Talladega. The sun was summer heat-lamp-of-the-gods intense, and yet a good 30 percent of the attendees were shirtless and headed for the kinds of radiation burns that skin grafts only slow down a bit. There were people whose backs looked like the hoods of derelict cars roasting in Florida parking lots. I got a burnt neck despite putting on four solid layers of industrial grade sunscreen. There are people in rural Alabama who woke up and went to work today as walking cinders, and that's before we consider the effects of six or seven hours of intense beer drinking in the sun.
3s in the air: Check
Dale Earnhardt led over 60 laps, and he won after delicate bobbing and weaving between competing lines of challengers to the finish. The real jockeying for position started around Lap 120, and every time the lead shifted into Dale Jr.'s hands, the crowd rose as he passed the grandstand, and they held up three fingers and whooped loudly.
Explaining Earnhardt Sr.'s lasting grip on racing is hard, and harder still when you try to differentiate it from Dale Jr.'s career. Earnhardt's death at Daytona in 2001 turned him into something larger than he could ever have been in real life. He's a touchstone for the pissant parking lot anarchist, a proxy father figure for the sport's younger drivers who want someone less polished than their gym-fit, sponsor-trained elders like Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson.
Earnhardt can be what you need him to be at any moment. Remember him putting people into the wall, and he becomes the scary ancestral badass you might need for inspiration. Remember him hugging his son after his first Winston Cup win, and he's the reformed hellraiser come full circle. He might be the prototypical alpha good ol' boy, coming from nothing to achieve the dream of being able to deer hunt pretty much wherever he wanted to, but he could also be the guy who bailed out the local farmers around him in North Carolina when flooding destroyed much of their crop one season. He can be a tattoo, or he can be a statue, or he can be three fingers in the air. He's portable, comes in a lot of symbolic sizes, and is available nationwide.
Whatever you might need him to be, he is, for the moment, a totem and symbol of something at the root of all this: of NASCAR, the best ambitions of Alabama and Alabama-like places, of taciturn sunburnt dudes in goatees who want, in their heart of hearts, to look fantastic in a pair of pitch-black wraparound sunglasses behind the wheel of a screaming American muscle car.
The living extension of that multipurpose, all-weather cultural legacy is his son. And for the record, Dale Jr. seems to be comfortable living in that ongoing fusion between the past and present he's constantly forced into. After his first victory at this track since 2004, a span of time featuring a lot of family strife and professional disappointment, Earnhardt got emotional, mentioning his dad's birthday passing recently, and how happy he was that everyone in his life was getting along so well. That was his entire victory speech: he was crying because he was happy that everyone was happy with each other, and that life at the moment was going pretty good, y'all.
Even if you think Dale Jr. is the very picture of nepotism, you have to admit he's also the best imaginable advertisement for it.
People falling out of a pickup truck: check.
Get the hell out and run to your car: Talladega after 10 minutes congeals into a traffic clot not even the guidance of traffic helicopters overhead can help. I sped out and onto the gravel track out of the lot, pulling up behind a pickup truck loaded with six or seven tipsy fans hellbent on getting onto the interstate before the mob clogged all escape routes.
The driver and the people in the truck bed did zero communication. When he stopped, two in the back would try to get out, and then get dragged back in by their friends, and then pushed out before oh wait, no, this isn't our spot, and then dragged back in again. One lady nearly fell out of the vehicle in front of a cop as he stood watching the traffic stone-faced from the roadside. By all indications, the cop was going to let her do just that; she was not discharging a firearm in public, drinking, fighting, or talking shit about the Earnhardt family.