One-Track Mind
On big race weekends at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Loudon becomes the most Southern town in the north. How can screaming fans and deafening engines possibly square with this quiet corner of New England? Actually, it couldn't be a more natural fit.
Every small town in New England has a place like The Eggshell. It's the breakfast joint where the influential people of the town meet every morning to chew over the morning's news and to hash out all the local issues over, well, hash. It's no different here, on Route 106 that runs north through the town of Loudon in New Hampshire. People linger over their omelets, and everybody knows everybody else, and they all know Cindy Rowe, who's been serving up breakfast to the local burghers for 20 years. You don't notice until you're well down 106 that, suddenly, almost every business establishment, from the motorcycle repair shops to the convenience stores to the storage facility just off the interstate, is bedecked in some variation of a black-and-white checkered pattern. The whole road, for miles at a stretch, is dressed up as a finish line. Which means, basically, that Loudon is, at some level, the only place you want to get to.
Twice a year, once around early summer and once in the early fall, a city about the size of Manchester comes rolling up 106 into Loudon. There are thousands of cars, and a flotilla of SUVs, and a vast armada of RVs. People come from Tennessee and North Carolina and Virginia, the places where the local moonshiners first went legit, climbing into stock cars and racing with their hair on fire even though nobody with a badge was chasing them anymore. They come from California and Texas and Arizona, the improbable places to which the sport has expanded. And they come from Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine, the places where local heroes once drove rickety contraptions over dirt tracks and pock-marked asphalt, building their own legends that were passed down to their children, who often became drivers themselves. They were the ones who built the history that made it possible for sleepy little Loudon to become a destination.
"I don't think people here had any idea what was involved," says Cindy Rowe. "Not at the beginning, anyway."
The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing - NASCAR to its loyalists, from devotees in the gun shops to its sponsors in the Fortune 500 - does not go anywhere quietly. Its races are loud, and its cars are bright, and its crowds are huge. Especially in its Sprint Cup Series (which used to be the Winston Cup Series, before tobacco money got so unpopular that even the people in North Carolina noticed), NASCAR moves around the country like a great, amiable beast - from Daytona in February to Miami in November. It trundles into its old-school tracks in places like Bristol, Tennessee, and Darlington, South Carolina, and into those places to which its heedless success in the 1990s brought it, like Las Vegas and Sonoma, California. And to Loudon, along Route 106 in rural New Hampshire, the home of next Sunday's Lenox Industrial Tools 301. The sport comes to town, overwhelms it for a week, and then leaves again. On the Monday mornings after the big NASCAR events, Cindy Rowe can hardly keep up with the orders.
"That's the day it's a zoo in here," she says, laughing. "People getting breakfast before they get on the road. Our parking lot out there looks like the RV lots up at the track. We get some regulars, every year, from all over the country."
The remarkable thing is how unremarkable it's become. In the beginning, the idea of NASCAR in Loudon was little more than an incongruous novelty - like having an NBA team named the Utah Jazz. Over the next 15 years, however, as the sport boomed, it became clear that the people who were most surprised were the people who'd spent decades ignoring both NASCAR's burgeoning national appeal and the thriving motorsports culture in northern New England that made the region welcome it. The checkered flags now don't look any more out of place along Route 106 than do the signs advertising maple syrup and antique shops. Even as NASCAR seems to be retrenching in tough economic times, the only significant differences between Loudon and Talladega consist of lines on a map.
On race weekends, the convenience stores put on more help, and they bring in quadruple orders of ice. The old-timers remember how big they once thought the motorcycle races were up at the Bryar Motorsports Park until 1989, when a dreamer in a yellow cardigan named Bob Bahre bought the place and determined that he would tuck a speedway into this tight little corner of the New Hampshire hills. (The track is so big and the area so small that one of its grandstands is not even in Loudon. It's over the town line in Canterbury.) He put up a 1.058-mile oval and then put thousands of seats around it (the total capacity is now 105,491), and he did so without even the whisper of a promise from NASCAR that New Hampshire International Speedway - now New Hampshire Motor Speedway - ever would get a big-time race to run on it. The sport was exploding, and it outgrew its roots, and Loudon began to look more and more like a destination. The checkered flags started popping up on the buildings, and Cindy Rowe and the folks in The Eggshell and the staff of the nearby Beanstalk store found themselves subsumed twice a year by the people who spend their summers traveling America, following the low roar and the high whine to every little corner of the country where you can hear it.
Jerry Gappens knew he wasn't in Charlotte anymore when the people in Loudon started talking about his tie.
In January, Gappens took over as executive vice president and general manager of NHMS on behalf of Bruton Smith, the racetrack magnate who'd bought the place from Bob Bahre for $340 million in cash. A big, open-faced man who looks as though he could sell you your own shoes, Gappens has been around motorsports almost from the moment he left the Indiana farm on which he was raised. Eventually, Gappens came to work in public relations at the Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte, North Carolina, under the legendary H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, who is regularly referred to as the P.T. Barnum of the industry. (Wheeler not only introduced both night racing and on-track condominiums to the sport, he also once enlivened his pre-race festivities by staging a reenactment of the invasion of Grenada.) Charlotte is Bruton Smith's flagship track - not long ago, after a prolonged spat, Smith pushed Wheeler out as president in Charlotte - and, in January, when Smith bought NHMS from Bahre, he picked Gappens to come up and run it. The first thing Gappens realized about working for NASCAR in the North Woods is that he'd left Southern formality far behind.
"I mean, I wear a tie, OK?" Gappens says. "When I first got here, I'd go down to The Eggshell down the street, because it's the only restaurant near here. Bob would take me there, and Bob never wears a tie. The guys there finally asked me, `How come you wear a tie?' They said, `You need to lose that tie, son.' So Bob and I started going there every day, and it dawned on me why. The police chief, the fire chief, the selectmen, they all eat there. [Bob] introduced me there to the people I needed to know to do my job. It hit me that Bob talks to 25 people at lunch there, so when there's something he needs business-wise, they can help him and have a comfort level with him. After the first quarter of this year, I stopped wearing a tie [there].
"Then Bob was in Florida for a few weeks, and they let me sit at the big round table without him. I knew I was accepted, that I fit in."
What Gappens took over in Loudon was a living demonstration of what happened when NASCAR's popularity exploded in the 1990s. When Bill France Sr. founded NASCAR in 1948, he planted his sport right in the middle of the booming car culture of postwar America. It was a sport as perfectly attuned to the America of its time as baseball had been to the turn of the century. For nearly five decades, NASCAR stayed largely a regional phenomenon, running at places like the old track in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, the home course of the legendary Junior Johnson, a former moonshine runner and, more famously, Tom Wolfe's "Last American Hero."
But the sport outgrew North Wilkesboro. The track was too narrow to accommodate the increased number of cars running every weekend, which was a direct result of the increased corporate interest in sponsoring them. By the mid-'90s, it cost around $6 million a year to run a car at the top level of NASCAR, and only major corporations had that kind of money to spend on sponsorship. In 1996, Bruton Smith and Bob Bahre each bought a half-interest in the North Wilkesboro track, which was owned at the time by two local North Carolina families. Smith took one of North Wilkesboro's NASCAR dates for his new superspeedway outside of Dallas. Bahre took the other one for his track in New Hampshire. That Bahre was able to bring the sport to his track was a measure of the vast national reach that, by the middle of this decade, had made NASCAR into not only a billion-dollar industry, but also into such a national phenomenon that it reached even into our politics, where suddenly we heard about "NASCAR Dads," one of those daft demographic categories that the elite media like to concoct in lieu of actual reporting. It was a juggernaut within American sports, and, in the face of NASCAR's popularity, people likely only still listed the NHL among "the big four" sports out of respect for our Canadian neighbors.
Today, however, there are signs that NASCAR's growth may have topped out. Attendance at the tracks is down, and, as is the case with many sports, its TV ratings seem to have hit a plateau, even though NASCAR's ratings still rank second only to those of the NFL. Sprint, which in January announced plans to lay off thousands of people this year, is said to be reconsidering its sponsorship of the sport's marquee circuit. Gas prices have hit the sport extremely hard, not merely among its competitors, but also among the fans who follow the races around the country every summer. From both within and without the organization, there are rumblings that the sport expanded to too many places too quickly, that it now runs too many races, and that NASCAR needs to retrench to its core audience, both regionally and in spirit. There is talk of the damage done to the sport by various shadowy corporate elites. There are nasty flame wars on the NASCAR message boards about the success of
"What New Hampshire showed is that the sport could grow," says Bruton Smith, who now owns the track there along with six other speedways. "There was some bit of jealousy about it."
Expect NHMS to keep thriving, however. It has some built-in advantages. It is the only oval track of its kind in a well-populated seven-state area, counting New York. (The closest facilities to it that host a top-level NASCAR race are Pocono, in Pennsylvania, and Watkins Glen, in New York.) But, unlike the tracks in Phoenix or Las Vegas, it's still fairly close to the tracks in the southeastern United States, where NASCAR was born. It's proximity to the Boston media market makes it attractive to corporate sponsorship. And it has a history to it that shines with the fact that it's still a working raceway. Motorcycles still run there, and there are vintage car races. It seems to be immune, for the moment, to the financial crunch - and the identity crisis - that's afflicting NASCAR generally.
"The appeal of this track is that our headquarters is in Danvers," explains Jon Di Gesu, the director of brand strategy for Sylvania, which sponsors the September Sprint Cup race in Loudon and which recently locked itself into a deal that will continue that relationship through 2012. "We've got three manufacturing facilities in New Hampshire, and 1,700 employees who work there and [nearly] 2,000 employees who call New Hampshire home. We looked at sponsoring race teams, but we decided to go for a race sponsorship, and this was the logical track. It was in our backyard."
As a NASCAR facility, it's always had its own personality. NASCAR already had its shrine in Daytona, and it had Darlington Raceway, "The Lady in Black," and it had Bristol, the cramped little oval where they run under the lights. In New Hampshire, for a long while, all it had was one guy in a canary cardigan, who owned a track without a race. "My lawyers all thought I was insane," Bahre says now. "When I was 72, I started a bank. Everything I've ever done in my life, people have said I was crazy."
Bob Bahre built his speedway without even a promise of a big-time payday. He'd been involved in motorsports in New England since 1963, working out of the Oxford Plains Speedway in Maine, where the stars of the New England racing circuit ran their stock cars and modified racers. He ran with the Dragon brothers, and with Stub Fadden, "The Flying Fire Chief" from New Haverhill, near the Vermont border. In 1989, he bought the Bryar Motorsports Park, gambling that he could build a big-time stock-car track on the spirit of the old dirt racers.
He went to old Bill France and asked, essentially, whether, if he built it, France would come. France refused to say, one way or the other. Bahre built the track anyway. The Busch series, a racing circuit that's one rung below the top, succeeded wildly there, and, in 1993, France called Bahre and told him he could have a single Winston Cup date. "I felt it would do well," Bahre says. "When we built here, it was the first new track built in 20 years. When we had our first Cup race, we gave all the people who'd bought the Busch series tickets first crack at them. We had 60,000 seats then, and we sold them all out." By 1997, the track was running two top- level races, and in 2004 the autumn race was made part of NASCAR's Chase for the Championship playoff series.
Bahre worked it out with the town over dozens of breakfasts at The Eggshell. (The neighboring village of Canterbury has always cast a more jaundiced eye on the enterprise.) The track expanded as the sport did, Bahre wandering through the multitudes of people in his yellow sweater and his black wingtips. The track developed its own lore, for good and ill. In 2000, two promising drivers, Kenny Irwin, 31, and 19-year old Adam Petty, the grandson of NASCAR icon Richard Petty, were both killed during practice laps at the track. The track seemed to the drivers to be a larger version of the Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, known around the circuit as "The Pretty Paperclip." NASCAR driver Matt Kenseth once memorably described racing at Martinsville as "racing around two light poles in the middle of a parking lot." Over the next few years, Bahre worked to make the track safer. It did not take long for NHMS to become as solid a part of the NASCAR schedule as Talladega or Charlotte. "We're so far up here, when I first talked about it, people thought we were 5 miles south of the North Pole," Bahre says. "Our fans, though, they figure it's their track. Down South, there're two or three they can go to that are right close to each other."
"In my limited knowledge of the area," says Bruton Smith, "I didn't know how much they loved stock-car racing up there."
Last winter, Bahre decided to sell the track to Smith. Bahre had turned 81, and none of the other members of his family wanted to run the place. Smith has already decided on what changes he wants. He may bank the track some more, angling its racing surface, and there's some talk about putting in lights, which may well send some of the local burghers, especially in Canterbury, into orbit. But there are only so many changes the place will allow. Not even NASCAR can move the mountains.
"This one's got the flavor of a state fair," says Jerry Gappens. "It's got big-league racing, but this track's got the coziness of Wrigley Field or Fen- way Park. What we have to do now is add investments in the fan amenities without changing its character or losing that down-home atmosphere."
Now he's exploring: "I took an ATV out for two hours awhile back, out in the woods, but still on our property, and I said, you'd never know you were at a speedway. You'd think you were in a national park."
It's an autumn-tinged day in the middle of spring. The flags around the racetrack snap in a brisk breeze, and gray clouds move in a great, muscular carousel above the top rim of the sweeping grandstands. Quint Boisvert looks as rooted in the garage area as any one of the pine trees does on the hillside. His yellow coveralls are mottled with grease and stains, and his gray hair sticks out like straw from beneath a battered baseball cap. Boisvert belongs here, in this place of sweat and noise, more than he belongs anywhere else. He's a motorsports lifer, building cars now for 30 years. He started out wanting to race himself, but he never had the personal financial stake. He couldn't get a sponsor, and that made all the difference in the world.
"I bought a car to race it back in the 1970s, but I couldn't afford to do it," he recalls. "So I worked a deal with Beaver Dragon [a prominent New England driver] to drive it, because he had a sponsor, and it just went on from there."
So he set about building his cars. They ran at Catamount and at Thunder Road in Vermont, and at Oxford in Maine, where Bob Bahre and his family got their start. His cars ran on smaller tracks all over northern New England and into Quebec. Some of his cars even ran on the road course here in Loudon, at the old Bryar Motorsports Park, long before all the technology and the marketing came here into the woods to stay. "We won two and lost one here," Boisvert says. "It's always been a great place for racing here, but I think Bob took a real calculated risk on this track."
On this morning, NHMS is hosting a test session for the NASCAR Camping World Series East, the equivalent in stock-car racing of baseball's middle minor leagues. Nevertheless, the sensory explosion of stock-car racing is no less vivid on this day for the conspicuous lack of Jeff Gordons, Jeff Burtons, and Dale Earnhardt Juniors wandering through the garages. The colors are still vivid, and you can still feel the noise in your molars. The drivers are testing their cars on the track today for a race that won't be held for over a month. When they're done on this afternoon, they'll pack themselves and their cars into the broad white trailers and drive to Newton, Iowa, for the next race.
Quint Boisvert wanders from stall to stall, greeting everyone he knows, which is practically everyone here. He spends a great deal of time peering under the hood of a car he'd built for Mike Olsen, a veteran driver from North Haverhill, New Hampshire. Olsen comes from a racing family. He's the grandson of Stub Fadden's, who was a star in the racing culture that produced Bob Bahre and nurtured his silly dream of dropping Bill France's sport, and Junior Johnson's old race, into the New Hampshire woods.
"There's a big difference now in the fan base, in their demographics and where those fans are financially. NASCAR fans are more middle class," Olsen says, "but that's changing all the time, too. NASCAR is trying [not only] to attract new fans, but to win their hard-core fans back, and I don't know if there are that many more of them left. It's why they're expanding into major markets, and New England is as rich in racing history as if you go down South."
The noise fades as you leave the place and drive back south down 106 toward The Eggshell. Make a right just before you get there, and you'll wend your way up through the hills and come to a place only a mile away from the track, but centuries distant in the way the place feels. In 1792, Shakers founded a village here. They built their homes and their barns and they raised their cattle between long white rail fences. They shouted and danced through their worship services. Their strict rule about celibacy did the Shakers in, and now tourists walk quietly between the fences and in and out of the old buildings, and the loudest noise you hear there is the flat clanging of an old bell in the Shaker meetinghouse.
Two weekends a year, some of the people wandering the old grounds are wearing Jeff Gordon hats and windbreakers paying tribute in the form of corporate logos to the kind of heedless Mammon that would have been a scandal to the people who founded the place. Some of the traveling NASCAR patrons have a jones for Shaker furniture, it seems, and there's an article about the Canterbury Shaker Village that will appear in the souvenir magazine that Bruton Smith sells at NHMS. On the race weekends this season, the track is arranging for shuttle buses to bring people who have come to Loudon for the race up to the Shaker Village and back again. "Believe it or not, we get a lot of spillover," says Funi Burdick, executive director of the village. "It's great to have the kind of new interest in the place that we have this year."
It touches everything about this place, the track does. Up and down 106, from The Eggshell up to the maple-syrup stand across the road, to the convenience stores stockpiling a small Antarctica of ice, it's a constant, looming presence in a very unlikely place. And even on the quiet hillside, on the right weekends, when the wind is just right, for seconds, there is nothing in the air and the trees and the hills except the high whine and the low roar, and you can't even hear the ancient gathering bell.
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