Guide to Enjoying NASCAR For the Dilettante

By Spencer Hall
Now that you’re completely starved for sport and stuck staring at the walls with tears in your eyes, here comes every sport-lovers February rebound of choice. Sure, they smell like gasoline and rubber, and they’re going to hang around just long enough to give you a rash, but NASCAR tells no lies: They admit the peak is the rush at the beginning of the season, and aside from a few big thrills on the downslope, you’re in for a slow but inevitable breakup when March Madness/NBA Playoffs/Spring Training comes along.
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But NASCAR just wants you to stay a while and call it Angel of the Morning when it leaves--make no promises, and use our handy guide on how to have a quickie, February-to May-ish romance with the sport where 150,000 people in the stands constitutes two-thirds of a crowd.
Watch these three essential races not occurring in Daytona:
Talladega. April 27th, but if you miss the marquee race they’ll come back to it later in the season. But know that the repeat races on the circuit never seem to have the same buzz, so catch the first spin through the fastest speedway on the circuit, a megaspeedway with 33 degree banked turns, an effect giving the whole thing the feel of watching cars race through Satan’s centrifuge. The fastest lap time ever in NASCAR history occurred at Talladega: 212.809 miles per hour by Bill Elliott, and even with restrictor plates on the engines this race howls.
Even better: Cars can race three wide with ease, meaning that when things go wrong, they go wrong in a huge and theatrical way, as when Bobby Allison nearly flipped into the crowd in 1987.

Bristol. The night race, preferably. Bristol is the most raucous short track of all: A hair over a half-mile long, the race resembles nothing so much as watching salmon swim upstream in a circle for three hours. Contact is inevitable, the seats are steeply banked, and the brawl for breathing room equals the closest thing to Thunderdome NASCAR can offer. The cars look like they’ve been in a week-long hailstorm afterwards.
Atlanta. A Daytona-esque superspeedway with the nasty chain-reaction chaos you know and love from Talladega, but with a history of flash-bang finishes. As with Talladega and Daytona, half the fun comes with monitoring the shifting politics of the race: Who’s working together, who’s not talking, and who wants to give someone a friendly shove into the wall at 180 miles an hour. Atlanta is an ideal blend of speed and space.↵