Martinsville Speedway, Or, Do Not Mess With NASCAR Fans

Story time! Years ago, I worked at a Radio Shack in Roanoke, Virginia. I only lived there for about a year, and I wasn’t really familiar with the region, so I didn’t know that Roanoke is about an hour away from Martinsville Speedway. Our store stocked dozens upon dozens of these hand-held scanners that sold for around $150 apiece, and my manager never really explained why. A typical Radio Shack stocked one or two.

↵On one Sunday in March, I figured it out pretty quickly. My Radio Shack was just about the only one within a fifty-mile radius of Martinsville. When I arrived at the store to open up, the phone was already ringing. I picked up. “Y’all have any portable scanners?” Yes, I said, and I set one aside for him. Three seconds later it rang again. I set another one aside. Then someone called our fax number, as well as our secondary number, which we didn’t give out.

↵A few minutes later, I heard some banging on the glass doors. I went out front and saw a mob of at least twenty people standing outside. The store wasn’t supposed to open for another half-hour, and when I explained this to them, the mob grew angry. Being my passive-aggressive self, I decided to spite them and continue answering the phone. A few minutes later, the mob swelled to nearly a hundred people, and a couple of them were trying to pry the doors open. I opened up and was nearly stampeded.

↵Unbelievably, I ran out of scanners within an hour, but the phone kept ringing off the hook and people kept flooding the store. Later in the day I learned that a new employee at the store had been selling walkie-talkies to NASCAR fans and passing them off as scanners, and as a result, we received plenty of threats of violence and other horrible things over the next week. I think one of them threatened to lynch me, but I’m not exactly sure.

↵These people, of course, are not representative of NASCAR fans. They’re simply representative of people who will spare no effort, expense, or rage for the sake of eavesdropping on Mark Martin as he discusses tire wear with his crew chief.

↵