One Helluva Ride
How NASCAR Swept the Nation
Chapter 1
A Hardscrabble Past
A full moon rose over the backstretch of Charlotte Motor Speedway the night of NASCAR’s 1992 all-star race, The Winston. It was the first time that a stock-car race would be run at night on a 1.5-mile superspeedway, and illuminating a venue massive enough to hold eight National Football League stadiums demanded a feat of engineering so monumental that the company that lit the movie Dances with Wolves was hired for the task.
Night racing on such a huge scale was the idea of the speedway’s president, H. A. “Humpy” Wheeler, a master showman who had never run a competitive lap himself but was determined to give NASCAR ticket-buyers—mostly shift-workers who lived black-and-white lives by day—Technicolor entertainment once they walked through his gates. As an undistinguished member of the University of South Carolina’s football team in the 1950s, Wheeler had watched in awe from the bench when the Gamecocks visited Louisiana State University for a Saturday-night game. LSU had its mascot, a live tiger, spitting at spectators and clawing the ...
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