What does NASCAR mean? Or More CAR TALK.

answers:

• Not All Southern Criminals Are Racecar drivers

• National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing

• Nearly All Southern Craphappy Assholes Race

• Nothing A Surburbanite Can Actually Relate to.

Perhaps, because I am a Yankee. Perhaps, because I grew up in a white collar household in a upper middle class neighborhood. Perhaps because my IQ is 146. Perhaps because I might be blond on the outside, but on the inside I am a brazen dark-haired Veuve Clicqout sipping literary genius, here are some other things I did not know before I drove a NASCAR racecar.

There is an apron to the racetrack. It is flat and wide and safe. The racetrack itself is a series of slanted walls, narrow passages and exit-entrance ramps without yield signs.
It smells inside there- like explosives or meth labs.
Once you crawl through the window in your baggy fire retardant gear, you can’t turn your neck and they remind you the windshield is magnified- objects are farther than they appear- huh? No wonder they crash.
Most NASCAR races are on ovals of varying sizes with only a couple of road courses.
There is a very complicated strap-on thing inside the cockpit that is in no way sexual but it freaked me out about the same.
This North American auto racing series was started in the American southeast by Bill France Sr., which sounds like an intelligent name. There are no instructions on how to use the fire extinguisher taped to the dashboard, and you are discouraged from shifting out of 4th gear once you hit it at 85mph.

How to be a NASCAR DRIVER—well first of all you’d better be short— and kinda wimpy bodied. Most of the people I know that are really big fans are either not so into physical exercise or vertically challenged. This guy has some ideas.


Things I said afterward that might have really made me look stupid- even when I only mumbled them around my margarita straw.

Why don’t they ever go clockwise?
Don’t you think they get tired of doing the all left turn thing?
What kind of race does the figure 8? That would be fun—or the kind that drives on real roads—I mean this track thing could get seriously BORING. You see the same thing over and over and over.
Why did the guys all laugh at the end when I came out of the race car legs first?